Son of Bob: Jakob Dylan on going his own way as a singer-songwriter
By RIchard Clayton from The Sunday Times UK
August 17, 2008
It’s a “kid and dog day” at Vagrant Records, I’m told, as a flaxen-haired five-year-old wheels around in her miniature fire truck and a droopy-eyed pooch noses my leg. One of them is called Dakota — I think it’s the dog — and both belong to the boss, who is Jakob Dylan’s manager as well as the head of the label, the American home of Eels and the Hold Steady. “Jake will be 10 minutes late,” someone says. “He’s stuck on the 405.” That’s hardly a surprise in Los Angeles — the city swims with cars, and this dour former paper factory on West Washington Boulevard is a long way from Bel Air, if that’s where Dylan means, later, by “the other side of town” — but how polite to phone.
He arrives in a check shirt, jeans and a tipped-back straw hat. He seems utterly at ease in these unpretentious surroundings. I get the impression he would have come by bicycle, if that were feasible.
His eyes, a searching yet patient blue, flinch only when I do my inevitable double-take. With a slight beard, he resembles his father more now than he did at the height of his rock-idol phase as leader of the Wallflowers — and, specifically, his father in the Nashville Skyline-into-New Morning era, 38 years ago, when Jakob was born. He is better-looking than Bob — but, hey, this is California, and he probably has his mother, Sara, an erstwhile Playboy bunny, to thank for that.
Dylan fils is here to talk about Seeing Things, his debut solo album. Consisting of 10 spare yet resonant songs, mainly for guitar and voice, it’s his first, too, for Columbia, which releases his dad’s records, and its subjects range from combat fatigue (Valley of the Low Sun) to domestic bliss (Something Good This Way Comes) and the virtues of honest toil (All Day and All Night) without being tethered to one particular time or place. Yes, Iraq is in the background, but, says Jakob, “I also work really hard — choosing my words very carefully — to avoid being bulky and heavy-handed.” Indeed, he sings in a warm, unwaveringly mellow style that won’t startle Jack Johnson fans — something to enhance the album’s commercial prospects, perhaps, just as it undersells his songwriting’s craft. Sales have been growing in America.
Produced by Rick Rubin (who has previously coaxed superb performances from veterans Johnny Cash and Neil Diamond), Seeing Things might be a slow burn, but it sounds like the work of a songwriter — two Grammys already to his name with his band — finding his proper niche. Even as the lyrics declaim “Evil is alive and well” and “Everybody pays as they go”, the vocals exude confidence and a kind of contentment. After a long apprenticeship with the Wallflowers, is this Jakob’s first “grown-up” album?
“I don’t like all those words like wiser or mature or reflective,” he says. “I couldn’t give you a well-rounded phrase on how I feel now versus 15 years ago. I know that I’m more interested in saying certain things, because I do believe, if you say things, you can make them true. If I sing a line like ‘Something good this way comes’, it’s because a) I believe it, and b) I need to keep believing it. But it’s not motivational speaking; there is dark, there is light, and it’s important to have it all represented.”
Meeting this son of Bob, whose parents divorced in 1977 (after which he was brought up in LA by his ma, but hung out on pa’s tour bus as a teenager), the temptation to sit in the psychiatrist’s chair is irresistible. Informed that his manager’s little girl was longing to say hi, Jakob had smiled: “I hope I didn’t disappoint.” I scribbled that down — as if it were symbolic, somehow, of a conflicted, diffident, eager-to-please personality. Then again, it might just have been the modest courtesy of a nice, well-adjusted guy. He claims to have left his angst far behind. On one of the rare occasions when his tone becomes more prickly, he pre-emptively scotches suggestions that anything other than his own talent and tenacity landed him the Columbia deal: “They don’t give anybody a record contract, you know.” I hadn’t said a word . . .
While acknowledging he intends to “very much address where we are today”, Jakob is quick to deny that his solo album is making any personal or political statements. “When you hold an acoustic guitar, people think you are being very confessional,” he says. “I feel quite the opposite, not just with this record, but in general. I didn’t have anything about myself that I necessarily wanted to say; these were my thoughts [a paternally nasal emphasis breaks through his carefully calibrated West Coast drawl], but, if you were curious about me, I don’t think you’d learn much from these songs.”
On the contrary, Jakob, we can’t help but look for genetic clues and connections in whatever you say and do. How could we not? Wallflowers songs have lines such as “I’m an educated virgin / Let me drown or learn how to swim” and “I want an apple that no one’s been eatin’”; the lyrics on Seeing Things include “My line of work suits me fine” and “You can have me or leave me alone”. Okay, I’m joining random dots, but there is some sort of narrative unfolding, isn’t there?
In the early days of the Wallflowers, whose 1996 sophomore album, Bringing Down the Horse, was among the biggest sellers in America that decade, you said that you censored your work, “grading it for references”, conscious or otherwise, to your father’s canon. Is that still the case?
