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 By: William Shaw
July 1997 (volume #16)


Days before I meet Jakob Dylan, his publicist phones me up. It's been a call I have been expecting, the one to warn me that Jakob doesn't want to talk about (his dad, of course).

Naturally, this means that when I finally get to meet the young man who sits opposite me outside Swingers diner in West L.A., somehow the specter of the unmentionable elder Dylan inevitably keeps hovering around, butting his way into the most innocent of conversations. Example: "So," I ask Jakob shortly after we first meet over iced tea on a Tuesday afternoon, "where do you keep your platinum discs?"

"Actually, I don't have my platinum," replies Jakob. "I have my gold disc. It's in my garage. On the platinum one, the spelled my name wrong, which happens to me quite frequently. So I sent it back."

"Your first name?" I ask.

"Yeah. They spelled it with a c."

"Not your last name?" I say.

"No," answers Jakob, with a tiny tight-lipped smile. "They always manage to spell my last name right." Actually, it's less a smile than a slight little ironic twitch of the left side of the mouth that says Yeah, right.

You can understand Jakob's exasperation. Most of our parents have not had an overwhelming influence on popular culture. If trying to dodge the subject of Bob Dylan is tricky for an interviewer, just imagine what it's like for Jakob, who has been doing it for over twenty-seven years.
In fact, what is noteworthy (and also inevitably fascinating) about Jakob is the doggedness which he has pursued his dream to make it as a singer-songwriter in his own right, without reference to Bob. The double-platinum success of the Wallflowers' second album, Bringing Down the Horse, has been a long time coming. It's no surprise that under the tightly written lyrical lines, songs like "One Headlight" or "Bleeders" exude the whiff of defiance. They are songs about romance and fulfillment in the face of the cynical, corrupt world. Jakob grew up in L.A., among the city's star aristocracy. No one really expects second-generation talent like him to do anything other than ride on their parents' coattails. But it took the Wallflowers seven years to get this far.

He says, "It has a lot to do with just being the underdog for a long time and knowing it-not feeling, but knowing-that people were rooting for me to lose." Jakob sits hunched forward. I ask him, "Are you stubborn?"
He smiles that tiny smile again. "Oh, I've been called stubborn before."

Jakob is wearing a black baseball cap jammed down on his head, eyes hidden behind a pair of large Armani sunglasses, looking like a rock star who doesn't want to be recognized (the perfect disguise in Los Angeles, where everybody looks like that). He lowers his glasses temporarily, displaying the most dazzling pair of water blue eyes. It's obvious that Jakob Dylan, though haughty and frequently obtuse, is an absurdly striking and charismatic individual.

Jakob (with a k for no reason Jakob understands) was born in 1969, the youngest child of the marriage of Bob Dylan and Sara Lowndes. It was a famously intense and stormy relationship, immortalized in songs along the way. Jakob gets his looks from both of them. Dylanologists assert that one of Dylan's greatest songs "Forever Young" was written about three-year-old Jakob. "That's completely unfounded," Jakob insists. "I've been hearing that one ever since I can remember. That song is obviously not about one person, it's more in general. (In fact, Dylan biographer John Bauldie wrote that Bob Dylan said of the song, "I wrote it thinking about one of my boys.")

The name comes from his parents' interest in Judaism: Jakob's older brothers were given biblical names too: Jesse and Samuel. (There is also a half-sister, Maria, and another sister, Anna.) Jakob didn't like the name growing up. He felt it made him stick out. These days, though, having grown up alongside the feckless second generation celebrities of L.A., he is proud of the Jewish history of his name.

"In L.A.," Jakob muses, "people name their kids the craziest shit that has no foundation. I know some little kid named Rebel. When this person gets older and wants to know where he came from....."

