Good As I Been To You and World Gone Wrong (Dylanology 23)
The Acoustic 90s Albums That Saw the Birth of a New Guitar Style
In this and the following issue, I will take a closer look at the guitar playing on the two early-90s acoustic albums “Good As I Been To Your” (1992) and “World Gone Wrong” (1993). In itself it was newsworthy that Dylan “went acoustic” again, but I rather see them as a stage in the development of the guitar style – and by extension the musical style – of the Never Ending Tour.
In case you hadn’t noticed: Dylan is strange.
Some times he’s the genius who does things nobody could have ever imagined, whether it is writing “Darkness at the break of noon”, embarking on a Never Ending Tour, or making Rough & Rowdy Ways: there is no telling where it came from, and subsequently the world has to readjust to the new reality.
But there are other times when things also seem to appear out of thin air, but no readjustment of anyone’s world view is needed, because in hindsight it seems so obvious that it is as if it has always been there.
Such as the completely new guitar style on the solo acoustic albums in the early 90s. Everyone thought that he couldn’t play the guitar anymore, and bam! there it was: a magnificent, skilled, exciting guitar track.
It’s not that it is revolutionary – it’s not completely detached from his earliest acoustic albums – but if one starts scratching the surface, it also becomes clear that 60s Bob and 90s Bob are two quite different musicians – related, but different.
This text is an attempt to outline some of the elements that set these two albums apart – from his earlier guitar playing, and also, possibly, from each other. Are they to be seen as a single block, right in the middle of Dylan’s career, or is there development also within the block?
Dylan’s 60s Style
In order to be able to compare Dylan’s playing style in the early 90s with his style in general, we first need to determine what that “general style” actually is. Which is not an entirely easy task. Even though Dylan has been playing guitar consistently both on stage and on record for all but the past few years (“few” in this case meaning “20”), he has hardly played alone since he went electric in 1965 – i.e. since he started playing with a band and no longer had to rely on his own guitar playing for all the backing. The solo acoustic songs that he did play, e.g. during the Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975, are played in an unusually unsophisticated strumming style which almost does not deserve to be called a “style” at all.
So in a general sense, that would be the style to evaluate Good As I Been To You and World Gone Wrong against – which is also why those two albums came as such a surprise: where there had been two decades of unsophisticated strumming, suddenly there was varied and skilled guitar playing once again.
But it is also worthwhile to make a quick note of what characterized Dylan’s playing style back when he was actually a masterful solo acoustic player, in the early 60s.
There are three main components of his style:
a steady pendulum movement in the right (strumming) hand,
a strong emphasis on the bass strings on the main accents in the measure, such as the first and third beats, frequently with prominent bass lines,
a lighter in-between strumming on the higher strings on the unaccented beats, frequently with some regular rhythmic pattern that usually becomes more active towards the end of the bars, and frequently also with hammer-ons and pull-offs.
That’s basically it, whether it is “She’s No Good”, “Talkin’ New York Blues”, “Man of Constant Sorrow”, or “House of the Rising Sun” from the first album:
or “Blowin’ in the Wind”:
or “Mr Tambourine Man”:
With these simple elements, Dylan provides a guitar track that can stand in for a full band: the bass line plays the part of the bass guitar; the upper strings substitute for any harmony instruments, and even fulfill the duties of the drummer. For this reason, Dylan’s 60s playing style is a model for anyone who wants to play the guitar.
The New Style
There are three main devices that are used on the two acoustic albums. I would call them: the Bass Melody, the Sus4 Thing, and the Moving Shape Licks. In addition there are a few songs that consist of simple strumming, and a few “genre pieces”.
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