IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER

The song of the greates songwriter of all time, he's hidden behind The Wallflowers for two decades. Now, with the help if Rick Rubin, he's embarked on a solo folk ventur. "I must be insane," admits Jakob Dylan as he steps out of his old man's shadow.

After an hour of discussion, Jakob Dylan suddenly leans in close and announces in a slow, measured tone: “If anybody is waiting for the verdict… if it’s a question at all… I can answer it, “ he says, arching an eyebrow. “I’m not as good as him.”

It’s late August and MOJO has come to Seattle to talk with Dylan, ostensibly about Seeing Things - his recently released solo debut, after two decades fronting The Wallflowers. But, inevitably, the conversation turns to the 800lb gorilla in the room: namely his father, a certain Robert Allen Zimmerman.

“Do people think I actually have the nerve to keep pounding away trying to prove that I can write something as good as Blonde on Blonde? “Does he have the audacity to think he can match this work or that work?” Well no, I don’t. I don’t imagine that any of the artists we admire are wondering if they can match his canon of work. But that’s not the goal.”

Now Dylan is really rolling, “I won’t use words like fair or unfair, it’s just that the work I do is constantly put within the same framework as, like the impossible. And we don’t do that to Tom Waits or to Randy Newman. We don’t do it to a lot of our favourite writes. We do it to people like myself - and I understand why.”

“Look,” he adds, a grin slowly appearing, “if you point I think that I’m completely insane when you actually write this, it’d be great. For the most part I don’t address it that much. But when it comes up and I end up speaking about it, even I can sit back and think about it and say, Are you completely insane? I must be insane, to do what I do. But, at the same time, I can’t stop.”

A day earlier, a slightly more subdued Jakob Dylan greets MOJO backstage before his performance at Seattle’s annual Bumbershoot Music & Arts festival. Dylan has quote, literally flown the length of the United States to get here, having played a rare date with The Wallflowers the night before in South Carolina - one of only a handful os shows with the group this year - before hopping plane to the West Coast. Inside a makeshift dressing room, a bearded Dylan - diminutive, clad in black denim - is holding court, “I love MOJO, it’s a great magazine,” he says effusive in his praise for publication before chiding, “but, it’d be nice if you put someone on the cover other than The Beatles or the Stones or… “he trails off, failing to mention one other major act.

The youngest of Bob Dylan and Sara Lowndes’ four children, 38 year old Jakob Luke Dylan was born in New York and raised largely in Los Angeles. Though his parents divorced when he turned seven, music - both his father’s and others’ - was a pervasive influence growing up. Finding inspiration in a number of all-for-one gang bands - The Clash, The Stray Cats, The Replacements - Dylan’s teen years were split between a passion for rock’n roll and visual arts. Like his father, Jakob eventually left home of the Big Apple, enrolling at an art college, the Parsons School of Design. “My main motivation was just to go to New York City, really,” says Dylan. “Once I started classes it was like an anvil fell on me: This is not what I want. I don’t want to spend my time doing this. I don’t think I made it more than a month. So, I went home and gathered all the people I had been playing with, started chipping away and putting a band together. That was The Wallflowers.”

For Dylan, the decision to get into the “family business” - one potentially rife with a unique set of expectations and baggage - wasn’t as fraught as it might have been. “I’ll be completely honest: I never really thought about it that much. Which probably sounds ridiculous,” he smiles. “Of course I was aware of it, but I really thought, I’ll put my head down and get through the first six months and then they’ll forget about it and then they won’t really care. In retrospect,” says Dylan, smiling, “I might’ve been wrong.”

Initially, few people did care about The Wallflowers. The group’s self-titled 1992 debut, on Virgin, sold just 40,000 copies initially. After, they split with the label and the group fell apart. A four-year gap followed in which Dylan worked to rebuild his band and career. Yet doubt never entered his mind. “Early on, I thought that maybe there was something to prove to people - but only because I knew in my heart I belonged doing this,” he says. I never thought my songs couldn’t be on the radio or be popular. I think we all have to believe that.”