Jakob's parents' marriage came to a shuddering halt in 1977, when Sara came down to breakfast, to find another woman in the house. In court, Sara claimed that Bob had hit her and subsequently ordered out of their home. "I can't go home without fear for my safety, "Sara claimed in court papers. "I was in such fear of him that I locked my doors to protect myself of his wild outbursts and temper tantrums." The divorce was a rare public moment in a family that had fought hard to guard its privacy. The relationship splintered and Sara took custody of the children. Jakob never talks about how much his father and him saw each other after the divorce. But Jakob still grew up in a circle that included some of the biggest names in rock.

Though he always tried hard at school, Jakob was not an academic and seemed to always end up with a D average. When it came to test he studied, but even when he thought he'd done pretty well, he would often just get an F. It drove him nuts. In the end, he stopped taking tests, and just took the F grade without the effort. But he was a well-behaved kid, keen to keep his head down. As Jakob puts it: "I was never a pain in the ass."

Jakob is, by his own description, "A fairly reserved person." But there were two subjects that did get him excited. The first was art; the second music. His brothers were into Stiff Little Fingers, 999, the Buzzcocks, and the Jam. At twelve, Jakob had a conversion experience when Jesse took him to see the Clash. "Mind-blowing," remembers Jakob. People were fighting. Boots were flying into the air. People were being carried out with broken legs.

"That was when rock was really threatening. Now when people slam-dance at my shows, it's really embarrassing. It's very safe and delicate: Are you okay?"

Jakob was scared, but even at such a young age, the Clash's sense of commitment impressed him deeply. Somehow, familial connections meant that he ended up backstage after the show: Thus young Jakob met the Clash. Jakob carried away a memento, too: Joe Strummer's vest. Jakob framed it and put it on his wall, along with his Clash and Jam posters. It was a treasure. He still plays his London Calling and his Elvis Costello albums on the tour bus. He says listening to them makes him feel melancholy. It's music from a time he discovered the compromises he'd have to make to become a rock star himself. Jakob says that meeting the Clash was "probably the highlight of my life."

It makes sense that Jakob has been playing guitar as long as he can remember. At thirteen he took lessons at school, but, as usual, when it came to formal education he found he made a poor pupil.

I ask, "Have you ever played with your dad?"

"A show, or something like that?" asks Jakob tentatively. "No. Just played."

"Well," he says, employing his usual strategy of nuisance avoidance, "I've played with all different kinds of people."

"I'm sure you have, but-"

"That's my way out of the question." His face assumes that slightly smug-looking, aforementioned tiny ironic smile again. "I've played with so many different kinds of people."

The single possession Jakob was proudest of was a 1953 Fender Telecaster (which would now be worth about $10,000) that he was given when he was fourteen.

"Who gave it to you?" I ask.

"Let's say... a family friend," he says side-stepping again.

He loved the guitar. It was his pride and joy. Telecasters were what Joe Strummer and Bruce Springsteen played. So he was distraught when, five years later, it was stolen from his house where he was living. It's astonishing how passionately he talks about that Telecaster, describing it as "the one thing that mattered to me," as if it had betrayed him somehow by being stolen. But since that time, Jakob has achieved an ascetic detachment from material possessions. "I learned I was in love with this thing that did not absolutely love me back. It couldn't give a shit who played it... I have great instruments now, and believe me, I don't want them to be stolen: but if they are, I'm prepared not to care." It strikes me that Jakob acts like a man who expects life to be full of such betrayals and has hardened himself against the possibility.

Jakob sips his iced tea. Comedian David Spade recognizes Jakob behind his disguise and approaches our table. "Hey," says David." Ellen DeGeneres is really mad about that joke you cracked about her."
Jakob laughs. David Spade is kidding-it was he who cracked the joke a couple of nights before at the VH1 Honors show. Spade, charged with introducing Jakob (who was appearing with Levon Helm, Sheryl Crow, Emmylou Harris, and Steve Winwood), kicked things off by saying "Hello, I'm Ellen DeGeneres." Later that night, Jakob had sung "The Weight" with Levon Helm, a former member of the band, the group that once used to back Jakob's father.

