His own man

10.7.00 By Mick Brown for Telegraph.co.uk

For a man desperate to mark himself apart from his father, Jakob Dylan couldn't have chosen a worse career. Now, after 12 years in the music business and an album that outsold any single one of Bob's, he talks about the importance of finally becoming... Interview by Mick Brown

THERE is a song on the new album, Breach, by the American rock band the Wallflowers in which the group's leader, singer and songwriter Jakob Dylan, makes a rare venture into the field of autobiography.

Jakob: has succeeded in stepping out of the shadow of the fatherEntitled Hand Me Down, the song deals with the subject of how hard it can be to live up to expectations. You won't ever amount to much, you won't be anyone, the song begins, adding, with a sardonic twist worthy of another singer-songwriter of an earlier generation, Now look at you, with your worn out shoes/ Living proof evolution is through/ We're stuck with you/ This revolution is doomed.

'It's been suggested that song's a very blunt take on what people think of me,' says Jakob Dylan. 'And it's true, there's pieces of that in there, but it's not all of it.'

So it would be right to describe it as a song about getting out from under the shadow of something? 'Yes and no... ' Jakob shifts in his chair. 'Something like that.'

Back in the Sixties, long before his son was born, the young Bob Dylan virtually wrote the book on how to deal with media interviews, goading and ducking journalists - whom he has always loathed - with a potent mixture of obfuscation, evasive word-play and monumental scorn.

Faced with the problem of fielding questions on growing up with - in his own words - 'one of the most influential minds of the 20th century', Jakob Dylan has refined an altogether different but no less effective strategy.

He pours you another cup of coffee (he is inordinately polite and considerate), smiles shyly, apologises in the nicest possible way ('please don't get me wrong, I'm not down on the press at all') and says something which you sense he has said many, many times before.

Very often the questions people ask aren't really about me, they're a way to find out things about my father. And they know that for 35 years he's been incredibly private, and I'm not going to be the loophole in that and suddenly start talking about everything.'

It is, of course - and Jakob realises this - the thing that everybody wants to know; that everybody has always wanted to know. And it's also the thing - for God's sake, give the kid a break - which in a peculiar way you least want to raise, because nobody wants to be known for who their father is.

Indeed, so pregnant is this subject that you are a full half an hour into conversation before the words 'father' or 'Bob' are even mentioned.

This, it must be said, is a predicament that nowadays presents itself less often in Jakob Dylan's life.

Having determined to follow in the footsteps of probably the hardest act that anybody could choose to follow, the son has succeeded in stepping out of the shadow of the father. The Wallflowers' last album, Bringing Down the Horse, released in 1996, has sold some four million copies - incredibly, more than any single album by Bob Dylan. And in 1998, a track from that album, One Headlight, won Jakob his first Grammy, for best rock song - ironically in the same year his father was awarded one for album of the year for his 27th recording, Time Out of Mind.

The first thing to be said about Jakob Dylan's music is that it in no way resembles his father's. The Wallflowers play a strong, melodic rock, replete with catchy riffs and heavy on guitar and keyboards, which owe more to Bruce Springsteen (himself once hailed as 'the new Dylan') and Elvis Costello than anything in the elder Dylan's work. Nor is there any similarity in the singing voice: the son having a deeper, warmer and more rounded tone than the father.

But if musically Jakob bears no resemblance to his father, physically he most certainly does.

When Jakob walks into the lounge bar of the Four Seasons hotel in New York, black shirt, black jeans, curly black hair, the physical resemblance is immediately striking; the same wiry figure and slightly hunched posture. The younger Dylan is fuller-faced, with a sensual look which has made him a poster-star with American record-buyers. But there is another, more striking difference. By the age of 30, which Jakob Dylan is now, his father was almost permanently shielded behind dark glasses, the better, it seemed, to conceal his soul and keep the rest of the world at bay. Jakob Dylan's piercing blue eyes stare out with a steady, confident gaze, if, it has to be said, a rather tired one. The truth is, he is exhausted. For the past week he has been flying on an almost daily basis between New York, where he has been appearing on an MTV awards show and doing promotion work, and his home in Los Angeles, where his wife has just given birth to their third child, a son.

