Acoustic Guitar August 2005
Welcome to Rebellion, Sweetheart
It's lunchtime at bread and Porridge, a petite cafe on Santa Monica, Calif.'s Wilshire Boulevard, and Dylan alternates between his cup of black coffee and a bottle of sparkling water. Sinking into an overstuffed, chocolate-brown reading chair, he talks for the first time about The Wallflowers' fifth album. There's a guy making drinks at the bar near us, and other patrons come and go during our hour-long chat, but no one seems to notice Dylan, whose boyish good looks and bright baby blues have been routinely plastered on MTV and VH1 since 1996's Bringing Down the horse. Casually attired in light corduroy pants and a dark brown jacket over a hooded shirt, he's relaxed and talkative. "This record, to me, is incredibly timely,"' Dylan explains on this dreary rainy day in mid February. "I think it's a vert fertile time to be a writer. For the first time we're right here on the brink of the end of time. Two hundred years ago there was going to be a comet, that's what everybody was worried about, but now it's us that might actually end it. I have three kids, and I find it dreadful and worrisome, and it's definitely embedded in the entire record." If the fear of mankind's self-inflicted annihiliation looms in Rebel, Sweetheart (say it like a plea for action), Dylan refused to be blatant about it. Instead, he strewed his songs with sporadic clues, like so many breadcrumbs leading to his message of imminent doom. Dylan is deeply upset about where our country, our world, is being led, as his words make evident: "Seems like the world's gone underground / Where no gods or beroes dare to go down" ("God Says Nothing Back"); "Batten down the hatches, extinction calls" ("The Passenger"); "What you give is what you get / These days I worry about your debt / Who carries eveil out / Evil will come" ("Here He Comes [Confessions of a Drunken Marionette"]"; "No amount of nightmares would ever compare / To the thought of only silence in this ghost-filled air" ("We're Already There") "My approach to songwriting isn't as direct as some other people's," he allows unapologetically. "I don't want to knock anybody out, but you listen to some of the country writers and how specific they're being - I don't find those are timeless songs. There's a reason that [my father's] 'Master of War' is as relevant today as it was in [1963]; the reason Pearl Jam was in practice of playing that song is that it's not about a specific moment.
Something might have sparked it specifically, but it's a timeless reference. "I don't traditionally write in a storytelling manner," he continues. "What I do is more like paintings, which are purely interpretive. But I don't see paintings as existing in one short block of time, and I don't really see songs that way either." Contributing to a further distance from storytelling, Dylan embraced a style of writing for Rebel, Sweetheart that clung to what he calls "a consistent language," inspired mostly by what he was reading at the time, specifically the writings of English poets W.H. Auden and Lord Byron. "It's reflected on the whole record and the title, as well. "The Lord Byron poem, 'Darkness,' is pretty consistent with some of the images that was working with on the record," he says, "and I think that they're as apocalyptic as where we are right now. It's relevant poem even though it's extremely old." The Wallflowers began in the late 1980's in Los Angelos, the brainchild of high-school buddies Tobi Miller and Jakob Dylan. Initially called The Apples, by 1992 they'd renamed themselves and become a steady fixture on the local club scene. With grunge about to finally send hair bands into oblivion, The Wallflowers were an anomaly, given Miller and Dylan's rootsy guitars and Rami Jaffee's array of oragns. Their first album, The Wallflowers, came and went before many people noticed, but after three years of losing band members and collecting rejection letters from disinterested labels, Dylan and Jaffee reemerged with a new group and Bringing Down the Horse, a double-Grammy record that rbought the kind of worldwide success (three hit singles and six million copies sold) that invites lofty expectations for subsequent releases. While their next two CDs, 2000's Breach and 2002's Red Letter Days, were both hits on adult alternative radio, either came close to Horse's spectacular numers and Dylan couldn't care less. "Numbers are onviously not the most relevant part of the equation. You can't be real worried about doing that again. I plan on doing this for an incredibly long amount of time," he declares, "and I don't want to go on making a record with the panic of having to stay in any particular limelight. The truth is, when you're selling tons of records, a certain part of your life is really fulfilled, but that doesn't mean that other parts of your life are on