dossier

BY MARK HEALY

PHOTOGRAPHS BY STEPHAN RUIZ

WALLFLOWER|Jakob Dylan

Ater ten years and five million albums sold. The Wallflowers' quiet frontman finally gets comfortable.

Jakob Dylan's dreams are beginning to come true. He doesn't long for platinum records, Grammy's or arenas full of fans to sing along to every word. He already has all that. It's the stranger, more elusive aspirations that have crept closer to reality. Old guys in tie-dyes stopped yelling requests for “Like a Rolling Stone,” and it's been years since anyone showed the lack of imagination to bill him as the “son of Bob Dylan”. And just when short-sighted reporters have stopped asking the obvious questions of Jakob Dylan, at last, he is finally ready to answer them.

After ten years of writing and recording with a band of his own creation, The Wallflowers 30-year-old front-man has dropped his self-imposed code of silence, and is using the band's latest album, Breach, to tell the stories he never allowed himself to tell.

“For a long time, “ Jakob says, “I denied myself the common right that people have to write about their lives without having to mask it too much. I mean forget it. I'm going to write about things that are on my mind.”

As Jakob begins the uneasy business of putting a public face to an extremely private CD, it's hard to imagine him any more at ease. He crosses Ocean Avenue on the quiet side of Santa Monica, looking every bit the Jakob Dylan that graces album covers and MTV daydreams—tan felt hat, white v-neck Hanes, dark 501's and dusty brown electrician boots. With his head tipped skyward, he moves with a loose-limbed gait that on anyone else would be called freewheeling. IF this were a Hollywood movie, he'd be whistling.

Breach is the first Wallflowers record to include printed lyrics, perhaps because its songs were written with a clarity that matched their candor. “It occurred to me that if you have to explain what a song is about,” he says, “then maybe you're not doing it right.”

Mostly, the songs on Breach are about acceptance, coming to terms with the lot you've drawn; they swing from the empty high of playing an endless string of arenas to the solace of returning home. And while the record comes full circle—documenting doubt, hurt, revelation and, ultimately, some strange salvation—many stops along the way are brutal: There are letdowns, loneliness, emotional homicide. Little girls are overlooked at their own birthday parties and parents don't mask their dissatisfaction in their children. You're a hand-me-down, goes the chorus “Hand Me Down”. It's better when you're not around/You feel good and you look like you should/But you won't ever make us proud.

“When I was starting to write the record,” Jakob recounts, “that's what I was thinking about. Me. I wasn't interesting in avoiding things anymore, not that the whole record is blatant and obvious about those things. To some people it might be interesting, but other people won't spend any time wondering if this song is about growing up or not. But either way,” he continues, “I did it and it's there and if people want to dig through it, then sure.”

No doubt, people will want to dig through it. This is part of the burden Jakob has learned to bear. Songs like “Hand Me Down” will be scrutinized by the obsessive scholars that haunt the father. Dylanologists, as they're called, will dissect the lyrics for evidence of a troubled childhood or a strained relationship. They'll say that even the title connotes a breach of something—of privacy, of discretion, or of the Dylans' three decades of unlikely privacy. They will draw catty, farfetched conclusions and say things that would be said of no one else. And Jakob will ignore them.

As well as anyone can discern such things, it is likely that Jakob Dylan was conceived in Woodstock, New York, some months before a festival by the same name. The youngest of Bob and Sara Dylan's four children was born in New York's Greenwich Village before the family relocated to Malibu. His childhood was typical of California in the seventies: his parents divorced when he was seven, there was an ugly custody battle, and Jakob and his siblings lived primarily with their mother in Beverly Hills, but spent time with both parents, sometimes joining their father on tour.

Fame has it privileges—trips backstage to meet heroes like Elvis Costello and The Clash. And, its burdens—like the strange convergence that occurs when your father's picture stares at you from the pages of your social studies book. Jakob went to private school, but showed more interest in the bands he jammed with than in academics. And after graduation he returned to his birthplace and enrolled in Parsons School of Design. It took him three weeks to realize he didn't belong.

“I didn't want it half as bad as the people around me,” Jakob says. “I was totally inadequate. I didn't really have it in me to be that serious.”

So rather than call his parents to report that he was dropping out, he did what countless first-semester college students have done: He stayed put and kept his non-student status to himself. Then, he started working out arrangements on his guitar. “But,” he says, “I didn't know the first thing about writing a song. So I got to spend three or four months attempting it.”

Eventually, Jakob returned to L.A., moved into his mother's guest house and started seeking bandmates. Though he says that his allowance was not extravagant, he never really had a job. “I stocked videos for about an hour-and-half,” he says. But Jakob wasn't exactly slacking—he was improving his chops, writing better songs and working on landing a record deal. By his twenty-first birthday he had one—with Virgin Records. The band changed their name from The Apples to The Wallflowers and began cutting a record.

Jakob puts little stock in the name, saying it was the product of “five guys trying to find a name nobody hates,” but careful students of rock history—or anybody who owns the Bootleg Series, Volumes 1-3, a box set of mostly unreleased tracks the elder Dylan released in 1991—like to point out that Jakob's father authored a country toss-off by the same name. “Yeah,” Jakob concedes, he's heard all this before, “There's an old unreleased track called 'Wallflower'. It's exactly that —an unreleased song. At the time, it was like 'What song? What? I named my band after one of his songs? He's got so much material, if I spent any time trying to find a word that he never used, I'd be up for years.”