Spade is with a girl with long curly hair. She stares at Jakob's baseball cap (which bares the words TOPEKA ROOFING SUPPLIES) and says, "I love your hat. I used to live near Topeka. Where'd you get it?"

Jakob is immediately evasive. "I collect hats. I, uh, have a job where I have to drive around a lot," he answers. It's as if evasion has become a habit with him.

At eighteen, Jakob left L.A. to go study arts at Parsons School of Design in New York. Suddenly he was thrown into a world in which creativity was dissected, discussed, and rated. He'd always thought he was passionate about painting, but he had never been asked to do it on demand before. It took precisely one week before he decided he wasn't ready for this. After his second week he left, and hasn't painted since. For four months, Jakob lived alone in New York, off of 6th Avenue, without telling his mother that he'd left college. He didn't know anyone. He would just walk around the city with his guitar and try to find something to do. "I never mind being alone," he says. "A lot of the time I crave solitude."

One day Jakob realized that what he really wanted to do was become a musician. From New York he phoned a guitarist, named Tobi Miller who lived in L.A.; they'd been friends since the age of eleven and had played together in go-nowhere bands with names like Livestock or the Boothills, in high school, practicing in Tobi's garage. Jakob returned to L.A. and they restarted their band, originally the Apples, now the Wallflowers. At first, the group started meeting in a friend's basement around the corner from the Whisky, and later at Tuesday-evening jam sessions at the Kibitz Room at Canter's Deli: a group of musicians who made the idea of jamming to old, unfashionable songs by Neil Young or the Beatles into something of a L.A. scene in the early 1990's.

By the time they were signed to Virgin, by the label heads, Jeff Ayeroff and Jordan Harris, they had become sort of the boy gang, Jakob had dreamed of being in since he saw the Clash. "An extension of the playground," he admits. When it came to recording the first album, Jakob insisted on a purthical recording ethic. "If I could have had it my way,"says Jakob, "I would not have seen a microphone or a cable anywhere. We just wanted to do it looking at each other with really no production." His biggest sticking point, though, was that he didn't want to be known as "son of". (Keyboard player Rami Jaffee, who was the last to join the original group, claims it was months before he learned who Jakob's dad was.)

The fact that he didn't want the band to cash in on his legacy was Jakob claims, the reason why the band played so few gigs. And that he says he couldn't pay the advance ticket money that clubs used to demand for bands to preform. "That was the height of our pay-to-play out here," he says. "We were eighteen years old. We never had $800 to buy our tickets."

"But everyone reading this will assume that you must have had $800."

"No," insists Jakob. "I had an allowance, but I always thought being in a band and asking your parents for money- I always thought that was really irresponsible: Can you buy us a van so we can load up all our gear and basically become complete slackers?"

Mark Williams, the Wallflowers' A&R Representative at Virgin at that time, became a friend of the band. "I think Jakob went out of the way to not utilize his legacy," he says. "Jakob chose to do things that made it harder for himself." What made Jakob difficult was his fear that he would appear to be exploiting his "son of" celebrity. Mark would watch Jakob avoid opportunities to do press, to pay shows, or to meet the people in the music industry who would do them good.

I try out a theory on Mark. Because of their history, Jakob's family are understandably protective of their privacy. But for Jakob, the quiet, self-absorbed youngest brother, the dogmatic preservation of his independence is not just a survival strategy, it's a way of life he's grown into. "Absolutely," says Mark. "It's obviously interrelated. I always thought there was a fear factor. A fear of failure mixed in with the other side-a fear of success." in particular, he remembers watching Jakob in rehearsal, playing really great rhythm parts. But when it came to playing live, he would watch in frustration as Jakob turned his guitar so low you couldn't even hear it.