that same level. This is not at all meant to be looking down upon success, but you're got your entire life to live ...I Like what I'm doing now. I'm able to continue to find things that are interesting and new ways fo writing." Rebel, Sweetheart features Dylan on guitars and vocals, Jaffee on keys, 12 year-veteran Greg Richling on bass and newest member Fred Eltringham - who has also played with The Gigolo Aunts and ben Kweller - on drums. When longtime lead guitarist Michael Ward left three years ago, The Wallflowers never replaced him, opting instead to use whichever guitarist made sense at the time. In the past, the band has toured as a four-piece - and probably will again - but for Sweetheart, producer Brendan O'Brien doubled as the second guitarist in the stdio. Where the'd employed numerous extras musicians on their three previous albums, Sweetheart wasaugmented only by percussionist lenny Castro and O'Briend, to whom Dlan now refers "the fifth Wallflower." O'Briend toured with The Wallflowers last summer and also joined them for their version of "Lawyers, Guns and Money" on last year's Warren Zevon tribute, Enjoy Every Sandwich, but Dylan doesn't feel compelled to find another permanent guitarist. "In this band Rami is that guy," Dylan explains. "Rami is the texture and he contribute what a quote-unquote lead guitarist player might traditionally do in a rock band. The truth is I'm just not that enamored of electric guitar. It has its spot and I grew up playing it, but it's getting so far from the roots of what this instrument was supposed to do on records that are being played today. I'd rather hear Rami layer a bunch of keyboards and create an atmosphere than conjuring up the image of somebody putting their foot up on a monitor and busting a solo out. It occured to me throughout the year that not only don't I hear it in my music, I don't like to hear other people do it. I find ithat it's a total distraction and it can date yoursongs and material by that solo, depending on who's doing it. For lack of a better image it's just a very masturbatory thing." One noticeable result of shunning hired guitar slingers is a return to the band's trademark organic rock sound after Red Letter Days. The Wallflowers flew to Atlanta last summer to make Sweetheart at O'Brien's Southern Tracks studio. For years, Dylan wanted to work with the former Georgia Satellites guitarist, who's better known these days for his production work with Pearl Jam and Bruce Springsteen, among many others. "I meet with him in '92, when we did the first record," Dylan recalls.
We've done all our records in L.A. and some of the records we've made have taken six months, which is absurd to me. And it's not because it's six months of solid work. It's breaks here and there, it's someone can't come in today...Brendan likes to work in Atlanta, where he lives and we jumped at that. A record takes six months here; if we get our shit together before we get to Atalantta we're going to knock this thing out in a month. In the past I've gone in to make records with five or six songs and see what happens when we get there. The wheels start turning when you're in that environment, but it also can just drag on. So going to Atlanta was good for us." Good for them, perhaps, but making records has never been really fun for Dylan.
"I expect it to be hard work. I've made records that were incredibly complicated, but I'm just not that interested [in that] anymore. If everybody gives a shit about what we're doing, we're going to butt heads a lot. That's important to arrive at someplace meaningful. This record has real immediacy to it. I had these songs together' I knew what they were. I was confident that we were ready to go and there was no reason this was going to take six, eight months. I had a need to get these songs out there, and I want the band back on tour playing them."
The Wallflowers have been in the public eye now for more than a decade, and much of the focus has been on the band's frontman. The obvious - his bloodline - has been written about add nauseam, often at the expense of DYlan's own music, as well as the man himself. But the father of three has little time for pursuits beyond music. "There is no grand hobby I could throw at you. What we're talking about is what I do, and it does take up most of my time. It is my hobby; it is myjob. That's ultimately a hell of a great place to be in life if you can manage to get paid to do it. I can't imagine getting throughlife any other way. I don't think I would ever want the alternative to happen, but you get a little distance sometimes and you realize, 'Well, I'm 35, what have I done? I've just kind of done whever the hell I wanted to for the last 15 years.' That in itself is a huge feat. I don't want to have to put on a nametag and go to a job I despise. That's half the goal right there."
- Jim Nelson
