Most casual music fans can easily name Bob Dylan’s masterpiece albums. Records like Blonde On Blonde, Blood On The Tracks, and Time Out Of Mind spilled over the brim with sprawling, profound songs. Other records in his catalog can make similarly elite claims.
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But you could make an argument that the two most important records of Bob Dylan’s career featured not a single original song. Good As I Been To You and World Gone Wrong, released in 1992 and 1993, respectively, helped Dylan recapture his elusive muse.
A Dylan Slump
In October 1992, a star-studded concert took place at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The occasion was the 30th anniversary of Bob Dylan’s beginning stages as a recording artist. Top stars gave stellar performances of Dylan’s material. The man himself was also on hand to play a few choice tunes at the party in his honor.
Truth be told, the concert gave off the vibes that you might get at a retirement party. Not that Dylan was contemplating any such thing. But his recorded output had become increasingly spotty. Three of his four most recent studio albums were considered flops by a consensus of critics. Sales of the records had also bottomed out from his peak era. The thought that he could get back to his former levels of excellence seemed far-fetched.
Dylan still toured relentlessly. But he seemed to have lost inspiration when it came to his original material. His 1990 album Under The Red Sky would turn out to be his last album with songs he wrote himself for seven years. The two studio albums he recorded in the interim went way back to the source.
Back to Basics
Since he’s never been all that forthcoming about his motives, it’s impossible to say if Dylan was searching for something he’d lost when he recorded Good As I Been To You and World Gone Wrong. There’s an anecdote in Steven Van Zandt’s wonderful autobiography that claims he suggested the idea to Dylan when the latter asked for help on a rock album he was contemplating.
In any case, Dylan recorded the albums quickly with just vocals and acoustic guitar. (Sessions for Good As I Been To You began with a full band, but Dylan shelved that idea.) Songs included on the records generally tended to be dusty folk and blues songs, not unlike the ones that Bob Dylan peddled as an unknown in New York City clubs in the early 60s.
Neither album release included the fanfare that usually accompanied a new Dylan project. And perhaps because no new Bob Dylan songs arrived with the albums, the two LPs mostly came and went without too many people taking notice. But they served their purpose, not only for Dylan at the time but for his future prospects as well.
Revisiting Folk and Blues
Good As I Been To You featured a few more story songs. Bob Dylan deftly picked apart the nuances of twisty tales like “Jim Jones” and “Arthur McBride”. World Gone Wrong hewed a bit closer to gloomy blues. Dylan’s vocals on songs like “Blood In My Eyes” and “Delia” chillingly capture the bereft emotional states of those narrators.
Critics praised the two albums. But it was hard to call them a return to form, simply because Dylan wrote nothing new for the records. Some wondered if he’d ever get back to penning his own stuff.
In actuality, Dylan had recharged his batteries by digging deep into these antiquated songs. When he returned with his own work in 1997 on Time Out Of Mind, the songs came infused with the darkness and honesty of that older material. Dylan had returned to the songwriting heights. And the oft-sung songs of those two crucial albums acted as the springboard.
Photo by L. Cohen/WireImage for NBC Universal Photo Department
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