World Gone Wrong - Aftermath

Aftermath

The response to World Gone Wrong was very positive, with many regarding it as superior to Good as I Been to You.

Robert Christgau gave it an A- in his Consumer Guide column published in The Village Voice. "Dylan's second attempt to revive the folk music revival while laying down a new record without writing any new songs is eerie and enticing," wrote Christgau. "He cherishes the non sequiturs, sudden changes of heart, and received or obscure blank spots in these buried songs--all usages he's long since absorbed into his own writing because he believes they evoke a world that defies rationalization. Me, I'm not so sure it doesn't just seem that way because there's no way we can be intimate with their worlds anymore."

Ira Robbins wrote in Newsday that "the record expresses as much about Bob Dylan's art as any collection of originals." Even music critic Bill Wyman, who dismissed Good as I Been to You, wrote that "it's a testament to his unpredictability that is tedious and World Gone Wrong is a signal document, a mesmerizing and sanguinary walk down the blood-soaked history of folk and blues. It also has his best liner notes since the 1960s."

Wyman was not the only critic enamored with the liner notes, which are written in strange, verbose prose. Andy Gill of The Independent wrote, "it's the liner notes that offer the most interesting aspect of the album... the songs steeped in deceit, treachery, venality and despair—not to mention his sometimes slightly berserk annotations—the picture builds up of the Blues as Bible Study, a series of lessons to be interpreted." Christgau, Greg Kot of The Chicago Tribune, and many others expressed their enjoyment in reading the liner notes.

World Gone Wrong went on to place at #23 on The Village Voice's Pazz & Jop Critics Poll for 1993.

Following its release, Dylan was temporarily a freelance artist. As possible promotion for World Gone Wrong, Dylan arranged for an acoustic television special to be accompanied by a live album release. Scheduled for mid-November at Manhattan's Supper Club, Dylan was accompanied by his current touring band, pedal steel and slide guitarist Bucky Baxter, guitarist John Jackson, bassist Tony Garnier, and drummer Winston Watson. After a series of rehearsals, Dylan performed four shows in front of a live audience, "invest 'Jack-A-Roe,' 'Delia,' and Blind Boy Fuller's 'Weeping Willow' with a power and passion that had been missing from a whole year of lackluster performances," wrote Clinton Heylin. In addition to songs from his two most recent albums, the group performed acoustic renditions of "Ring Them Bells" and "Queen Jane Approximately" "that spoke with all the hurt that inner voice felt when left crying to be heard."

For reasons never explained, the TV broadcast and CD planned from these performances were all scrapped. It was an expensive decision, as Dylan had paid all expenses out of his own pocket, including those for a film crew and a multitrack digital console. Everything was filmed and recorded, but the results were shelved indefinitely (and are now widely bootlegged.)

At the end of 1993, Sony signed Dylan to another contract good for ten albums. A compilation and a live album would follow, but Dylan would take four years before releasing his next studio album, Time Out of Mind, a collection of originals that won far more media attention than World Gone Wrong.