30 Years Later: Revisiting Bob Dylan’s Stripped Down ‘Good As I Been To You’

It only stands to reason Bob Dylan would return to his roots with Good As I Been To You (released 11/3/92). The solo acoustic foray comprised exclusively of traditional material harkens directly to this earliest folk roots and, with three decades of hindsight sounds like the perfect antidote to the misconceived and clumsily-executed studio efforts of the era, 1985’s Empire Burlesque, mixed by Arther Baker and five years later, Under The Red Sky, produced by Don Was. 

Though both collaborations proceeded with the  Nobel Laureate’s blessing(s) at the time, he has expressed a combination of bemusement and frustration with the failed attempt to sound contemporary on the former as well as the revolving door of high-profile guests that appeared on the latter. The dense but evocative expression of purpose in between that was the Daniel Lanois-helmed Oh Mercy of 1989, stands in stark contrast to both exercises in futility.

As does Good As I Been To You, wherein numbers like the woeful fatalism of “You’re Gonna Quit Me” had become a staple of Dylan’s live shows as his so-called ‘Never Ending Tour’ progressed. One round of sessions for a new album composed of such material involved a full band under the aegis of Bob’s long-time associate David Bromberg, but the mercurial Minnesotan chose to abandon those recordings.

He instead opted for his first entirely solo, acoustic album since Another Side of Bob Dylan in 1964. Accompanying himself on guitar and harmonica, Dylan rediscovered the poetry in ”Tomorrow Night” and “Hard Times,” the deceptively plain-spoken language of which distilled the emotion in their imagery.

Of course, this first of a near-perfect pair  (with its successor two years later World Gone Wrong) is not his first such expedition into roots. In 1967, the year after his famous (alleged?) motorcycle accident, Bob explored all manner of song sources on The Basement Tapes Yet, in the company of The Band, there was more than a little jocularity going on. 

In contrast, during this roughly fifty-five-minute ‘92 outing, Dylan sings and plays with a serious purpose. Right from the start of “Frankie & Albert,” his performances radiate the intensity of a man finding exactly what he’s looking for, at least in terms of the music he’s making. 

Yet he was aiming for clarity of sound as well as mind. For all the deceptively ragged spontaneity of cuts like “Step It Up And Go” and “Hard Time,” the designation of the expert Stephen Marcussen as mastering engineer for Micajan Ryan’s recording and mixing is the same attention to detail Dylan applied to the sequencing of the baker’s dozen tracks.

Along with production supervisor Debbie Gold, he illuminated not just the mix of arrangements–guarded but liberated harmonica-laden blues of “Sittin’ On Top of the World” contrasting  the genuinely world-weary “Hard Times”–but also the continuity between narratives such as the storylines of “Blackjack Davey” and “Canadee-i-o.” 

In this regard alone, this LP begs favorable comparison to Bob’s watershed of original songs Blood on the Tracks. But with three decades of hindsight (and almost two more with the 1975 album), Dylan’s deep level of engagement in the project is unmistakable: the rapid fingerpicking on “Froggie Went A Courtin'” hearkens to his solo spots on the thirtieth-anniversary celebration in his honor the next year at Madison Square Garden, reaffirming he enjoys playing music as an end in itself. 

The fact is if Bob Dylan had proved nothing else with Good As I Been To You, it is that the long musical heritage of which he’s a part actually transcends his own estimable body of work. And the subsequent, similarly-styled album, World Gone Wrong, is a natural extension of that effort;  the man outlined the fundamental duality in much of his best work, that is, what’s going on inside his head and heart often mirrors what’s going on in the world around him and vice-versa. 

Perhaps not coincidentally with the exception of “Dignity” on Greatest Hits Vol. 3, Bob would not release an original song from then until 1997, when he issued yet another record produced by Lanois, the widely-hailed return to form titled Time Out Of Mind.  The effort he made to rediscover the source(s) of his original inspiration thus paid the dividends Dylan was seeking. And, in a measure of his great artistry, each of the precursors to his creative reawakening is almost as memorable, in its own way, as the Grammy Award-winning album of just a few years later.