Bob Dylan's Good As I Been To You
My famous brother called bullhonky on yesterday's Free Bin claim that my college years were spent listening to Black Francis and acting like a 12 year old.
He's got a point: I actually spent my college years listening to Guided by Voices and acting like an angry, entitled white man. My ire knew no bounds: meat eaters, D.H Lawrence, record store hipsters and Pearl Jam flunkies alike all knew the flair of my evil eye. And, in response, they all shrugged.
I also couldn't stand Bob Dylan's Good As I Been To You back in the day, and so I impulsively condemned that record to the Octogenarian Bin in yesterday's post.
Then, this morning, three things happened:
I remembered that it's supposed to be Positive Month in the Bin. Positive Month is officially a pain in my ass. But a deal is a deal, and positive I must be.
I also realized that I probably haven't even listened to Good As I Been To You, the record I'd just bashed, in over 30 years.
And finally, I remembered which of us owned Good As I Been To You. To clarify: my teenage buddies and I had a system, born of our scarce means and budding genius: we took turns buying new records. We're talked about the days of double tape decks here, of course, meaning that while Jordan owned Harvest Moon, and Harris owned Full Moon Fever, and I owned Magic and Loss, and Eric owned Green Mind, all of us wound up with a personal, bootlegged copy of each of those mighty records in short order.
And, because my buddy Matt has always been the nicest and most selfless among us, he was often passive-aggressively bullied into buying the records we needed but were least excited about.
For example, Matt had to get our copy of Hard Promises because its videos and cover looked like they were products of The Great Depression.
And, therefore, he totally had to buy our copy of Good As I Been To You.
Featured what we thought of as a lousy Cream song (Sitting on Top of the World)
Ended with something called Froggie Went A-Courting which sounded like Mr Toad ditching his motorcar so as to guest on an episode of Rainbow Bright.
Followed Dylan's previous record, Under the Red Sky, which I had proudly bought and then instantly regretted, cuz it sucked, and,
Featured arguably the worst cover in the history of CD long boxes:
Good grief, the cover is even worse than I remember! Dylan doesn't just look like he's Adam Sandler, age 92, working his way through a long and wearying fart; the mild, rising explosive light and clouds to his either lower side make it look like the fart in question is leveling entire city blocks, kinda like whatever is hopefully not currently occurring in Orange County (seriously, what the hell is wrong with our country?).
Anyway, let's stop declaring truths without any evidence and actually listen to Good As I Been To You, and let’s see if it does indeed still suck. And let's dedicate that effort to my forever friend Matt.
So you can picture him: earlier this week Matt and I spent an afternoon and early evening sticking out like polar bears in the Sahara at a hipster brewery. Legions of said hipsters were either line dancing and/or ax throwing in an inner arcade while we quaffed the goods, ate the tacos and took turns identifying the acts responsible for a truly terrible mix of late 80's glam rock on the place's high-fi.
My blind guess that Styx was responsible for one utterly harrowing track was proven correct even though I've never listened to a Styx record; he remembered that Skid Row was responsible for 18 and Life. I remembered Sebastian; he remembered Bach.
I doubt Matt still has his CD copy of Bob's 1992 ode to the white man's solo acoustic blues, but that's no matter: Matt's the best, and this is for him...
Well, I already stand corrected. Dylan rocks here at the album's opening; he's all swerving skip and dodge, rooty-toot-tooting his way through this piece like there are ants in his pants, only they're the good kind.
It kinda blows my mind that Bob could do so much so well on an acoustic guitar at this point. Matt and I had seen him play a few months earlier and he'd sounded and appeared just about dead.
Want some proof? I've got some proof:
It took 3/4 of Stuck Inside of Mobile before we even recognized the song;
he played Cat's in the Well;
the best part of the show, by far, was the blissed out guy next to us in the very last row describing the high quality falafel one could get one's hands on in a Grateful Dead parking lot.
That, and I got to drain the main vein in the men's room alongside a tie-dyed Bill Walton. His one-eyed trouser snake was loose and about somewhere way up in the rafters and he was all fired up about Bob. A gnarly moment!
But wow, this second song is just totally beautiful. I'm sitting here all upset about the fate of these convicts, wishing they could be pirates.
Clearly, I was a dumb kid to hate this record. Hard Times, Canadee-I-O: the record is actually made up of great, skillful stuff from one of our big deal artists in mid-flight.
Then again, let's give me a break: I was 16 years old when the thing came out. I was a teenager in love with another teenager, and I drank a lot of Squirt. Who could expect me to get fired up about the deeds of pirate folk as told by the world's spriest 116 year old?
And, there is some pulpy nonsense mixed in with the good stuff. I still don't like Sitting on Top of the World; Tomorrow Night previews Bob's snoozy Sinatra phase; and Froggie Went a Courtin' still puts Positive Month strenuously to the test.
The song is.... uhhh.... okay? I guess? Uh-huh!
