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At Last !!!
Awesome news if you're a BOBSTER fan and collector.
This material has been out in the streets for some years, but will be getting an official release in november mastered from original tapes.
What follows is a summary from Andy Greene of Rolling Stone online:
In February 1969, Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash holed up in a Nashville studio for two days of loose, free-flowing sessions where they sang each other’s songs, jammed with rockabilly icon Carl Perkins, broke into spontaneous covers like “Mystery Train” and “You Are My Sunshine” and even wrote the the tune “Wanted Man” that Cash would debut at San Quentin prison just one week later. Their duet on “Girl From the North Country” appeared on Dylan’s LP Nashville Skyline later that April and select tracks from the sessions leaked out into the bootleg world over the years, but much of this material has never been heard anywhere.
That will change on November 1st with the release of Bob Dylan (Featuring Johnny Cash) — Travelin’ Thru, 1967–1969: The Bootleg Series Vol. 15. The three-CD package devotes a disc-and-a-half to the legendary Johnny Cash sessions, but it also has outtakes from the 1967 John Wesley Harding sessions and Nashville Skyline sessions that have never been bootlegged, along with a couple of Johnny Cash covers recorded for Self Portrait in 1970, the soundtrack to Dylan’s 1969 appearance on The Johnny Cash Show, and selections from Dylan’s 1970 home recording session with bluegrass great Earl Scruggs and members of his family.
“Besides the very early folk years, you don’t have Bob playing with a lot of other major stars up until this point in his career,” says a source close to the Dylan camp. “Here you have him doing duets with Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Earl Scruggs. It’s a really deep dive into some of the music that he loves and just a really cool package. I think people will come away from it enchanted by the breadth of his catalog.”
The John Wesley Harding session have been a source of deep fascination with Dylan fans for decades. Not only have the outtakes never leaked out to the bootleg community, but the whole thing was made in just three days and he’s never talked about the songwriting process in any depth. None of the songs have choruses (unlike other works from this era) and he didn’t attempt a single one of them with the Band while they worked on The Basement Tapes in this same time period. “1967 was a very creative time period for Bob and you get the feeling he could have written them in the car ride down to Nashville,” says the source. “Who knows?”
There are just seven John Wesley Harding outtakes in this new collection. “There just doesn’t seem to be many alternate versions of the songs,” says the source. “The ones we have are often very similar to each other. We had to include ‘All Along the Watchtower,’ but it’s not like ‘All Along the Watchtower’ cha-cha or anything. But ‘I Pity the Poor Immigrant’ is great and has a completely different melody. I don’t think anything had more than three complete takes.”
(The European copyrights for the John Wesley Harding sessions have expired since they are being released after the 50-year copyright-protection window closed. That has no impact on the publishing rights, but it is technically legal for anybody to release these seven outtakes on physical sets in Europe. “I’m sure they will appear on grey market collections,” says the source. “But people don’t really buy records anymore, so it doesn’t make much of a difference.”)
Nashville Skyline was recorded across eight days in February 1969, but roughly half of the session tapes have been lost. “There was an engineer who had taken some of the tapes home and put them in a storage locker,” says the source. “Someone later bought them for a couple of grand and Sony had to buy the tapes back. Most of what we have comes from the storage locker, but the rest were lost. From the best we can tell, they are just gone. That is unusual [in relation to the rest of the Dylan catalog, which has been carefully preserved], and I think it’s just because nobody in Nashville was paying attention. They weren’t thinking about future reissues.”
Fortunately, the tapes that survive offer a fascinating glimpse into the making of Nashville Skyline. There are alternative versions of songs like “One More Night,” “Peggy Day,” and “Country Pie” that are quite different than their album counterparts. “Everyone always talks about the Wrecking Crew in Los Angeles,” says the source. “The players in Nashville from this time don’t get enough love. Wayne Moss played on Blonde on Blonde and now three years later he’s playing on ‘Country Pie.’ These guys could do anything and make it sound funky.”
None of the Johnny Cash sessions were lost and they form the heart of Travelin’ Thru. June Carter Cash was in the studio those two days and she can be heard suggesting they dust off Dylan’s 1963’s classic “Girl From the North Country,” which he hadn’t played in five years. “Bob goes, ‘I like that, I just don’t really remember it,'” says the source. “I think he only remembered one verse. We included that conversation. And every time Carl Perkins takes a solo, Johnny Cash says, ‘Carl Perkins, everybody!’ It’s so cool. If Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley, and Jerry Lee Lewis were the Million Dollar Quartet, this is the $750,000 Trio.”
For Dylan obsessives, the single most interesting song on the set will probably be “Wanted Man.” There are numerous versions of Johnny Cash performing the song over the years, but nobody has ever heard Dylan sing any of it. “They don’t have the words together, so they’re making the words up on the spot as they go along,” says the source. “You can hear June say, ‘Johnny, you need to get that ‘Wanted Man’ from Bob so you know the melody of it.'”
The set also contains Dylan and Cash duetting on “One Too Many Mornings,” “Matchbox,” “Ring of Fire,” and two medleys of Jimmie Rodgers songs. “They are just singing Jimmie Rodgers song off the top of their heads,” says the source. “Johnny starts, Bob joins in. It’s just two guys relaxing in the studio and having fun. That’s what we tried to focus on. We wanted to focus on the fun they were having.”
For the sake of completion, the set also has Dylan and Cash singing “I Threw It All Away,” “Living the Blues,” and “Girl From the North Country” from The Johnny Cash Show in June 1969 along with “Ring of Fire” and “Folsom Prison Blues” that Dylan sang on his own during the Self Portrait sessions on May 3rd, 1969.
The set ends with four songs that Dylan played with Earl Scruggs at the Carmel, New York, home of album-cover illustrator Thomas B. Allen on May 17th, 1970. The songs (“East Virginia Blues,” “To Be Alone With You,” “Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance,” and “Nashville Skyline Rag”) were intended for the 1971 documentary Earl Scruggs: His Family and Friends along with its accompanying album Earl Scruggs Performing With His Family and Friends. “It’s a little outside of our chronology,” says the source. “But to us, it put a nice bookend on the set. They sound really relaxed and there’s a very nice, casual feeling to all of it.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/...nashville-skyline-john-wesley-harding-886719/
Awesome news if you're a BOBSTER fan and collector.
This material has been out in the streets for some years, but will be getting an official release in november mastered from original tapes.
What follows is a summary from Andy Greene of Rolling Stone online:
In February 1969, Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash holed up in a Nashville studio for two days of loose, free-flowing sessions where they sang each other’s songs, jammed with rockabilly icon Carl Perkins, broke into spontaneous covers like “Mystery Train” and “You Are My Sunshine” and even wrote the the tune “Wanted Man” that Cash would debut at San Quentin prison just one week later. Their duet on “Girl From the North Country” appeared on Dylan’s LP Nashville Skyline later that April and select tracks from the sessions leaked out into the bootleg world over the years, but much of this material has never been heard anywhere.
That will change on November 1st with the release of Bob Dylan (Featuring Johnny Cash) — Travelin’ Thru, 1967–1969: The Bootleg Series Vol. 15. The three-CD package devotes a disc-and-a-half to the legendary Johnny Cash sessions, but it also has outtakes from the 1967 John Wesley Harding sessions and Nashville Skyline sessions that have never been bootlegged, along with a couple of Johnny Cash covers recorded for Self Portrait in 1970, the soundtrack to Dylan’s 1969 appearance on The Johnny Cash Show, and selections from Dylan’s 1970 home recording session with bluegrass great Earl Scruggs and members of his family.
“Besides the very early folk years, you don’t have Bob playing with a lot of other major stars up until this point in his career,” says a source close to the Dylan camp. “Here you have him doing duets with Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Earl Scruggs. It’s a really deep dive into some of the music that he loves and just a really cool package. I think people will come away from it enchanted by the breadth of his catalog.”
The John Wesley Harding session have been a source of deep fascination with Dylan fans for decades. Not only have the outtakes never leaked out to the bootleg community, but the whole thing was made in just three days and he’s never talked about the songwriting process in any depth. None of the songs have choruses (unlike other works from this era) and he didn’t attempt a single one of them with the Band while they worked on The Basement Tapes in this same time period. “1967 was a very creative time period for Bob and you get the feeling he could have written them in the car ride down to Nashville,” says the source. “Who knows?”
