The Confessions of Jakob Dylan: A Wallflower’s Coming Out
Jakob Dylan cannot recall the first time he saw the movie Don’t Look Back or how many times he’s seen it. “I just remember always knowing about it — it’s the ultimate family photograph,” he says of D.A. Pennebaker’s gripping all-access chronicle of the 1965 British concert tour by Jakob’s father, Bob Dylan. “On one hand, it’s the greatest rock documentary going. On the other hand, that’s one of my parents when he was younger than me.” The elder Dylan was just shy of his twenty-fourth birthday when Pennebaker caught him riding the lightning of celebrity. Jakob, now a successful singer-songwriter in his own right with the Wallflowers, turned thirty last year.
“What’s interesting,” he continues, “is watching the rules being written right then. That was the moment rock stopped being cute.”
Jakob is sipping coffee in the sepulchral lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel in New York. He looks dressed for labor: plain black pants, heavy brown shoes, a blue denim jacket buttoned to the top. He also arrives with his guard up, wearing jet-black sunglasses that make him look like a warrior insect. But when he eventually takes the glasses off, his ocean-blue eyes shine with a keen pride as he talks about the surreal electricity of the backstage and press-interview scenes in Don’t Look Back — and how the movie captures his dad in the act of creating a new brand of self-empowered rock stardom.
“You can imagine how docile everything was before that, how appreciative you had to be, as an artist, just to be anywhere,” Jakob says. “Those reporters were guys who had no idea what was going on. Somebody had to come along and have the insight and the balls to say, ‘None of this means anything. We don’t have to work hand in hand here. My job doesn’t depend on being appreciated by you people.’ ”
Two nights later, Jakob is nearly drowning in cute. He and the Wallflowers — keyboardist Rami Jaffee, bassist Greg Richling, guitarist Michael Ward and drummer Mario Calire — are at MTV’s Times Square studios taping an episode of First Listen, a breezy cross between a focus group and Total Request Live in which hit acts premiere hot product by playing live and answering questions from a studio audience. The Wallflowers are here to promote their new album, Breach — the follow-up to their 1996 breakthrough, Bringing Down the Horse, which has sold 6 million copies worldwide — and they coolly kick ‘n’ roll through two of the record’s most biting numbers, “Sleepwalker” and “Hand Me Down.”
The queries from VJ Brian McFayden and the eighty young fans in the studio are cheerful softballs, mostly about influences and the four years between records. Jakob responds with an almost paternal geniality, a quiet directness leavened with dry humor. There is also a palpable awkwardness in his delivery, the discomfort of peddling intimate work in a light setting. When McFayden remarks that the new album seems very personal, Jakob flinches for a moment. “I thought the last record was very personal,” he says, then recovers, flashing a showbiz grin. “I guess it didn’t come across.”
The best part about the show is that the entire two-hour taping goes by without either the host or anyone in the audience mentioning the name Bob Dylan. “It’s nice to be in a position where it’s about our group, our music,” Richling says later with blatant relief. Otherwise, the whole exercise is like Don’t Look Back never happened.
“His history doesn’t depend on any of the things mine does,” Jakob admits, referring to his father, a few hours before the taping. In conversation – at least in front of a tape recorder — Jakob never says the name Bob or uses the words my father or my dad. It’s always the elliptical third-person: he, his, him.
“The position that generation gets to hold, whether it’s him or Neil Young or Willie Nelson or Al Green — they get to do whatever they want,” Jakob continues. “If they want to dabble in the world I deal with, they can. Maybe it’s interesting to them to peek in once in a while. But it can’t hurt them. They’ve lasted. They’ve made it through.
“I’m very envious,” Jakob says without embarrassment. “My job consists of different things that weren’t around when they established themselves. You know what groups like mine go through. You can say no. But I want to allow myself the same chance everybody else gets — to put the music forward.