On this, as on almost everything to do with his family or personal life, Jakob Dylan is politely but firmly circumspect. Yes, he is thrilled to be a father again. But he would be grateful if I didn't print the name of the baby, or the names and ages of his two other children, or indeed anything about them.

'It will just make their lives a little easier.'

Jakob, of course, is speaking from experience.

His mother is Sara Lowndes, 'Scorpio Sphinx in a calico dress', as Bob Dylan would describe her in one song, Sara, and the inspiration for any number of others, including Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.

Dylan and Sara separated after 12 years of marriage when Jakob, their third child, was seven, amid allegations by Sara that Dylan had struck her on the face. There followed an acrimonious custody battle, in which Sara attempted to move the children to Hawaii, and Dylan won a court order for them to remain in California.

Jakob refuses to discuss any of this. But growing up in California, divorce was hardly uncommon among his peers, and whatever differences his parents might have had were buried for the sake of the children. 'Marriage was a failure,' Bob Dylan once remarked. 'Husband and wife was a failure, but father and mother wasn't a failure.'

'It's a question I get asked all the time,' Jakob once said.

' "What was your dad like as a parent?" And I say, I'm not a crackhead; I don't go on afternoon talk shows and spill. I mean, you can probably figure it out for yourself that he did a decent job.'

He moved freely between both parents, living in his mother's house in Beverly Hills but seeing his father whenever he wanted to and often joining him on tour. (When I mention that I interviewed Dylan in Spain in 1984 he retorts, 'I was there.')

Like any Jewish boy, he took his bar mitzvah at the age of 13 - around the time his father was beginning to distance himself from the evangelical Christianity he had espoused on his albums Slow Train Coming and Saved (the elder Dylan attended the ceremony). But when the question of religion is raised Jakob politely declines any comment. 'I am Jewish, and that's what's there.'

Whatever the myths around his father and his work, the young Dylan remained happily insulated from them. 'I mean, it's like anybody's parents; they've got a job and you know what that job is. Your dad's a mechanic and that's what you know - he works on cars. The rest of the stuff, how he does that and what happens every day you just don't know. And I was fine with that. I didn't need to know.'
As to the matter of being Bob Dylan's son, that was something else. His parents were always careful to shield him from any unwarranted attention. If he was in a public place with his father and a photographer appeared he would cross the street, stand next to somebody else. 'It was instinct. My picture was not to be in magazines. It was unsaid. I understood.'

To be nothing more than anonymous was, for a long time, his greatest ambition. But there were always enough people around to remind him he was Bob Dylan's son - the stares from other parents when the Spokesman of a Generation turned up to watch him playing in junior school baseball games - even in those rare moments when he was able to forget it himself. 'I think feeling self-conscious is what happens when you're a kid. But it gets amplified when you're 10 years old and you just want to play with your friends and suddenly the grown-ups are talking to you for unknown reasons, and you're aware of people watching you.

'Even at that age you're aware that you just want to play, you just want to fit in; you don't want to be noticed.'

So there was never a time when he felt impelled to declare, I'm Bob Dylan's son?

'Absolutely not.'

And side-stepping the question became second nature?

'Absolutely... But the truth is, when you're a kid some grown-ups can be very rude. I always found that when somebody asked me out of the blue, "What's your dad's name", well, I figured they already knew, but they want to hear me say it. So if you're going to be rude enough to ask me what you already know, I'm going to say, "It's Hank."' He laughs.

'Adults can be incredibly cruel to kids in that way. They're caught up in their own moment, and they have no idea how detrimental that stuff can be to a kid who just wants to be left alone and is having a hard enough time just being 11.

'A lot of people in a similar position to me maybe used that to gain some advantage in their life. But I wasn't raised to do that. I didn't get into a limousine probably until I was doing my own record deals, and I won't go in them any more. So on the inside I felt normal - I'll say average; but I don't think it was possible to be unnoticed in those situations. And in a lot of ways that doesn't ever really go away.'

He grew up listening to his father's music. 'I'd been on tour since I was little. I knew all the songs. But when you're six years old it's the melodies you fixate on. And they weren't more special to me than other songs out there at that time; I just happened to know all those ones. But as I got older I started to figure out the worth of them... ' Jakob smiles. 'And people tell me they're very good.'

