After legendary musicians pass away, it\u2019s only natural to reexamine the road he or she traveled to reach that status. The benefits of doing so are two-fold:\u00a0 you learn how the musician\u2019s creative methods flourished from its infancy, and your thirst for new material is quenched.\u00a0 Such is the result of listening to posthumously released Bootleg, Volume II – From Memphis To Hollywood<\/i>, a two-disc collection of largely unreleased recordings from the Man in Black.<\/p>\n
Seconds into the album, you\u2019re transported to over a half-century ago in 1955, when then-23 year old Cash made his debut over the radio waves on Memphis\u2019s KWEM Saturday afternoon program.\u00a0 On this untouched, rawest of recordings, Cash introduces some of his earliest works, such as honky-tonkin\u2019 \u201cWide Open Road\u201d and Bible-quotin\u2019 \u201cBelshazzar,\u201d with his backing band, the Tennessee Two.\u00a0 Each song is bookended by advertisements for a local home improvement store (which employed Cash at the time), narrated by Cash himself.\u00a0 The opening 15 minutes offer a captivating insight into the birth of a legend, and in itself is a great reason to check this album out.<\/p>\n
Next come early demo tracks, during his time in Memphis with Sun Records.\u00a0 \u201cThe advice I\u2019ve given myself over the years,\u201d Cash had told American Songwriter<\/i> just before his death, is to \u201ckeep it simple.\u201d\u00a0 Indeed, Cash mastered this art, leading to ingeniously straightforward and ultimately profound country, folk, and gospel songwriting.\u00a0 This style is doubly perceptible in the unreleased demos captured in this collection, many of which consist of Cash singing and strumming solo, in glorious monophonic quality.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s especially stunning to hear early classics like \u201cI Walk The Line,\u201d \u201cGet Rhythm,\u201d and \u201cBig River\u201d in their stripped-down, incomplete form.\u00a0 Peppered here and there throughout the album\u2019s demos, you\u2019ll hear pauses or even abrupt stops in the music, clear evidence that Cash was still working out some kinks.\u00a0 In addition, it\u2019s fascinating to listen to these early recordings given the context of his life as a whole.\u00a0 For instance, \u201cLeave That Junk Alone\u201d appeals the listener to stray away from alcohol and stick with \u201ccool H2O.\u201d\u00a0 Ironic, of course, given his later well-chronicled abuse of drugs and alcohol.<\/p>\n
In 1958, Cash left Tennessee behind for Los Angeles when he signed with Columbia Records, and disc two offers 25 outtakes and B-sides from his first decade on the west coast.\u00a0 Although still definitively Johnny Cash, it\u2019s immediately obvious that these tracks are far more polished and representative of his transition into the mainstream.\u00a0 Backing vocals, especially noticeable in \u201cYou Dreamer You,\u201d were rarely found in his Sun recordings, but are omnipresent on the second disc.<\/p>\n
\u201cSend A Picture Of Mother,\u201d sung from the sad perspective of a jailed outlaw writing to his former cellmate, is a gut-wrenching highlight of the Columbia outtakes, along with a folksy cover of Bob Dylan\u2019s \u201cOne Too Many Mornings.\u201d Still other compositions are byproducts of his work in the movie industry, such as \u201cFive Minutes To Live\u201d from the 1961 bank-robber flick of the same name in which Cash himself starred.<\/p>\n
Following the first volume of bootlegs covering 1973-1983, Bootleg, Volume II<\/i> is an intimate glimpse into Cash\u2019s entrance and eventual explosion into the country music arena.\u00a0 Clocking in at over two hours, the album catalogs an almost overwhelming plethora of unfamiliar material.\u00a0 Although these chronicles will be valued most by longtime Cash devotees searching for a cure for nostalgia, it\u2019s fascinating enough to make the album appreciable by any casual Americana fan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":84,"featured_media":30600,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[5664],"rating":[5613],"class_list":["post-42268","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-johnny-cash","rating-rating-a-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/42268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/84"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42268"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/42268\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30600"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=42268"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=42268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}