When Ayeroff and Harris left Virgin, Jakob was left-stranded in a company that he felt regarded such scruples as unworkable in the modern-day business. Frustrated, he says, people at Virgin ignored his wishes to leave his father out of this. Jakob complained that he saw posters advertising the band as featuring Jakob Dylan, "son of Bob". The next time, he says, they read "Check out their debut video directed by Jesse Dylan-Jakob's brother. You figure it out."

"That's pretty good," says Jakob, with a leaden irony to his voice. "Somebody was thinking there."

Eventually the band turned up in Mark's office begging them that he find a way to let them out of their contract. "They felt no one really understood them," says Mark sadly. "It was a really hard thing to do to let them go, but I knew they were right."

In some ways, the band were in worse shape than when they had started. Not only had they failed to build a reputation as a great band, they had somehow succeed in gaining one for being difficult. People assumed that Virgin had dropped them. Mark sounds sad when he talks about the Wallflowers' time at Virgin. He is evangelical in his belief that the resulting album, The Wallflowers, is a neglected classic. "That was a great record," he says, "and Jakob was a brilliant musician and songwriter."

The day after we talk at Swingers, Jakob meets me at his manager's office. He sits there, still wearing his dark glasses. He has been doing phone interviews all morning.

"You know how I love to talk about myself," says Jakob.

"Oh yeah," I answer. "You're all ego, ego, ego."

"No other topic thrills me as much as me," he says with that twitch of a smile. "Let's talk about me." (Such exchanges often fall flat in phone interviews. "Facial expressions don't come over so well," he explains.)

Jakob shares a manager with Fiona Apple. There's a pile of mail for her. A man who signs himself "Your #1 Fan" has left a hefty manuscript of his novel. It's called "An Anthology of Psychological Torment." It looks like a bundle of fun.

"Can the stuff your fans send you compete with that?" I ask.

"I guess I don't make my torment that obvious," he says with a tiny grin. "I never read the fan mail, actually for legal reasons. It's kinda dangerous."

"Really," I say innocently.

"It's just a precaution. A lot of people don't open fan mail. You never know if you're gonna get sued over stuff years later."

An odd amalgam of Jakob's likes and hates and assorted personal details emerges in conversation. He cuts his own hair, and has done so for the last seven years. He likes dogs (but hates the smell of them when they're wet) and is allergic to cats. He doesn't like gold; in fact, the only visible piece of jewelry is his silver wedding ring. (He got married after his first album.) He has chicken pox scars on his face, although they're barely visible, and a small scar on his hand from when his pet dog bit him when he was little. He cooks, but he would not be able to change the oil in his car. He doesn't read books much, and has never subscribed to a magazine. He isn't much of a film fan either: The amount of collaboration and compromise he knows goes into making them turns him off, he says. He does, however, like reading poetry-Corso, Ferlinghetti, Dylan Thomas. He's not much of a Walt Whitman fan, but recently he's been reading the poem "Among the Multitude". It struck a chord. The theme is pretty similar to his song "One Headlight" about the unlikely miracle of finding love in an ugly world-yet another of Jakob's songs about his struggle to rise above the humdrum.

Jakob has made a point of never talking publicly about his wife and three-year-old son in interviews. "If celebrities dress up their kids in little suits and walk them into movie premieres with them," he says, "that's their choice. It doesn't make sense to me." Jakob is grateful for the efforts his mother and father made to shield him from such exposure.
"There are kids of famous people in this town who are famous for just being kids. They're not actors, they're not writers, they're not musicians. They're just people who are famous, " he says, like it's some sort of disease.

For months after they left Virgin, it looked like the Wallflowers would never get another deal. Band members trickled away to other projects. The original gang slowly dwindled. Jakob had imagined that it would be easy to get signed with another label. Now he realized he had gained that he had gained a reputation for being stubborn. Finally, Interscope picked them up and put the wheels in motion for a second record. When it came to the touchy matter of choosing a producer, Interscope's Jimmy Iovine asked Jakob who he would choose in a fantasy world. He name his two songwriter heros, Paul Westburg of the Replacements, and Joe Strummer. Both replied that they were not available. Instead, the name T-Bone Burnett came up. Jakob was happy with the idea of his work with another childhood idol, Elvis Costello and because Burnett, like Jakob, was a singer-songwriter. (Maybe it was a sign of Jakob's slowly blossoming self-confidence that he didn't object to working with the guy who had played for Bob Dylan's 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue.)