They are more than that, of course, as he well knows. And, as he also knows, in a sense they are pieces of his own history. The songs of domestic bliss on Nashville Skyline were written and recorded immediately before Jakob was born, and the songs of emotional pain on Blood on the Tracks chronicle his parents' growing estrangement. They are, as Jakob has acknowledged, 'my parents talking'. But, he says, he has never been inclined to listen to those or any of his father's records to look for answers. 'I think songs are separate. Maybe some of them are relevant, but there's all kinds of reasons to be doing art, to write songs.' And as to whether Forever Young was written for him, as legend has it, the simple answer, he says, is that he has never asked.

Nor was his father's music particularly influential in shaping his own tastes. Every generation has its own heroes: Bob Dylan's were folk and blues singers such as Woody Guthrie and Blind Willie McTell.

The young Dylan was more influenced by the music filtering down from his elder brothers, mostly English rock from the post-punk era - the Jam, Elvis Costello and, in particular, the Clash.

'I think there's a real need for any 12-year-old to discover their own music - something that's their little secret.

'And when the records that are being played in your house are like dusty old records with the needle flying off that sounds like a 900-year-old man in a cornfield, music's kind of terrifying. But I found a connection when I first started listening to the Clash, because they knew that kind of music too. They weren't just kids who'd picked up an electric guitar in the Seventies and started imitating Marc Bolan or something.

'I just wanted to know how they got so damn good. Who did they listen to? What were their influences? So you just follow those paths. And it was different from people just colouring their hair and jumping around and begging for the camera to love them.' He got his first electric guitar at the age of 12, bought a leather jacket and tried to sculpt his hair into a pompadour, like the Clash's lead singer Joe Strummer, 'although I didn't have the right hair for it'.

He knew he wanted to be in a group, not a solo performer like his father had been. 'Because I liked the gang mentality that some of those groups had, and I've always wanted to be surrounded by that sort of camaraderie.'

His brothers and sister are all, as he puts it, 'civilians': Jesse is a video-director; Sam a photographer; Anna an artist; and Maria a lawyer. None of them was encouraged to follow their father into music. 'But I don't think he tried to dissuade me more than any other conscientious parent would have done. It's a ridiculous job. It's 99.999 per cent fruitless and ineffective. It's ruthless. It's emotionally damaging to a lot of people; they invest their whole lives in it and that becomes what the measure of their self-worth is, and they never realise there's other parts of life. And even if you are successful, how long does that last? People write nasty things about you. It's nothing you'd want your kids to get into. But the act of being interested in the arts was certainly never discouraged in my family.'

At school, the only thing he wanted to do was play music. He was, by his own admission, a woeful student, who was moved from public school (the American equivalent of state school) to private education in a futile attempt to improve his academic performance. 'I tried. I wasn't a pain in the ass. Just a C plus, just to be average. That's all I wanted. But I just couldn't figure it out.'

At the age of 18 he left home for New York, to enrol at the Parsons School of Design, with the thought of studying painting. 'I was just praying it would be interesting to me, but it wasn't.' Within three weeks he had dropped out, and after a spell living in Greenwich Village he returned to LA and started putting together the first version of the Wallflowers.

'I wasn't making any money, but I didn't need any, because all you're doing is playing in your mother's garage and collecting egg-crates as soundproofing. I had the guys I'd started the band with and there was food in the house. I didn't want to get a job - no 18-year-old wants to get a job. But at the same time I'd just dropped out of college and it would have been rude to ask for any kind of assistance to be a slacker.'
For three years the group rehearsed, wrote songs and played in any club in LA that would have them. In 1992, they signed to Virgin and released their debut record, but it was a commercial failure and the group were dropped. Looking back, Jakob argues that the record was less a failure on its own terms - it sold 40,000 copies, a reasonable amount for any other group of unknowns - than a failure of expectations engendered by the name Dylan.
'That's all it was. And people were very disappointed when that itself didn't light a fire for people.'

Accounts of the band at this early stage suggest that Jakob was 'paralysed by the dad thing', and did all he could to avoid the connection being known. (The Wallflowers' keyboards player, Rami Jaffee, once said that he had been playing with Jakob for two months before he realised who his father was. 'Didn't seem like it was necessary,' Jakob is said to have replied when Jaffee asked him why he'd never mentioned it.)