The release of The Wallflowers’ second album 1996’s Bringing Down the Horse, certainly secured Dylan’s place in the rock landscape. Produced by his father’s Rolling Thunder Revue guitarist T Bone Burnett and propelled buy its rootsy organ-fuelled radio singles (One Headlight, th Avenue Heartache), the album was a slow growing hit, eventually going platinum six times over and putting Dylan’s chiselled features on magazine covers and into heavy rotation on MTV. But its success - the album outsold his father’s biggest release Blood On the Tracks, threefold - left Dylan feeling much the same as before. “I’ve sold a lot of records and I’ve sold very few records and neither one makes me feel better than the other,” says Dylan. “It doesn’t change how you feel about yourself just because more people are listening. That said, selling six million records is awesome, I would never suggest otherwise. But it doesn’t really put everything into place the way you imagine it might.”

If anything, the rise of The Wallflowers brought added scrutiny and unwanted comparisons to the elder Dylan. As a defense mechanism, Jakob responded by avoiding referring to his father by name (preferring he and him) and mostly talked about their relationship cheeky or abstract terms during interviews. At the height of the band’s career, Dylan admits he put himself in a creative straightjacket: he would often censor his own songs, checking lyrics for any lines or phrases that might remind listeners or critics of “Him”.

“That became a pain in the ass. It became frustrating and counter productive. I started feeling like I wasn’t evolving at all,” says Dylan. “I couldn’t figure out if I was hoping to stay clear of all those comparisons. But it was it was belittling to my art. It was belittling to my songwriting. It was belittling to scour my own lyrics and change words because I found something that someone might draw connection to.”

“That became a pain in the ass. It became frustrating and counterproductive. I started feeling like I wasn’t evolving at all,” says Dylan. “I couldn’t figure out if I was hoping to stay clear of all those comparisons. But it was belittling to my art. It was belittling to my songwriting. It was belittling to scour my own lyrics and change words because I found something that someone might draw connection to.”

It wasn’t until The Wallflowers’ fifth and final studio album, 2005’s Rebel, Sweetheart, that Dylan says he finally felt liberated. “I just woke up one day and realized there is no way, there’s no way for that stuff to ever go away. No amount of creative output or success - commercial or otherwise - is going to change anybody’s impressions of my motivations or my abilities. That was a relief, actually and my attitude changed completely. Now I look at it like: It’s the English Dictionary, everybody can use it. You can’t copyright a word that’s already in the dictionary. With this new album, I’ve been totally relived of that ridiculous burden that was self-imposed and useless.”

Today, Dylan seems fee of inner turmoil as he and his trio - The Gold Mountain Rebels, The Wallflowers’ Fred Eltringham on drums - work through their set at Bumbershoot. Dylan holds the crowd rapt with selection or mostly unfamiliar songs from his solo album. Few in the audience seem to care, or even notice, the passing melodic resemblance that his This End of the Telescope has to My Back Pages, or the conspicuous use of the word “masterpiece” in Up On the Mountain. They simply enjoy music.

The next morning, Dylan is in the lobby of a downtown Seattle hotel, chatting between shots for the camera, “I have a hard time smiling, unless it’s real,” he says, before making an effort to flash his teeth. In person, Dylan is a charmer: blessed with sharp intelligence, a bone dry wit, perhaps more complex than would seen at first. This is hinted at by frequent line-up changes in The Wallflowers over the years - most recently, the departure of keyboardist and original member, Rami Jaffee. “It’s always been my group, I never pretended otherwise,” says Dylan. “I wrote and sand the songs, so it was going to be my vision. Some people were asked to leave and some people wanted to leave. I don’t think that standing next to someone like me- with the attention that I either ask for or don’t ask for - is that simple of pleasing if you gotta be around it all the time. Not everyone is cut for that.”

By 2006, Jakob himself was weary of The Wallflowers. “Creatively, I had bottomed out with what to do with the band,” he says. “I’d been doing it for so long. I just needed a break from the sound, from the dynamics, the whole concept. At that point I’d just had enough.”

