Jakob Dylan Seeing Things His Own Way
By Scott Gold for the LA Times
HOLLYWOOD — Jakob Dylan has been waiting for this moment.
He has four sons, and the older two are inching toward their teenage years. Over a lunch of black coffee the other day, he said he’s made plans to become a stage dad, the best and most fervent that there ever was. He’s going to enroll those boys in every arm of the performing arts he can think of, he said — dancing and singing, instrumentation and songwriting.
“And then,” he said, “people can dissect them and talk about how much pressure they must be under because they are my sons.”
Dylan, 38, narrowed his eyes and offered an easy smile. It was a smile of poise and peace, of recognition — at long last — that to much of the world, it always will be about the father, even when it should be about the son.
The longtime ringleader of the Wallflowers, he has enjoyed considerable success in the past decade or so. But Seeing Things, his first solo album, is probably his best work, certainly his most graceful, with imagery — of grown-up love and grasshoppers on a country road, but also of darkness and war — achieved only by gifted storytellers.
Unlike the ensemble rock of the Wallflowers, the new album is also, however, largely about one man, one voice and one acoustic guitar. That will seem, Dylan knows, awfully familiar to some.
So Dylan was kind enough to suggest, without prompting, his own headlines. They included “Dylan Unplugs,” “Dylan Doesn’t Go Electric” and, his personal favorite, “Another Side of Jakob Dylan,” a modern take on his father’s 1964 album, Another Side of Bob Dylan. “Clever, right?” he said.
He used to avoid the issue. Now, he figures he might as well get it out of the way. Maybe then it will become evident that his career is not as complicated a matter as everyone has presumed. Maybe then it will become evident that with these 10 songs, he has merely endeavored to join the ranks of the most delicate and lyrical songwriters, a high enough calling without trying to be, you know, the conscience of a generation.
“Look, if I wanted to avoid all of it, my next record would have been played on a kazoo and it would be about water polo,” he said with a shrug. “The truth is, it’s just not as big an elephant in my room as it is for some other people.”
As liberating as that is for him, it will be disappointing to some. For 45 years, Bob Dylan’s fans have walked a fine line between devoted and obsessive. One piece of that fascination — to both artists’ chagrin — has long focused on Jakob Dylan, the only Dylan child who elected to become a recording artist.
On one hand, he acknowledges that no one forced him into a recording studio. On the other hand, the result has been, at times, preposterous; he was somehow elected chairman of the Child Musicians Who Could Never Live Up to Their Fathers Association.
There were many board members: the Lennon boys, Ziggy Marley, Lisa Marie Presley. Some put their generational pathos to song (Martha Wainwright wrote a song to her father, Loudon, the title of which contains the words, “Bloody,” “Mother” and two unprintables).
Jakob Dylan, all along, told everyone who asked that, yes, he was well aware of his father’s role in the creation of modern music and, no, he had no aspiration to match that. Some still couldn’t get past the idea that the seminal album Blood on the Tracks was effectively a conversation between Jakob Dylan’s parents, that “Forever Young” was written, reportedly, for him.
“I think it’s plagued him his whole life,” said Rick Rubin, producer of the new album and a head of Columbia Records, Dylan’s label.
So Jakob Dylan retreated to a degree. In interviews, he began using “he” and “him,” not “my dad” or “my father”; even now, the official biography that accompanies his new album does not mention that he is Bob Dylan’s son, which, of course, says more than if it did. He has acknowledged scouring his lyrics for anything that might be interpreted as being either derivative of his father’s music or revealing about their relationship.
The Wallflowers built a following in Los Angeles in the late 1980s. The band’s first album, released in 1992, did not sell. But its second, Bringing Down the Horse, with songs including “One Headlight” and “6th Avenue Heartache,” helped fuel a resurgence in post-grunge modern rock. It won two Grammys and has sold more than 5 million copies.
Dylan hasn’t been able to replicate that success. Three more albums — Breach in 2000, Red Letter Days in 2002 and Rebel, Sweetheart in 2005 — engendered a more uneven response.
The band, meanwhile, went through 10 members and performed, at various times, as a trio, a quartet and a quintet — largely, Dylan concedes, because he “may not be that easy to work with.”
The band has never broken up; it is scheduled to play a slew of shows this year. But Dylan was searching for something new and began to find it not long after the release of Rebel, Sweetheart, when he agreed to open a series of concerts for T-Bone Burnett, the songwriter, an old friend and the producer of many hit records, including Bringing Down the Horse.
Dylan played short sets to open for Burnett; he had nothing but the Wallflowers catalog to play but tapped into a bit of magic by reinterpreting the songs as solo acoustic numbers. He began to write a collection of often beautiful songs — some about the horrors of war, many laced with elements of traditional folk music — that eventually would become Seeing Things.
“These were the sounds I wanted to hear coming out of my speakers,” Dylan said.
That simple sound would be captured through a convoluted series of events.
Dylan signed with Columbia Records during a tumultuous time at the storied label. The result was that the newly appointed Rubin — one of the most successful producers of his generation — elected to record the album at his home. Their styles meshed.
“I don’t listen to music by genre. I just like good music,” Rubin said. “And these are good songs presented in an honest, natural way. And maybe for the first time, you really get to feel Jakob. It’s a pure expression of him.”
Jakob Dylan is scheduled to perform at the Newport Folk Festival, Fort Adams State Park, Saturday, Aug. 2.
