The 15th volume of
Bob Dylan's Bootleg Series focuses on the recordings he made in Nashville in the waning years of the 1960s. There are outtakes from
John Wesley Harding and
Nashville Skyline, along with a pair of cuts from the
Self Portrait sessions, but the fulcrum of the three-disc set is
Dylan's sessions with
Johnny Cash in February 1969. Some of this is due to pure scarcity. There weren't an extensive number of outtakes from the
John Wesley Harding sessions, plus
Dylan didn't play with his arrangements in the studio; the seven alternate takes from these sessions prove this point. Then, CBS Nashville wound up not paying the fee for a storage facility, so a number of
Nashville Skyline sessions were lost. The outtakes that did survive are lively and friendly, accentuating the good humor that flows through the finished product, but they're so amiable, they're bound to be overshadowed by the disc and a half of
Dylan and
Cash running through their respective songbooks while supported by
Carl Perkins, who was
Johnny's guitarist at the time. The
Dylan and
Cash sessions happened as
Bob was in the middle of recording
Nashville Skyline, and it was possible that it was intended as the genesis of a duet album that never materialized. While "Girl from the North County" wound up kicking off
Nashville Skyline, the rest of the recordings remained in the vaults, bootlegged heavily over the years before appearing in this official, complete form. The additional context of
Travelin' Thru -- not just the alternate takes of disc one, but a joyous epilogue of a handful of tracks cut with bluegrass banjoist
Earl Scruggs in early 1970 -- lends some gravity to the amiable, occasionally wobbly
Dylan/
Cash sessions. The looseness can be ascribed to two mutual admirers attempting to find common ground. The pair knew they shared a bond --
Cash patterned his "Understand Your Man" after
Dylan's "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right," a connection made apparent when producer
Bob Johnston had them sing the songs simultaneously, each sticking to their own lyrics -- but finding a groove takes time, and much of the appeal of
Travelin' Thru lies in how the duo finally fall into step together. They start to move in the same direction by playing oldies from
Elvis Presley,
Carl Perkins,
Jimmie Rodgers, and
Cash himself, throwing in a few folk standards and
Dylan originals -- including "Wanted Man," which
Bob wrote for
Johnny -- along the way. If the results aren't epochal, they're nevertheless illuminating, revealing how these two American icons shared the same musical vocabulary. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine