Don't Look Back
By Anthony DeCurtis, Unlimited Magazine

Jakob Dylan is strolling through his manager's Beverly Hills office when an assistant stops him in the corridor and hands him a letter that had arrived in his name. Dylan opens it and looks at it curiously-- there's a card, and a couple of sheets of notepaper covered with writing. "Is this fan mail?" he asks, as he scans the pages. He leafs through for a few more seconds, then hands the letter back to the assistant and begins to walk away. "I don't know what this is, " he says off-handedly. "I saw Bob's name in there-- I didn't see mine."

Evidently there are some things that even an album in the Top 10, two hit singles, and a couple of Grammy nominations can't erase. Not that the 27-year-old Dylan, whose band, the Wallflowers, has been one of the biggest rock phenomena of 1997, is at all ashamed of his lineage. It's just that being Bob Dylan's son has presented him with certain complexities.

For example, when the Wallflowers released their rollicking, rough-hewn debut album, simply titled "The Wallflowers", in 1992, the media paid far more attention than the eminently modest record company warranted. And, as with the latter, the attention really wasn't about Jakob himself-- or his music.

"I did an interview yesterday," Dylan says, as he kicks back in an empty office, "and the guy said, 'I was looking at some reviews of your tour after the first record, and they're all unfavorable.' I said, 'Well, most bands at 21 aren't very good-- the difference with me is that critics were coming to my shows.' Normally, people don't review bands playing in Kansas that are not on the charts, not on the radio, not on MTV. There's a certain amount of power in the underdog-- you have nothing to protect you, you can go all out-- and I wasn't afforded that. At the time I got defensive, but later on I could see that we really weren't there yet. But that's not unique to us. The difference is that Rolling Stone was coming down to see me play and not my friends' bands, who weren't on the radio either."

There's no need for defensiveness this time around. On the strength of eloquent folk-rock sagas like "6th Avenue Heartache" and "One Headlight", Bringing down the Horse, the Wallflowers' second album, has fully established the younger Dylan in his own right. From being reluctant in the past to put himself forward at all, Dylan has grown used to seeing his image endlessly reproduced in music videos and on magazine covers. He has become something of a Gen-X sex symbol, with his curly brown hair, bright blue eyes, and sculpted features. If there are still some people for whom Jakob will only ever be Bob Dylan's son, their numbers are rapidly dwindling.

Asked when he knew that Bringing Down the Horse, which came out in 1996, had become an undeniable hit, Dylan laughs and says, "Probably when I, too, started turning my face off the TV set, or when I started hitting the radio dial, saying, 'Jeez, I'm sick of that song.' So it was probably right around the same time it was for everybody else." Dylan who lives and was primarily raised in Los Angeles, is the youngest of four children born to Bob Dylan and Sara Lowndes; he also has a older stepsister on his mother's side. A bitter divorce in 1977 split his parents; his mother eventually got full custody of the children. Still, Dylan very much came of age in his father's shadow. "I grew up being stared at," he says. "I always thought as a teenager that people were staring at me-- and they were. The whole idea of 'Is that person looking at me?' is not new."

Dylan formed the Wallflowers-- The name nods to one of this father's more obscure songs-- in 1989, and the band played the funkier edge of the L.A. club scene, most notably the Kibitz Room at Canter's Deli. Even then, he did not want to be the trail to his father's comet. "I never wanted help," Dylan says. "I think rock'n'roll is such a juvenile job to aspire to that you can't do it on your own abilities you just shouldn't do it."

"People can't believe that when I started out," he continues, "I didn't have a rehearsal space. I'd rehearse in one of the band member's garages or go to the shittiest space in town where nothing worked and there were rats in the room. I did that only because it didn't make any sense to me to be 18 and say, 'I don't want to go to college. Can you buy me a van, a rehearsal space, some guitars...?' That felt ridiculous. If I wanted to go to college, sure, they'd pay for that. But if I wanted to live a hippie dream and stay up all night driving aimlessly around town trying to find shows and new guitars, it was embarrassing to ask for anything. You just don't want to show your face until you get somewhere."

The Wallflowers signed with Virgin Records, but shortly after the debut album was released the problems started. Dylan refused to do any interview that didn't have to do entirely with his band and his music, much to the chagrin of his record label. Reporters who pursued a line of questioning about his father were met with shrugs, jokes, or offhand dismissals. He got a reputation for being difficult. Remind you of anyone? "Bob did his career his way and didn't let anyone else dictate the way to do it," Jakob says. "Maybe I was brought up in that type of environment."

The Wallflowers sold a mere 40,000 copies, and by mutual agreement the band and Virgin parted ways. Dylan has no regrets. "I wanted to be as successful as the next guy; I was just thinking long term," he says simply. "I knew if I did a story with People Magazine, I could get a little excitement going and sell a few records. But then that would be it. I would be a personality' the music wouldn't have any truth to it and it would go away. When you get up in the morning you want to look in the mirror and recognize yourself."

The next stage of things was hard. Dylan was perceived in the music industry as a commercial failure and worse, someone who didn't want to play ball. Other record companies showed no interest in signing him. Band members quit or were asked to leave. But that dark period was not without its hints of light.

"This band was defeated for so long," Dylan says. "Everybody told me my songs were no good and the band was no good. We were playing two nights a week and nobody was coming to see us. There are times when I still feel like that person-- it wasn't that long ago.

"But it was interesting," he continues, "because it finally got to the point where nobody had expectations of me. So even though we were beaten down, it was kind of refreshing-- all I could do was go up. I reveled in that. Maybe it took a fall to get everybody to stop watching so that I could figure out how to do this job."

Dylan wisely took his setbacks as a challenge, an opportunity for self-examination. "It forced me to work hard and bring things out of myself that I didn't know I was capable of," he says "It also made me ask myself, 'Do you really want to do this? Because you've got a long way to go now.' I could no longer just wander through it. The stakes had gotten real high. I did not want to embarrass myself around town. It was not going to be, 'Hey, there's so-and-so's kid-- he sucks.' I was not going to be that guy."

When the Wallflowers finally signed with Interscope-- "On Monday nobody wanted to talk to us; by Wednesday it was 'Write your own contract'"--Dylan completely buckled down. "I felt that this album was my shot," he says. "I made this record when I was 26 years old, and I took it seriously. There are a lot of excuses you can give somebody when you're 21-- if you're not great then, you're just not a prodigy. But when you're in your mid-20s you're not a kid anymore. Just think of all the people who were dead by the age of 27--think of Hendrix. I also thought of Bruce Springsteen--Born to Run, 26 years old. It was time to do it or not do it."

That self-imposed pressure inspired a burst of creativity. Dylan had been writing all the while he was touring and searching for a record deal, but when it came time to record, he decided that much of the material he had was just not good enough. "I needed the threat," he says. "To write songs that matter, you have to turn yourself inside out, and it's really overwhelming. I hadn't done that yet. They're ready to make the album, and I'm like, 'Oh shit-- I haven't written it yet.' In the last two weeks I wrote what I consider to be some of the strongest stuff. I wrote 'One Headlight,' 'Bleeders,' 'Josephine,' Invisible City' I wrote in the studio during the first couple of days. 'The Difference' and 'I Wish I Felt Nothing' I wrote in the studio. I probably wrote 60 percent of the record with two weeks to go."

The confidence that we would have another chance to prove himself also enabled Dylan to address some feelings he hadn't recognized previously. "If you listen to the album, it's all in there," he says. "Every song, fortunately or unfortunately is about feeling massively defeated, because that's what I was living."

The whirlwind experience of the past few years has lent Dylan a deeper perspective on the vagaries of the music industry and what it takes to ride out a career as a recording artist. "It only gives me strength," he says, "when I think about how I was playing this club down here, the Mint, to about 13 people, and a year and a half later there I am at the Grammys getting loved up by the same people who wouldn't even give me the damn time of day. It makes the whole thing so absurd and perverse.

I played that song '6th Avenue Heartache' every damn night in those clubs, sang it like I cared every night, and nobody would come down to see us. I had that song for my first record--the producer didn't want to record it and the record company didn't want it either. Now, it comes out and it's a big hit and everyone is like, 'Yeah, I always knew that was the song. It makes a lot of people look really silly. You just try to be aware of who's patting you on the back and why."

That attitude makes Dylan take little for granted about the future. He's still trying to do it the way it feels right. While his good looks-- and, no doubt, his marketable name-- have brought forth a raft of film offers, for example, he's not interested at the moment. "I'm fighting the acting career," he says, grinning. "Honestly, it kind of horrifies me."

So, for now, the Wallflowers are staying out on the road, and once Bringing Down the Horse runs its course, Dylan wants to get back in the studio as soon as he can. He's determined to build a body of work worthy of his name. "In the '60s people made records every seven months," Dylan says. "After five years, I have 24 songs that people might know by me-- that's not enough. I wish you could make records a lot more quickly. There are people who can. You have to make your own rules, I suppose. But I'm not in a position to do that-- yet."


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