Bob Dylan songs have a habit of sneaking up on me. I can listen to a song for years and think of it as just another song on an album, and then, without warning, that very same song will suddenly come into bloom before my eyes. For this reason, I’m always cautious about dismissing anything Bob Dylan does, as there’s a good chance that I'll come to love it eventually if I don’t get it right away.
The latest song to reveal itself in this manner has been ‘What Good Am I?’, from 1989’s Oh Mercy. Until recently, this song had always passed me by, perhaps due to it being placed immediately after the twin peaks of ‘Man in the Long Black Coat’ and ‘Most of the Time’. It wasn’t the studio version that turned me onto ‘What Good Am I?’, however: it was a live performance from 23rd April 2014 in Osaka, Japan.
Usually, Dylan songs go through various permutations as they are performed over the years. Nothing is sacred, with lyrics, melody and arrangement often torn apart and reassembled like one of Dylan’s scrap-metal sculptures. Curiously, despite being performed more than 200 times over a 25-year period (1989-2014), ‘What Good Am I?’ remained strangely immune to this practice. Not only did the arrangement change very little over that time, but the song also seems to have been played in the same key (E) for this entire period. This is extremely unusual, but it also raises the question of why this song remained relatively untouched by Dylan’s famous tendency towards reinvention.
Usually, Dylan songs go through various permutations as they are performed over the years. Nothing is sacred, with lyrics, melody and arrangement often torn apart and reassembled like one of Dylan’s scrap-metal sculptures. Curiously, despite being performed more than 200 times over a 25-year period (1989-2014), ‘What Good Am I?’ remained strangely immune to this practice. Not only did the arrangement change very little over that time, but the song also seems to have been played in the same key (E) for this entire period. This is extremely unusual, but it also raises the question of why this song remained relatively untouched by Dylan’s famous tendency towards reinvention.
Dylan’s comments on the song in his autobiography Chronicles offer some potential answers:
“When we began working on “What Good Am I?” I had to hunt for a melody and after working on it for a suitable amount of time Danny [Lanois, producer] thought he heard something. I thought that I was onto something but hadn’t quite found it yet. I was looking too hard. When it’s right, you don’t have to look for it. Maybe it was only a foot and a half away, I didn’t know. But I had exhausted my energy and thought I might as well just go with what Lanois liked, although it was too slow for my taste. Danny used layered rhythms to create a mood for this song. I liked the words, but the melody wasn’t quite special enough – didn't have any emotional impact. Setting aside our personal differences, we worked on this song for a while and completed it.”
It sounds like Dylan felt that he had allowed the song to slip through his fingers in the recording studio. “I thought that I was onto something but hadn’t quite found it yet”. “Maybe it was only a foot and a half away”. This is probably a common occurrence for Dylan, but the fact that he altered the song so little over years of live performance suggest to me that, in the case of ‘What Good Am I?’, the studio version was just a hair’s breadth away from what he was hoping to achieve. If his vision couldn't be realised in the studio, perhaps it could be onstage.
There are many other wonderful live versions of this song (Nagoya 1994 is a particular favourite), but – for now at least – the Osaka 2014 is the one for me. Where the narrator on the studio version found himself facing a sudden, terrible epiphany of self-doubt, the atmosphere in the Osaka performance is very different. The song has now taken on the feel of a Shakespearean soliloquy, with the narrator, now much older, staring into his own soul, or perhaps up towards the sky, and asking “Am I a good person? And if not, can I be redeemed?”. These are the same questions Michael Corleone was seeking to answer in The Godfather Part III, and that Frank Sheeran faced at the end of The Irishman. In both of their cases the answer was a devastating “no”, but the fate of our narrator is left much more ambiguous.
The song ends with a beautiful pedal steel/electric guitar flourish. It’s one of those rare performances where, although the band is playing during the whole song, it feels as though Bob is onstage entirely alone, as was the case with ‘Song to Woody’ in 1999/2000 and ‘Don’t Think Twice’ in 2018/19. Even the audience recedes far into the distance. All that remains is one man, alone with his thoughts.
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The Osaka 2014 performance is not on YouTube, unfortunately, but I did find an performance from five days earlier in Nagoya that's almost as good:
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