As Good As He’s Been To Us
BY JOHN WESLEY HARDING (Feb 1993)
As we kick-off Season Two of the Dylan.FM Podcast, we’re looking at Bob’s two early 90’s acoustic albums. On our first podcast episode we highlight some of the original reviews of Good As I Been To You.
One we liked and reference in the episode - written by John Wesley Harding (Wesley Stace) for Stereophile in 1993 - was not available online, and so we are republishing it, with the author’s permission.
“Mr. Dylan’s voice is anything but pretty. He is consciously trying to recapture the rude beauty of a southern field hand musing in melody on his porch. All the ‘husk and bark’ are left on his notes and a searing intensity pervades his songs…”
-Robert Shelton, New York Times, 1961
“I just want to keep on singing and writing songs like I am doing now. I just want to get along. I don’t think about making a million dollars. If I had a lot of money what would I do?… I would buy a couple of motorcycles…”
- Bob Dylan on the future, 1962
Ever since Bob Dylan laid aside his acoustic guitar in order to create modern rock as we know it, the world has clamored for his return to the simple basics. But apart from live performances, when his initial solo acoustic strum is met with a kind of religious rapture, his solo recordings since the second side of Bringing It All Back Home have barely numbered a handful. Highlights have included: “George Jackson,” his return to acoustic protest form in the early ‘70’s (though, as Steve Goodman once said to him, “It ain’t no ‘Masters of War’, is it, Bob?”); “Dark Eyes,” a lonely number from the understandably underrated Empire Burlesque; and the startling “Wedding Song” from Planet Waves. Along with this went the sneaking suspicion that, somewhere down the long road, Dylan had forgotten how to play guitar. Considering the deft originality of his first few albums, his guitar playing became, over the years, merely eccentric.
Now, in a moment of synchronicity entirely at odds with Dylan’s normal modus operandi, we have a new acoustic album released 30 years and a bit after the first one - Dylan’s 30th public birthday, as it were. On Columbia’s big 30th Anniversary do for Dylan on pay-per-view (money not going to charity), after nearly everyone had paid tribute to him with his own songs, he entered with “Song to Woody”, a song that at once pays tribute to his heroes (Woody, Cisco, Leadbelly), places Dylan in the lineage where he would like to (and should) be remembered- the one place in today’s mean culture where Dylan still really makes sense- and returns the focus to his very first album of 30 years and a bit ago, in particular to one of the earliest songs that he actually wrote. Neat.
Recorded somewhere in America and issued typically too late for that Big Dylan Tribute is Good As I Been To You, Dylan’s new album of acoustic cover songs. Again, one must think back to his first album, Bob Dylan. One’s meant to. On that record, whose cover so neatly summed up who Dylan was, where he was at, and where he was going, Dylan only wrote two songs. But what the album showcased was a man who could live a song, live in it. In fact, the record was praised again and again for how old and wise Dylan sounded. How could this old man’s voice come out of that funny peach-fuzzed face?