There are just seven John Wesley Harding outtakes in this new collection. “There just doesn’t seem to be many alternate versions of the songs,” says the source. “The ones we have are often very similar to each other. We had to include ‘All Along the Watchtower,’ but it’s not like ‘All Along the Watchtower’ cha-cha or anything. But ‘I Pity the Poor Immigrant’ is great and has a completely different melody. I don’t think anything had more than three complete takes.”
(The European copyrights for the John Wesley Harding sessions have expired since they are being released after the 50-year copyright-protection window closed. That has no impact on the publishing rights, but it is technically legal for anybody to release these seven outtakes on physical sets in Europe. “I’m sure they will appear on grey market collections,” says the source. “But people don’t really buy records anymore, so it doesn’t make much of a difference.”)
Nashville Skyline was recorded across eight days in February 1969, but roughly half of the session tapes have been lost. “There was an engineer who had taken some of the tapes home and put them in a storage locker,” says the source. “Someone later bought them for a couple of grand and Sony had to buy the tapes back. Most of what we have comes from the storage locker, but the rest were lost. From the best we can tell, they are just gone. That is unusual [in relation to the rest of the Dylan catalog, which has been carefully preserved], and I think it’s just because nobody in Nashville was paying attention. They weren’t thinking about future reissues.”
Fortunately, the tapes that survive offer a fascinating glimpse into the making of Nashville Skyline. There are alternative versions of songs like “One More Night,” “Peggy Day,” and “Country Pie” that are quite different than their album counterparts. “Everyone always talks about the Wrecking Crew in Los Angeles,” says the source. “The players in Nashville from this time don’t get enough love. Wayne Moss played on Blonde on Blonde and now three years later he’s playing on ‘Country Pie.’ These guys could do anything and make it sound funky.”
None of the Johnny Cash sessions were lost and they form the heart of Travelin’ Thru. June Carter Cash was in the studio those two days and she can be heard suggesting they dust off Dylan’s 1963’s classic “Girl From the North Country,” which he hadn’t played in five years. “Bob goes, ‘I like that, I just don’t really remember it,'” says the source. “I think he only remembered one verse. We included that conversation. And every time Carl Perkins takes a solo, Johnny Cash says, ‘Carl Perkins, everybody!’ It’s so cool. If Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley, and Jerry Lee Lewis were the Million Dollar Quartet, this is the $750,000 Trio.”
For Dylan obsessives, the single most interesting song on the set will probably be “Wanted Man.” There are numerous versions of Johnny Cash performing the song over the years, but nobody has ever heard Dylan sing any of it. “They don’t have the words together, so they’re making the words up on the spot as they go along,” says the source. “You can hear June say, ‘Johnny, you need to get that ‘Wanted Man’ from Bob so you know the melody of it.'”
The set also contains Dylan and Cash duetting on “One Too Many Mornings,” “Matchbox,” “Ring of Fire,” and two medleys of Jimmie Rodgers songs. “They are just singing Jimmie Rodgers song off the top of their heads,” says the source. “Johnny starts, Bob joins in. It’s just two guys relaxing in the studio and having fun. That’s what we tried to focus on. We wanted to focus on the fun they were having.”
For the sake of completion, the set also has Dylan and Cash singing “I Threw It All Away,” “Living the Blues,” and “Girl From the North Country” from The Johnny Cash Show in June 1969 along with “Ring of Fire” and “Folsom Prison Blues” that Dylan sang on his own during the Self Portrait sessions on May 3rd, 1969.
The set ends with four songs that Dylan played with Earl Scruggs at the Carmel, New York, home of album-cover illustrator Thomas B. Allen on May 17th, 1970. The songs (“East Virginia Blues,” “To Be Alone With You,” “Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance,” and “Nashville Skyline Rag”) were intended for the 1971 documentary Earl Scruggs: His Family and Friends along with its accompanying album Earl Scruggs Performing With His Family and Friends. “It’s a little outside of our chronology,” says the source. “But to us, it put a nice bookend on the set. They sound really relaxed and there’s a very nice, casual feeling to all of it.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/...nashville-skyline-john-wesley-harding-886719/