Looking back now, Jakob says that he always imagined that he would be able to make a record and somehow remain invisible, 'which is pretty stupid when you think about it'. Hoping that it could milk the family name in interviews, the record company was disappointed when Jakob refused to play along.
'I never had any plans to do that. Firstly, it was a matter of dignity; and secondly, it's not the kind of attention you want. You want to be noticed for your abilities. You don't want to be noticed for who you just happen to be, and which you're not responsible for.

'So if you take away the thing I didn't want to talk about, there was nothing to talk about. I also found it in some way to be an invasion of privacy. Asking what's it like growing up with Bob Dylan, did Eric Clapton hang out at my house... this is none of my business to be talking about these things, and never was.'

Jakob's recalcitrance gave him a reputation for being arrogant and difficult. 'The truth is, I was just quiet and just wanted to learn how to be in a band and tour, the same as everybody else does.'

It would be a further eight months before the Wallflowers signed another recording contract and in 1996 they recorded a second album, Bringing Down the Horse.

Still refusing to trade on the family name, Jakob and the band worked their passage across America. Over the course of 18 months, the group went from playing clubs for a few hundred people to arenas with a few thousand. By 1998, the album had sold four million copies. 'What that did more than anything was lead me to believe that I was right, that there were people out there who don't really care where I'm from, or my lineage or legacy. You don't sell that many records to people because of who your father is.'

By the middle of 1998, Jakob was exhausted. He went home and spent the next six months 'living a life again, so I could have something to write about'.

While the Wallflowers' first two albums dealt with themes broad enough to disguise any suggestion of autobiography, Breach is positively confessional, its songs reflecting questions of self-identity, the need to be recognised on your terms, the mixed blessings of success.

'I wanted to write stuff that I really cared about; not just stories and entertainment stuff. And some of the songs are a bit of a reaction to where you end up.

'I mean, I love my job and have a great time with it, but it's kind of an illusion for a lot of people starting out that if you can be what is considered "successful" publicly, that's the answer to your life. You have those euphoric moments when you feel you're being heard and listened to, and that's excellent. But as far as your life personally being enhanced in any grand way, I don't know if that kind of success is necessarily the answer.'

He pauses and laughs. 'But obviously a lot of older people have known that for a long time... '

In fact, he seems to view his current position with a bemused detachment; the Grammy awards, the modelling shoots for Armani, the fuss and attention - all seem to have left his head gratifyingly unturned. 'That whole big fur coat, love the success, live your life in front of other people thing - I wasn't raised that way and it doesn't seem attractive to me now,' he says crisply.

He does his work. He goes home to his family. He and his wife, Paige, were childhood sweethearts. 'I think we still are.' They married when he was 23. 'That's kinda how I wanted things. I didn't envision running around the world and doing things. I'm kinda simple that way.'

So he always wanted a feeling of security?

'Yeah, the world's as big as the block you live on, and I like to keep it small. I have the same friends I've had since I was 11 years old; haven't really made any new ones.'

He sees his father 'as much as in any family that gets along' - and that's as much as he'll say about that. Yes, he watches his father perform when he can, and his father sometimes watches him. As to what the elder Dylan thinks of his son's music, he says, 'You'll have to ask him that. But I think he's relieved things have worked out for me so far, as any responsible parent would be.'

The artists he has always admired - the kind of artist, you sense, he would like to be - have always had a life beyond fashion. He has seen enough of the music business to know how ephemeral success may be. 'But I don't plan on this being temporary. The ultimate criterion for me is to continue: to be able to do it for a long time, finding a way to be relevant and to have something a certain number of people want to follow you through your life with.'

Like Bob Dylan, perhaps?

But Jakob wouldn't say that. Whatever his father has achieved, he says, is unique. 'He's in an exceptional position, and always has been. I don't think anybody could follow that, and nor should they attempt to. And for me, whatever I do I wouldn't put it in the same realm at all. But it's not necessary to do that.'

So what does he think is the most valuable thing he has learnt from his father's career?

'He's proved you can do whatever the hell you want to do.' No matter, he might have added, who your father might be.

* 'Breach' is released on Pal Interscope on October 9