Regardless of its origins, the name foretold the band's underdog prospects. They released their first record, The Wallflowers, with little fanfare and no mention of Jakob's family ties, and then set out on the road. It was a time any other musician would cherish—debut record, national tour—but Jakob saw it as something they “had to go out and get it over with.” On occasion, local promoters plugged their shows with mentions of Jakob's father, and the usual flock would assemble.

“They weren't going to like the show,” he says, laughing about the diehards that would come to their shows. “And it was just uncomfortable, to be 22 and have these 55-year-old guys screaming songs that aren't yours.” He pauses, his long fingernails scratching at some stubble. “Yeah,” he says with some satisfaction, “I don't see them any more.”

When the band returned home from touring, a few members quit. That, and the fact that Jakob refused to trade on his valuable name, won The Wallflowers the distinction of being a “difficult band.” They asked to be released from their contract with Virgin and were, then spent the next nine months working on new songs (keyboardist Rami Jaffee went back to delivering pizzas) while their manager got them signed to Interscope. The resulting record, Bringing Down the Horse, started slow and finished two years later, a quadruple platinum Grammy winner. At the beginning of their tour The Wallflowers were playing to twenty-five people; at the end they were warming up The Stones at Dodgers Stadium.

The two years of touring honed their skills, bolstered their confidence and kicked off a new age of Dylanology. “I think a lot of people who bought the last record had never heard of him,” Jakob says, choosing the personal pronoun to describe his father; “they were fifteen and didn't know.” But suggest that there are Wallflowers fans who view Bob's music as overrated, and Jakob will leap to correct them. “Maybe there are, “ he says, smiling, at last finding the humor in the subject, “but obviously those people are wrong.”

One of the final Wallflowers shows on that two-year tour was at the San Jose Arena and featured the Dylan's—or rather separate sets by both Bob Dylan and The Wallflowers. No tickets were sold and few were available, as it was a private party, a thirtieth Anniversary celebration for a Silicon Valley company. Critics took them to task. “You know what?” Jakob says, “I'm like everybody else, I work for a living. I'll play with anybody if the opportunity is healthy and it would in some way benefit The Wallflowers. Somebody's paying you whether it's the promoters or it's a company. I don't really see what the difference is. Do you know what the difference is?”

The difference is that for many people, the show was a bright spot in rock history, and it could have been done for fans, not just employees seizing a company perk. Jakob corrects this. “People have this idea that we refuse to play together—or that I refuse to play with him,” he says, “but we just don't get asked. You know,” he continues, “that was a great show. We were both on tour and we got a chance to be in the same town for the night. If paths cross, well I wish they did more often.”

That simple wish—is common enough, but when a son attempts to get by without the family name, the worst of us assumes that there must be animosity, some kind of resulting fallout. “I don't think most people have to defend that,” he says. “Maybe it sounds rude, but it's not really anybody's business. Of course I'm implying that I have a perfectly great relationship with him, probably more so that people could imagine. But if you don't gush, then people just take it and run with it.”

Depending on how it's viewed, Jakob has either discovered a way to step out of the long shadow of his heritage or he's simply learned to love the shade. But this, The Wallflowers' third and most refined record, is more than a musical memoir from a famous son. Breach is both restrained and self-assured, a solid next step and precisely the right follow up to Bringing Down the Horse, which crept on-to the charts and didn't budge until everyone knew the songs, knew the handsome frontman and knew that he'd rather not talk about it.

Breach as a low-key grace of music made by talented people with nothing much to prove. It is straight-up—guitars, drums, organ, bass and vocals—with a more adventurous, technological finish. In addition to Jaffee, who's been with Jakob since 1989, the band includes guitarist Michael Ward, drummer Mario Calire and Greg Richling on bass. To make Breach they enlisted guests like John Brion, Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell, and vocalists Frank Black and Elvis Costello. It was co-produced by Michael Penn, whom, Jakob describes as “incredibly thorough. I was aware of the fact that maybe I'm lazier than some,” he confides, “but I wanted this one to be more fine-tuned.”

Fortunately, that fine-tuning doesn't obscure the core classics Jakob Dylan never stopped loving—the radio rock he sopped up in his youth, the Replacements records he adored, the talking blues of Woody Guthrie and Nebraska-era Springsteen. Slater sensed that Jakob was ready to be himself. “I did not want to deny whatever DNA was in there—in the songs or in his voice,” Slater says, “If he sounded like somebody whose records we all worship, then so be it. I think, if you listen to the vocals on this record, you'll find him facing the mike, for who he is and where he comes from.”

On a park bench high above the Pacific Coast Highway, Jakob Dylan tilts back his hat and lets the afternoon sun in on his face. He sneaks a peek at his vintage Rolex, a modest number that has a plain leather strap and black face, but ignores the fact that he's running late. He recalls the Woody Guthrie and Mississippi John Hurt records he knew he was supposed to learn as a kid, cracks a joke about the Kid Rock songs he'll have to learn in order to entertain his and his wife's two young sons and talks about skeptics.

“I'm skeptical,” he says, “when somebody similar to me is in a movie,” and by this he means the offspring of somebody famous. “I always wonder what are the chances that they're also really good?”

Then as he scans his mind for some worthy representatives of the second generation, there is a moment of uncomfortable silence. Oddly, he mentions Candice Bergen. There's another pause as he considers Josh Brolin. “He's funny,” Jakob says finally. “What was he in? He played a really dingbat cop or something?” He keeps scanning until he remembers Flirting with Disaster.

“Ben Stiller,” Jakob suggests, at last. “Ben Stiller is a great junior. A great junior.”