T-Bone was one of the musical friends-of-family Jakob grew up among. He's known Jakob since Jakob was about four, and was surprised when he'd heard that the quiet, intense young boy he'd known had gone into the music business. "I thought he would know better," T-Bone says with a laugh.

As on the first album, Jakob brought the songs to the band fully formed. He wanted to be confident in them before he let the band members rework them. He doesn't like to improvise them with the band first. "I like to know that its a good song." T-Bone had heard the first band and had like the demo Jakob had sent him.

"He has a honest voice," T-Bone says simply. As with the first album, Jakob wanted it to sound as unproduced as possible, still regarding the whole idea of production as duplicitous. Instead of regarding Jakob's obstinacy as an impediment, T-Bone admired it. He loved walking into the studio, finding the Wallflowers recording songs like the mournful, mystical "Invisible City " in one take, all playing together. "We producers don't often hear music played in the studio anymore," he says wryly. And gradually, over the 8-month recording period, he helped Jakob spread his wings. The puritan in Jakob had always been upset if anyone so much as suggested he use an effects pedal. T-Bone persuaded him to lighten up a little.

The resulting songs-delivered in a deliberately simple vocabulary-are meticulous distillations of Jakob's struggle: Over and over he returns to his theme of private redemption in the face of a cynical world. In "Bleeders," Jakob sings of a "sentimental fever," which he concedes is shorthand for a passion for songs that he inherited from his father. "They say you're only sad and lonely / And no one is impressed," sings Jakob, about record-company indifference to what he was doing.

"That song actually does have a lot to do with it," says Jakob. "When I got to making this record, I wrote about my life. And basically, my life was being told countless times that I was not very good, and that the songs were no good, the band was no good, and that there was no future to this thing. It was hard. There was a time there when it was embarrassing to say the Wallflowers were playing."

On Thursday, Jakob is in a suite on the top floor of the Alexandria Hotel, in ancient relic from glory days which is now filled with transients and single men. He's getting ready to have his photo taken (a necessary evil that he is learning to accept). But compromise is unavoidable. A hairstylist looks at his self cut hair and starts chopping at it. Jakob turns and sees me writing in my notebook. "You can't write about this," he insists. "You can't write about the grooming."

Today he is being photographed with Jewel. He says he likes her music and that he thinks she's doing pretty well. Yet, when she arrives, he greets her politely but keeps well apart. When she stubs her toe on the bathroom door and breaks off a nail, he refuses to become a part of the absurd drama. The photo session grinds to a halt. Several doctors are consulted over phone. Two paramedics arrive, which is probably more medical attention than any of the other hotel guests would be likely to get should they encounter similar-or even worse-tragedies. (There is talk of a tetanus shot.)

Jakob, meanwhile, remains distant and aloof, wandering around the huge hotel floor on his own, self-absorbed. T-Bone says that if you want a clue to understanding Jakob's character you can see it plainly enough in the video "One Headlight": The action is happening around him. He appears to make no concession of it. "If you look at videos these days, all these entertainers are begging for love," he says. "There mugging, over acting, saying 'Love me!' Jakob has never begged. He doesn't do that. He's very strong and firm. He just lets the guy take the picture.

While Jewel is recovering, Jakob poses for a few solo shots. Afterwards, he hovers over the polaraids of himself: They are beautiful. "You got me," he tells the photographer, politely, encouragingly, knowing that the session will only finish when the photographer is satisfied that he's gotten the shot he wants. "That's it. You really got me there."

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