I hadn’t paid much attention to Bob Dylan for a few years, other than his participation in The Traveling Wilburys, when his 1992 album Good As I Been To You got a good review in Rolling Stone (to which I still subscribed at the time). So as soon as a copy showed up in the used bin at my favorite CD store (hey, I was still digging out of debt from college, early parenthood, and a dozen years working for low pay at small newspapers), I picked it up. If I recall correctly, I wasn’t immediately bowled over by it, but it grew on me until it became not only one of my favorite Dylan records, but an all-time favorite that I often pull out when I need a little mood adjustment.
As David Wild pointed out in his RS review, it was the height of “unplugged” fever, but Dylan was hardly jumping on a bandwagon by recording a whole album of folk and blues songs with just himself on vocals, guitar, and harmonica. He was simply returning to his roots, in more than one sense. More than a quarter century after he shocked his folk fans by plugging in, he was finally going back to the acoustic blues and folk music on which he first rose to fame, but this time solely on his own terms and of his own choosing.
Reportedly, Dylan and a band had gone into a studio and recorded an album’s worth of traditional songs and covers, which he scrapped, then went to his own garage studio in Malibu where he laid down the tracks that became Good As I Been To You. Turns out it was a good move. Great songs, superb performances, and sensitive sequencing. Of the 13 tracks, five are credited to other writers or arrangers and the rest are more or less traditional, depending on your definition.
He’s right out of the gate with a propulsive reading of “Frankie & Albert,” a variation on the Frankie & Johnny folk motif, that’s impressive for Dylan’s guitar picking if nothing else. It powerfully sets the template for the rest of the album. Another thing that immediately struck me, and which should be obvious, is how catchy most of these songs are. Because of course they are, especially if they’ve come down through the oral tradition. If somebody sings you a ballad about a crook being transported to Botany Bay (“Jim Jones”) or a young woman who secretly follows her man on board a ship and ends up marrying the captain (“Canadee-i-o”), or a blues song in which a fellow claims to be happy that his woman left him (“Sittin’ On Top Of The World”), and you don’t walk around humming that tune the rest of the day, then the song and the singer have failed.
There’s violence reflected in some of these songs. Not only do we get a woman shooting her man in “Frankie & Albert,” but a man threatening to do the same to his woman in “You’re Gonna Quit Me,” the second line of which yields this album’s title. And also the somewhat comic violence of my favorite song on the album, here called “Arthur McBride,” which Bob credits as arranged by Paul Brady, who sang it memorably on the influential folk album Andy Irvine / Paul Brady. In case you don’t know this one, an English sergeant, accompanied by a corporal and a young drummer boy, accosts a couple of Irish men at the seaside and tries to persuade them to enlist; when he won’t accept their refusal, they set to the trio with their shillelaghs and fling their swords and drum into the sea.
Another favorite here is Dylan’s arrangement of Stephen Foster’s “Hard Times.” Honestly, it’s one of his most plaintively delivered songs ever, and always catches at my heart no matter how many times I’ve heard it. And the album wraps with a delightful rendition of “Froggie Went a Courtin’ ” that I never skip. But seriously, this is an album I nearly always listen to all the way through. Good As I Been To You at the time was seen as a return to the acoustic folk music of his early career, but with hindsight it also pointed the way to many of his later, very popular albums that have continued to explore the riches of the folk tradition — both Black and Anglo-European — of the United States of America.
(Columbia, 1992)