Fortunately, he was asked to an open a tour that spring for T Bone Burnett. Playing alone and acoustic for the first time opened my eyes of that lifelong band guy”. “I liked the isolation of it, the simplicity of what I was doing,” says Dylan. “And out of that I started getting songs together.” The idea of a solo album soon followed. “I thought I could write sons that could be that sparse and recorded in a simple way,” he says. “The people I admire throughout music have taken the opportunity to do that and I felt it was my turn.”

In the interim, after years of growing displeasure with The Wallflowers’ label, Interscope, Dylan signed to Columbia Records. Before the ink was dry on the contract, the label executives who brought Dylan to the fold were sent packing. For six months, an uncertain Dylan didn’t make any contact with the company - until Rick Rubin was tapped to take over Columbia’s label operation.

Dylan, who’d known Rubin socially since the early 90’s, decide to feel out the bearded producer. “Once he got settled in and I had a handful of songs, I got together with him. We had an early meeting, just talked. I

didn’t know what that company was expecting from me, or if Rick would support what I wanted to do,” says Dylan. “he was very enthusiastic, but he also wanted to hear the songs first to be sure it was going to work.”

Rubin eventually came on board as the album’s producer. “He’s got incredible taste, incredible ears - what else is there?” says Dylan. The two worked together at Rubin’s home studio, working up a minimalist production aesthetic not unlike Rubin’s efforts for Johnny Cash and Neil Diamond. “This record is all about performance,” says Dylan. “I didn’t want to in the studio creating a sound or making anything that really had to be discussed.” That casual charm is perhaps the most appealing quality of Seeing Things. A stripped-down fold album that wraps strident political commentary inside rustic metaphors, it’s largely prased - if politely - in the press. Yet one sense those judgments are clouded by the weight of the expectation Jakob’s surname brings; the qualities he is usually derided for - the restraint of his songs, the simplicity of the lyrics - would be hailed as virtues in other singer-songwriters.

Though he speaks with a quiet pride about Seeing Things, even more palpable is Dylan’s joy at being part of the Columbia roaster “Of course, they’ve got the greatest catalogue in the world,” he says. “And they’ve had the same artists - some, anyway - for 40 years, and there’s probably a good reason for that. And I’m glad to be a part of that camp verses some of the ones that I’ve been a part of.”

Didn’t signing with his father’s label invite cries of nepotism? “I guess some people thin that I just called up Columbia and asked for a label deal,” he says, laughing. “Like, Hi. I know this has been a family label for a long time - could I please make a record? The idea that you could actually do that is almost charming. There’s too much money involved and it’s too hard to sell records these days for them to that for anybody.”

Though Dylan seems at ease talking and dealing with the rather long shadow his father casts, he also evinces a certain send of resignation about the matter. “I think I’m confusing to people,” he says, “I don’t think you can say there’s anybody working like me right now. There isn’t anybody that deals with the same circumstances I do. There’s nobody I can relate to. And even the ones you could maybe draw a comparison to, unfortunately for them, they’re parents aren’t working any more; they’re not coexisting in the same way. Whatever the lasting impression of my work is going to be, it’s probably won’t be judged in my lifetime,” he adds. “I think, with hindsight, people will view what I’ve doe in a more complete way. That’s not me putting myself on any type of pedestal or anything like that. But I just don’t think that it’s looked at clearly right now.”

Dylan’s not sure where he’ll head next; another solo outing perhaps, or even a full-time return to The Wallflowers. “it’ll be determined by the songs I write,” he says, “where ever they take me. When all is said an done, the reason I’m still doing it today, the reason I’m out here working now and why I’ll keep recording is because I do think I have singular voice,” says Dylan “I can’t estimate to you what it’s worth. But I know what else is out there and I do think it’s different. And I think I have something to offer that’s all my own.”

- Bob Mehr for Mojo Nov 2008

photography by Piper Ferguson