“I’ve lost interest in worrying about myself any more,” Jakob replies firmly. “It’s not conducive to writing good material. With people who care about that stuff, the stretch that they’re willing to go to analyse my songs is astounding at times. It’s become a game of outwitting each other or proving they can draw six degrees of Kevin Bacon. Nothing I’m going to do will stop that process, but it’s not entertainment for me. In the rest of my life, I don’t see it or hear about it, though, so it doesn’t matter.”
In April, Dylan père became the first rock’n’roller to be honoured with a Pulitzer prize; the special citation spoke of his “profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power”. Many blokes worry about being able to wire a plug as well as their dads, or having as successful a professional career. How do you follow in the footsteps of a once-in-a-generation artist? There are no off-the-peg answers to that question, obviously. Nobody in their right mind, least of all Jakob, imagines he (or anyone else) will match his father’s achievements. What intrigues us is the human side of his situation — an established songwriter still coping with that pressure.
I quote a bit from Chronicles, Bob Dylan’s memoir. With benign resignation, he waits for me to finish. “Once his fame got beyond a certain level,” I say, “your dad writes of it being ‘impossible now for me to observe anything without being observed’ — a heck of a position for a writer to be in. But haven’t you been ‘observed’ all your life?”
“Ahhh, yaah,” he stalls, “It’s something I’m aware of, but it’s something I don’t have any interest in any more. If you’d asked me that 10 years ago, I might have had a different answer. If you’re talking in a familial sense of where I come from — without any hesitation, without any bitterness, without any regrets — I couldn’t care any less about that at this point. I choose to believe that the interest in my songs [arises] because I’ve been a songwriter for 15 years.”
If he prefers it like that, fair enough. While wearily accepting that interviews are always partly about his old man, he does admit to finding it “tiresome”. He feigns surprise that we aren’t bored with the Dylan father-son dynamic, yet realises we never will be.
It’s true that, rather than saying “my father”, “my dad” or “Bob”, Jakob says “he”, “his” or “him” when there’s a tape recorder around. And the son’s verdict on reports he was “difficult” when he started in the music business? “I don’t know what the word is to describe how I may have behaved, but people were less kind. And I was never going to be a tool for anybody. People always have an easy time mistaking quietude for arrogance.”
Jakob, one of five siblings, married young and is now the father of four boys. His reputation as a quiet, family man precedes him. Although the Wallflowers barely registered in Britpop-obsessed Britain, they were big news in America. Jakob is more comfortable with the lower-profile, old-time muso vibe of Seeing Things than with the MTV stardom he was earmarked for in the mid-1990s. Now that he’s proved himself as a finger-picking folkie, is he better able to swap songwriting tips with dad?
His smile has a hint of pity: “First, I don’t make it my business to give anybody career advice; and second, I will certainly not give him any, because he’s busy doing that by example for most of us anyway. His experience is invaluable and I have the ability to get information about that stuff, but any advice he gives [publicly] is in the book, which he was paid for — anything that goes beyond that, I’m thinking of charging.” He gives a stage chuckle.
Talking of Chronicles, since Bob sets such a store by his privacy, were you all told about it in advance? “No, he does his own thing,” Jakob smiles ruefully. “When I write mine, I won’t ask anybody for permission either. Did people find it, like, insightful?” What, Chronicles? We were pathetically grateful, and amazed that when you were a kid, and the press and prurient fans were hounding the family, your folks could give you a relatively normal and stable upbringing. “Well, at least that’s the effort of the book, and that’s why I hesitate to say too much, because he’s still busy weaving whatever web he wants to weave. .t how to be real good at it,” he says. “At the same time, I’m not sweating about how important I am. I’ve never worried too much about being inventive or ‘original’. Those are just nonsensical words to me when making art. I feel like I come in a long line of traditionalists, that I’m a team player and I serve a good purpose.”
It’s his most complete answer. But the reporter in me isn’t satisfied. Next day, I tell the manager I have more questions. Jakob phones back. I ask how he first listened to his dad’s albums, if the emotions involved were sometimes too powerful to handle. “That’s where it gets very creepy,” he says, with an even temper. “It doesn’t give people any value to know about that. It’s used for voyeuristic ends.” I feel awful. We discuss whether biography furthers our understanding of artists’ work. He thinks not; I think it can, though many people simply want to know anyway. No hard feelings?
I’m not sure that Seeing Things represents another side of Jakob Dylan so much as a fresh palette to express what he’s always been: a musical young fogey who “can’t believe U2 aren’t still 25”. In another life, a 16th-century one, he would have thrived in that Dutch school of painting (surely Bruegel’s boys didn’t have to put up with the hassle Dylan the Younger does?), turning out austere peasant landscapes and haunting fruit bowls. Crucially, though, with his baggage, apparently, safely stowed, his easel is now his own.
“You won’t abandon your masterpiece”, goes a line in On Up the Mountain. If that’s a memo to self, Jakob certainly hasn’t achieved it yet, but nor is he giving up on the possibility that, one day, he might. So, a suitable message for ravenous Dylanologists out there? He’s got everything he needs, he’s an artisan, he does look back — but, for a good while to come, he's not telling us everything he sees.
