JAKOB'S LADDER

6.12.97 By Gerry Hirshey for Rolling Stone

THEIR FRONTMAN IS THE SON OF ROCK'S POET LAUREATE, THEIR FIRST ALBUM WAS A ROYAL FLOP, AND THEIR RETURN WAS GREETED WITH INDIFFERENCE BY THE MUSIC INDUSTRY. AND YET, THE WALLFLOWERS HAVE PERSEVERED, CLIMBING THEIR WAY TO THE TOP TEN AND GRAMMY NOMINATIONS. NOW, AFTER A LONG, STONY SILENCE, JAKOB DYLAN TELLS US HOW IT FEELS.

Some have come here for the grabby, impressionist lyrics. Others are finding poetry in the lead singer's eyes.

"Go get 'em, Jake!"

"Wallflowers rule!"

Tonight the dance floor at Boston's Avalon Ballroom scans 20s - and the crowd is very vocal. It's a mixed bag: practical Polartec, flannel remnants, preening clusters of this week's Stussy shirts. Along the stage apron, pale-painted lips mouth lyrics just burnished double platinum. The Wallflowers' Bringing Down the Horse has been a bit slow out of the gate, released last May and breaking the Top 10 just this March. That'll happen to a "new" band like the one Jakob Dylan has been fronting and retooling for more than half a decade. He has been singing the album's first hit single, "6th Avenue Heartache," since 1991.

"Hi. I'm Jakob...uhhh...Seger!"

The reference to elder rocker Bob Seger is a wee joke, aimed perhaps at the pair of graying, bearded gents in Grateful Dead T-shirts who have slipped in amid the kids to sneak a peek at Bob Dylan's boy. Such 60's ghosts used to materialize in greater numbers at earlier Wallflowers' gigs, bleating through their sweet hemp clouds, "Play 'All Along the Watchtower,' man!" But much of tonight's audience has no idea who Jakob's father is; everyone I've talked to couldn't care less: Bob Dylan's just a guy in my social-studies book.

"Jaaaaaykob!"

So handsome, with those sharp Armani shoulders, the startling, Samoyed-blue eyes, that cool, funky hat destined to become a video talisman... "Jaaaaaykob! Tell it!"

What the recordmen don't know, the little girls understand. Jakob Dylan is a young man of certain passion, singing his own words with a shy, fitful intensity that seems, sometimes to take him out and above this big, hot room. It's not the raspy, unremarkable voice so much as the delivery that draws them, some strain of the ageless troubadour DNA that goosed vestal virgins in the shadows of Stonehenge. It moved singer Sam Phillips, wife of songwriter and producer T-Bone Burnett, to pull the Wallflowers' tape out of the pile of petitioning demos sent to her husband, drop it into the deck and tell T-Bone, "Listen. This guy's dead honest."

T-Bone heard it, too, something cleaner, more astringent than the self-pitying wallows that have gushed forth post-grunge. Burnett, a respected musician who had barnstormed with Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue in '75, knew Jakob as a child, but had never heard his adult voice. The songs needed work; the band hadn't quite jelled. But Burnett agreed to produce the Wallflowers because he heard three or four real, big, honest-to-God *songs* in there - and, damn, the kid was no complainer. "I don't believe Jakob ever begs for love," Burnett has told me. "He doesn't do all those unattractive things that so many of our current crop of stars do - whine and beg for love at the camera. Or do vocal tricks. He just tells the truth really straight."

"Alone tonight in somebody's bed/she's gone and dyed her hair red..."

Jakob is painting the dusky tableau that opens "Three Marlenas" a bit briskly tonight. He's already sweating through his trademark black shirt, speeding to get his set in before the ballroom turns into a house-music pumpkin. "That's right, ladies and gentlemen," he says, "this place becomes a disco at exactly 10." Already, an aggrieved-looking DJ is fussing around the booth.

"It just kills the rock bands!" Jakob lectures, mock seriously. "We're a dying breed. Make a call to your city council."

Some nights, Jakob doesn't talk at all onstage, but right now he's working up to an uncharacteristic rant. He and the band are bone tired in the midst of a merciless string of one-nighters, and just a bit sick, this evening, of the tyranny of commerce. Club management has been adamant about getting the group on and off ASAP. Nevermind that last night the Wallflowers were at Madison Square Garden as double-Grammy nominees, that Bringing Down the Horse is about to spin off it's third single, "The Difference" (following the hits "6th Avenue Heartache" and "One Headlight"). Just last week in Montreal, Beatle-like screaming broke out in the crowd every time Jakob stepped to the mike. After the show, hundreds waited in a raging snowstorm just to see the band leave.

"Tonight is a sobering reminder: Even boys with a bullet get those disco-night blues. But the Wallflowers are all loose and laughing onstage, still not believing their current good fortune. This is a five-man band that came together only after Bringing Down was recorded in 1994-95 with a shifting cast of studiomen and special guests (including Adam Duritz of Counting Crows, Mike Campbell of Tom Petty's Heartbreakers, and, yes, Sam Phillips). It wasn't so long ago that the Wallflowers learned to play the songs from the record together in rehearsal halls and on the road. They figured out how to be a band while opening for Chris Isaak (Hey, we're the Wallflowers, and look for our album in...five months!") They're still washing their own socks, still need to cram everything - equipment, luggage, egos - into one groaning, generic tour bus. Luxury is a midnight carton of Hunan bean curd delivered to the hissing bus door.

By any standards, it has been a grueling apprenticeship. But they asked for it. When Interscope Records' Tom Whalley negotiated the Wallflowers' contract, he was surprised by the precise calculation of the guaranteed tour support that their manager, Andy Slater, insisted on. Slater seemed to know exactly the number of weeks to keep the Wallflowers on the road, to let the MTV kids see them live and unpixilated, to feel the sweat fall on their Doc Martens. "I give Jake credit for not getting *out there* - tv and all - too early," says Whalley. "He stayed out, getting the band real tight. It's one of the smartest things they've done."

So far, the worst side effects are the circles beneath the frontman's eyes. This, Jakob explains, is a result of insomnia brought on by chronic back problems - made worse by the narrow, Spartan bunks on the bus. "So it hurts," he says, shrugging. "I'll live."

We don't want to wax too seriously scriptural here, but didn't the Jacob of Genesis 28 - in exile over birthright issues - lay his head on a pillow of stone and dream of a ladder to heaven? And wasn't his 20 year odyssey home necessitated by a troublesome blessing from his kingly father, Issac? True, a beer-and-urine stinking dressing room in Raleigh, NC, may not be the rocky plains of Paddan-Aram. And, surely, rising chart positions aren't always the stairways to salvation. But *this* Jakob has long found refuge in the nomadic life, has cast his lot with small but loyal tribes in mall-studded hinterlands. In the strangest places, he's encountered kids with T-shirts from the band's earliest incarnation.

"The one thing that's always worked for us is the road," Jakob says over and over. It's tried them, honed them, sustained them - barely. But just now, racing the clock like this when, damn it, you've finally got *fans*, kids who want more...

"*Disco sucks*" bellows a husky partisan in a Bruins jersey. A lacy, burgundy-colored bra floats onstage, then - *thunk* - a yellowed, dogeared paperback copy of Lolita lands at the scuffed toes of Jakob's black brogans. He looks puzzled, a bit concerned. How could anyone out there guess his fondness for Nabokov? Could they possibly know that he can read a page of the old reprobate's lush prose and see a half-dozen songs fly out of it? Round midnight, sitting in the darkened back lounge of the Wallflowers' rolling bus, Jakob Dylan will wonder aloud: "Where are they getting their information? How?"

At bottom, this is a story about the freedoms and tyrannies of *knowing*. About how Information is transmitted, instinctively, from father to son. From songwriter to listener. From public myth to private memory, and back. This is where, after years of resolute silence, Jakob Dylan has begun to decide which parts of his remarkable childhood are his to discuss. He must wrestle with how best to present himself without disrespecting his father's 30-year insistence on privacy. Until now, throughout scores of maddeningly oblique interviews, Jakob points out, "You won't find one where I've said the words *my dad*."

He will say now that Dad was dead set against this whole thing. Bob Dylan feared for his youngest child, whose birth (in 1969), it's long been rumored, moved him to write the lovely classic "Forever Young." In advising against a rock & roll life, the wily revolutionary sounded like a concerned parent: *Why this? It's a terrible life, a disposable job. You could get kicked around.*

Hadn't his father given him the necessary Information? Hadn't he shown all five of his children first-hand the rigors and hoodoo of the road? They all came out with him for years - beautiful, long-lashed children playing tag amid the amps. They felt the road's brutal toll when their parents' marriage crashed and burned. Only Jakob went back out - alone. And for seven years, in an anonymous knit cap, he plied the teeming wilderness of Los Angeles like any demo-toting pilgrim, playing in garages, delis and dives, refusing to identify himself to club owners, forbidding promoters to mention...*Him*. Breaking this almost ritual silence will prove a hard go, requiring several long conversations in several cities. Every now and then, with the Sony snapped off and amiable small talk warming the room, Jakob will lean over, half-apologetic, with a blurted disclaimer: "Look, do I think people are curious about growing up with one of the most influential minds of the 20th century? Of course I do. Am I confident I can get it right? Shit, no." He knows he's negotiating this in the midst of perilous times: the Information Age. He winces when the most unflattering fan-snapped candids of his weary late-night mug whiz through laser printers and get tacked to teen walls. He's not thrilled that his most convoluted early lyrics are readily downloadable.

Worse, the family demons have sprouted world-wide wings. A media trickster who used to sign himself the Scavenger, notorious since the late 60's as Bob Dylan's longtime scourge, has now added a web site to his obsessional ouvre. Information - true or imagined - is the favored cudgel of a man so craven that he invented celebrity "garbology," raiding the metal trash cans outside the Greenwich Village house Jakob was born into, in New York. The Scavenger became the ubiquitous jackal of MacDougal Street, terrorizing Jakob's mother, Sara, and the older children, organizing group howls beneath the family's windows at night, rummaging in the bins to make off with loving notes from the children's grandma. Public, publishable information, he claims.

And now, like some howling ancestral curse, he has descended, fangs dripping, upon the son. The Scavenger has boasted that he rooted through Jakob's soiled Pampers. And a quarter-century later, he tosses up more alleged flotsam of that infancy, online, offering photo negatives of Bob feeding his baby boy a bottle, pouring venomous supposition into tracts he calls "Analysis of Jakob Dylan's Poetry."

Such are the boons and burdens of celebrity birthright. Is it any wonder, then, that when Jakob's seventh-grade class turned to the section in the social-studies book on the 60's, where his father's face and name came up beside those of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Beatles, the shy, skinny Dylan boy asked for the bathroom key and disappeared? For so long, everybody had their information. And very little of it matched Jakob's.

"The notion of any myth about my father, all that curiosity...that stuff existed outside my house," Jakob is saying. "We didn't really hear a lot of that information. Looking back on it, I think it is pretty surprising that we didn't feel it more."

Whatever the picture we outsiders had, nobody seems ready to believe that Jakob could have turned out...normal. He says, "I get asked all the time, 'What was your dad like as a parent?' And I say, 'I'm 27 years old; I'm not a crackhead; I don't go on afternoon talk shows and spill.' I mean, you can probably figure out that he did a decent job."

We are sitting in a chilly, glaringly lit sideroom at the Avalon. Jakob has begun by warning me of his miserable media rap sheet. He says that at his first record label - Virgin, which produced "The Wallflowers", their debut album, in 1992 - and with much of the press, he has had a reputation as an uncooperative, close-mouthed, brooding pain in the butt. Even now he looks well-shuttered: hands jammed into the bulky green Army-type jacket, knit cap pulled down to his eyebrows.

Jakob says he is ready to talk because, "Now I actually have a job. I have something to stand on." He also has a family (his wife, Paige, and their toddler son), a muscular, cohesive band, an enviable chart position (No. 4 at this writing), 22 performable songs of his own, more works in progress, the two Grammy nominations (both for 6th Avenue Heartache) and at least a half dozen chattering-fan Web sites.

Famous fans surface daily. Giorgio Armani keeps sending Jakob clothes, inviting the band to glittering soirees. Jim Carrey is twisting his Flubber face into Jakob impersonations on MTV; Howard Stern elicited a command performance from the Wallflowers for his vaunted favorite-bands birthday bash. Bookers for Letterman, Leno, Saturday Night Live, Rosie O'Donnell and Jenny McCarthy just gotta have Jake.

Out on the road, stars have begun to twinkle at VIP tables and in walk-ons. In February, when the Wallflowers opened for Sheryl Crow at Manhattan's Roseland, Carly Simon skipped onstage to duet with Jakob on "You're So Vain." The night's all-star encore (including Crow and Emmylou Harris) offer one goose-bump moment for those of us in the critics' corner creaky enough to recall the Dylan/Band tours. It came when a silver-haired Levon Helm, the Band's drummer of legend, ambled out with a mandolin and traded verses on his classic "The Weight" with the Dylan boy he had known as a toddler. And this was a small, affecting torch-passing that drew roars from the sold-out, oxygen-deprived congregation - including Bruce Springsteen, who sat in the dark clapping and shaking his head.

After seven years, it seems to Jakob that an awful lot has happened in a scant few months. Just hours ago he was in Manhattan as a slightly dazed Grammy nominee. As a presenter, he'd had a deer-in-the-headlights air about him. But today, having failed to bring home the hardware, he's downright cheerful. He says he doesn't mind losing, because he was so surprised just to get nominated. And later, when the Wallflowers hit the record-company parties around town, all the Suits - the ones who wouldn't even let their secretaries return manager Andy Slater's calls two years ago - were glad-handing like mad.

Looking back, Jakob realizes that there was enough to mark him as a plague carrier in a very skittish industry: "Not only did my group have a reputation for being difficult, we had a [first] record out there that commercially stiffed. That was odd. A person in my position putting out a record that stiffs? It must have really been a piece of crap. We sold 40,000 or something. I was not unique to anybody anymore. I was a joke."

At Virgin, the bottom line was no laughing matter. "I wouldn't have gone a million dollars in the hole with the Wallflowers - and that's about what it came to - if we didn't believe in Jakob," says Jeff Ayeroff, who, with his partner, Jordan Harris, signed the band to Virgin (both have since landed at Sony Music). "Jordan and I didn't expect to sell even 200,000 copies. We always felt that is was the second record that would be Jakob's breakout." Just what was the first one? "It was a good record," says Ayeroff. "But it was intended as the smudge-pot room of an Indian ritual - you know, when you fill the room with smoke to clear off the spirits."

In Jakob's case, the jinni was a monster. "The kid was freaked," says Ayeroff. "He was paralyzed by the dad thing, but clearly burning, possessed to get out and do his own."

A & R men may have the patience to wait for things to shake out. Promo men do not. As the record faltered, it was hoped that a few well-placed "son of" interviews could goose things along, but young Jake wouldn't play. "The company wasn't sympathetic to the fact that there was just no damned story at that time," Jakob says. "What are we going to talk about - my string of hits? I'd say 'If it doesn't bother you too much, I'd rather not talk to Hard Copy.' Then I got perceived as kind of a jerk."

Dylan's kid. Feisty as the old man, too good to make nice around the office and at radio stations. Jakob says he was simply too damned scared. He'd made the record when he was 21, and he went out on tour soon afterward. Though he'd been on the road with musicians of legend before he could say "highway 61," he had no idea how to do it in a band. He was still so unsure of his own rhythm-guitar playing that he trained those pale-blue eyes on his fretwork instead of on the paying customers.

His Garbo act wore thin with management. And, once his protectors Ayeroff and Harris left Virgin, Jakob realized that he hadn't bothered to make any other allies up and down the corridors. "All the flak I got at Virgin was that I wasn't friendly enough," he says. "And I guess I wasn't. I wanted to be left alone."

He says the split with the label was mutual but that it was generally perceived that the Wallflowers had been dropped. All around L. A., other musicians offered their sympathies, with Cheshire-cat smiles. "My friends were saying, 'Aw, you guys are over,'" Wallflowers keyboard player Rami Jaffee told me. Jaffee kept his jobs delivering pizza and playing the odd gig with L. A. underground personality El Vez, the Mexican Elvis. Other band personnel came and went, impatient with the Wallflowers' tenuous fortunes. Jakob, who had tried art school for four months after high school, hadn't gone to college and had no other job skills, kept at the only work he knew. "I never felt defeated by it," he says. "It was almost comforting at that point. I spent a year putting this group back together, writing more songs." During the worst of it, Jakob was not about to complain to Dad. "He was one of the original people to get screwed in this business, to win again, get screwed again," says Jakob. "It's not like I can say, 'No, you don't understand.' Most kids can say that when their dad's a farmer and they want to race motorcycles. That was never available to me."

So, like many restless American sons, Jakob says, "I went ahead and did it. I knew his information was right. I knew that it was a bad idea. It's obviously a good time now, and I really like doing it. But I was aware of stepping into the fire."

He laughs, then reminds me that there have always been signs that Bob Dylan considered the singer/songwriter mode a stinko way to earn a living: "It's a job he's tried to get out of many times, if you look back - in '66." Jakob is referring to his father's infamous motorcycle accident. Squabbling Dylanologists have put forth countless theories on the severity (or lack) of Dylan's injuries. But the point, says Jakob, is that Dylan needed out. Bad. Here is the information his son took from it: "It's a ruthless job. It's a job no sane person really wants. He tried to get out of it when he was on top of the world. After his accident he didn't tour for eight years. He was obviously drawn back because of the music. And once you get a certain age, you have trades you know how to do. That's how you're going to support yourself."

Not that Jakob has ever seen his father capitulate or do anything...conventional. Take Bob Dylan's current work mode, for example. Though he is wealthy, his children grown, though he is sitting on a song catalog that could wipe out a sizeable chunk of Third World debt, Bob is back on the road in a very low-key way. All spring, father and son criss-crossed the country separately, playing modest venues: college auditoriums, civic centers, local festivals. One notable divergence: The April night that the Wallflowers were beamed to 57 million homes across the country on the VH1 Honors show, Bob Dylan was turning up at the University of New Hampshire, in tiny Durham. "He just likes to play," says Jakob. "He's out there. He'd rather keep it simple."

As this story went to press, both Dylans had just played the Beale Street Music Festival, in Memphis, Tenn., on the same weekend (though on different nights) in early May. This does not mean that they're passing one another in different directions up or down that ladder. If you think so, Jakob warns, you are guilty of a foolish cultural myopia that has long plagued this country: We don't know what to make of artists who have the audacity to outlive their own revolutions.

"They want you to give it up fast, and crash and burn," says Jakob. "It's no joke. Everybody knows the best way to be a legend is just die. Elvis, James Brown, my dad - they didn't lose it. I don't believe you lose it. But people don't know what to do with you."

Nor have we developed any protocol for addressing the sons of American legends. Certainly that birthright qualifies one for the tabloid and a guaranteed place in the paparazzis' cross hairs. But it won't necessarily buy you a record deal. Given the stakes these days, even the most short-sighted quick-buck A & R types are apt to growl: Where the hell is Julian Lennon? Chynna Phillips? Interscope's Whalley says that he gave the Wallflowers extra-harsh scrutiny before he signed them, in 1994. "The Dylan name was widely perceived as a negative," he says. "There were so many eyes on him. If he couldn't live up to other people's expectations, it could be a real disaster."

Jakob had felt the pressure long before other industry men voiced their doubts. "Absolutely, I think the name worked against me," Jakob says. "And I actually found some kind of power in that. I still do. I do not mope, and I do not complain. I've driven my own path here, and I'm on it, and it's fine. But if people think it must be easy..."

He is laughing again, wondering aloud why so few people seem curious about his album's title. "That's what it felt like for three years trying to make this damned thing," he says. "It was like trying to pull down a horse." As the Avalon's disco ball starts turning, the guitars are being handed down the narrow aisle of the Wallflowers' bus amid no small chaos. Outside, in the mammoth shadow of Fenway Park, patchouli-scented clusters of self-proclaimed Flowerheads - lots of little girls in big, clunky shoes - surround the band's unmarked motorcoach.

"What's going on in the bus..." Jakob is telling me, "we'd kind of rather you didn't see it."

He stands, rubbing scarlet lipstick off his cheek. Hungrily, he scrutinizes the evening's rider - that ubiquitous tray of cold cuts, spongy bread, chips and salsa. As Jakob slaps together a sandwich, Rami Jaffee leans over to whisper: "I mean, maybe you don't have to report all this...*deep weirdness*."

I can see his point. There is nothing more damaging to a band's image than the substance lurking in an aluminum pan on the counter. It's kugel, aka Jewish noodle pudding. Sweet, tasty and possessing a specific gravity rivaling those of the heaviest elements - plutonium comes to mind - tonight's dose has been cooked up by Jaffee's cousin, who lives nearby. Aunts, uncles and cousins are crammed into the lounge, urging band members to take hits off the tray.

"Eat! You're too skinny, Jake!"

The Wallflowers won't be voted World's Most Dangerous Band. Jaffee's lovely, leggy wife, Alicia, is on board. She is pregnant with their first child, and keyboard paternity leave has been arranged for August. Jaffee, who plays the Hammond B3 organ and piano, is the only long-term Wallflower, dating back to Jakob's days playing the Kibutz Room at Canter's Deli, in L. A. Jaffee's friendship is a mighty anchor; his keyboards bring well-placed leavening to the rootsy, lyric-hugging arrangements and the live act.

Ascetic lead guitarist Michael Ward is the band's Mystic Figure. He's so unobtrusive, he nearly drifts into the wings sometimes, a man as polite and self-contained as his riffs are sharp and aggressive. Ward signed on with the stipulation that an extra bunk be reserved for his traveling companion, a sleek, curvaceous racing bike. His true devotion shows - Ward is a compact, ergonomic wonder, hairless but for a chin wisp, with leg muscles you could bounce a quarter off. He does up to sixty miles a day between gigs, often leaving a hotel at dawn to meet up with his band mates down the road.

Greg Richling went to high school with Jakob; they jammed together in friends' garages but went their separate ways until a few years back, when the revamping Wallflowers were combing L. A. for a bass player. Tall, gangly Mario Calire summons amazing grace behind his drum kit. He has been playing since second grade, often jamming with his rock-musician father, who, like the most exacting sports dad, would let the kid sit in with better and better players to see if he could keep pace. Calire lives with his parents, still has the curling lashes and untroubled brow of a Titan archangel. Tonight he looks a bit stunned when a vacuum-packed blonde climbs onstage, coaxes the mike from Jakob and introduces the drummer breathily: "Maaahh-rio. Ooh!"

As the bus rumbles through closely shuttered Boston, Jaffee, Richling and I repair to the back lounge. Jakob has dragged a quilt up front and burrowed beneath it; only a few black curls are visible in the passing flicker of interstate lamps. He's asleep within seconds.

"Jake loves playing music; he likes writing songs," Richling is saying. "No one wants to believe that it's that simple." This Richling knows from the days he and Jakob attended the Windward school, in Los Angeles. The Dylan kids were living in Beverly Hills with their mother. And for a while, the coolest place to mess around with music was at their friend Eric Grossman's house. There would come, bony, tousle-headed, 15-year-old Jakob, straddling his amp-on-wheels and riding it downhill two blocks to the Grossmans'. Eric had the ultimate drum kit, a zillion pieces, with lights and whistles hanging off it. These were boys who came up going to Clash shows, who thrilled to the torn clothes, the physicality - the blood! - of a full-bore rave-up. Jake had a sweaty vest of Joe Strummer's fixed up in a frame... As the night deepens, Jaffee and Richling, both Angelenos, work up a funky pastiche of the music scene there in the late '80's - goofy days, when hair-metal bands caused a run on Final Net spray, people really said "duuuuude," and Millie the White House dog was writing a best seller. Few kids knew the lyrics to any of Jake's dad's songs, but they could recite all of surfer/slacker Jeff Spicoli's lines from Fast Times At Ridgemont High. Life was very...Spicoli. And that was light-years away from the '60's urban crucible - all espresso, grit and tear gas - that produced Bob Dylan's early work.

The smell of chicken fat suffused the Kibutz Room when Jakob, Rami and the boys played there. Teen spirit, too, in pungent drive-by whiffs of thrift-shop flannels, Mountain Dew and musk. Though L. A. may be known as the land of garage bands, practicing at home was problematic in precision-groomed neighborhoods where security signs bloomed among the bougainvillea. Jakob and his friends collected egg cartons from supermarkets and tacked them to walls to blunt the noise. Real rehearsal space was too expensive; in clubs it was the overcrowded era of "pay to play." As in: "You wanna spot? Sell $800 worth of tickets to your friends and you got it." Jakob says he didn't have enough friends to sell tickets to. And he'd never dream of asking his parents for cash to rent rehearsal space or buy equipment. It wasn't like asking for college money. The Wallflowers found sanctuary in the hillside basement of an photographer named Ivy, a laissez-faire Hollywood eccentric whose house backed the infamous Whiskey on Sunset and featured a bunkerlike room. And there was the Coconut Teazer, a simpatico club farther east on the strip where they could play without paying. Some nights, by his own admission, Jakob would chicken out. Last minute, he'd call the band and tell them, "You sing. Tell some jokes. I can't do it."

Continued....