The Second Coming:
After two solid albums, three new band members and four long years, the music business finally discovered Jakob Dylan and the Wallflowers
By Bill Flanagan, GQ, December 1996, pp. 74-75


Being in a rock-and-roll band is, statistically, a sucker's game. If you're a talented young musician with good original songs and a decent voice, you'd be better off buying a Lotto ticket than hoping that you can cut through the mountain of sleaze, business complexities and professional apathy that stands between you and a record deal. But if you should be the one band in a thousand that beats the odds and is signed to a major label—well, then you're really in trouble. Because you get only one shot at making a hit album, and it's your first shot.

Imagine if new ballplayers were required to get a hit the first time they stepped up to bat. What can a first-time musician do? You hope that the record executives like you—personally and musically—or fear your manager enough to focus their promotional muscle on your album at the expense of the other twenty they're releasing at the same time. And if that works, and you get decent reviews and can stir up some kind of club tour or bribe your way into an opening-act slot, you pray the record company has picked the right song to push to radio, and that radio picks up on it fast enough to get you a chance to have a shot at winning a crack at making an impression before next week, when the new Pearl Jam album arrives and your window of opportunity slams shut.

And if any of those cylinders don't fire perfectly and in proper sequence? Well, then you're screwed. Look at the Wallflowers. They came out of L.A. in 1992, grabbed the ear of the chief of Virgin Records America and recorded a solid first-album. The Wallflowers sold respectably, about 40,000 copies, as they did tours opening for 10,000 Maniacs, Chris Isaak, Cracker and the Spin Doctors. But when the Wallflowers got home, they found the Virgin leadership had been replaced. The new guys had other priorities. Suddenly out of a contract, the band had to go back to the clubs. No other label would come down to see them or listen to the tapes or even return their manager's phone calls, because, hey, these guys had their chance already.

The Wallflowers have one other weird wrinkle: Bandleader Jakob Dylan, 26, is one of the children of Bob Dylan. He has inherited his father's deep, weary eyes and crafty, "I know more than I'm telling" manner. Once people know he is Dylan's non, they comment on the resemblance. Cynics who had never even heard the band figured they got the first deal because of the Julian factor.

After Virgin, the Wallflowers passed a year or so back in L.A., playing a couple of nights a week at the Viper Room and the Mint. One by one, members left the group, until Dylan and keyboard player Rami Jaffee were all that remained of the original five. Conventional wisdom among record-company talent scouts a few years ago was that the rise of grunge had killed the sort of all-American Petty/Springsteen style the Wallflowers worked in. That wisdom held until late in 1994, when Counting Crows, friends of the Wallflowers with a similar sound, sold the 5 millionth copy of their debut album.

Suddenly, all the A&R men were back in the front row, slipping Dylan their business cards and telling him they loved their band. Dylan's no fool. He'd figured out the game. He signed with Interscope, the hip label that broke new acts from Nine Inch Nails to 2Pac. The Wallflowers hooked up with Counting Crows producer T-Bone Burnett, invited head Crow Adam Duritz to sing on their first single and worked hard at making a record that put Dylan's voice and songs front and center. The first Wallflowers album had been recorded to sound like a live band—a big sonic soup with all the musicians playing at the same time and at the same volume. But what sounds great in a bar can sound busy and unfocused on record. Dylan had written some fine songs; Burnett made sure they survived the journey to CD. Then, having made an album radio could love, Dylan delayed touring until the group had made a terrific video. Only then was he ready to hit the road with a 60% new Wallflowers.

It worked. Airplay for the single "6th Avenue Heartache" grew for months, while the album, Bringing Down the Horse, did a slow, steady march up the charts. Building majestically from a bed of Hammond organ and electric guitar, the single rang out of the radio with a sound that could draw in either old fans of the Band or young fans of R.E.M., as Dylan's voice, craggy but warm, sun a story of feeling inexplicably connected to a homeless man singing old rock songs on a street corner. After two albums, Jakob Dylan is writing better songs than almost all of his under-30 contemporaries do. The same kind of songs he was writing and playing just as well two years ago, when he was over.

"For about 18 months, nobody was coming to see us," Dylan says of the band's period between deals. "Nobody would pay attention; it was not happening." Then one A&R man heard a demo tape with "6th Avenue Heartache" and flew Dylan to New York for a meeting.

"Word spread like wildfire," Dylan says with a laugh. He has a young man's physical self-assurance and bears no animosity now that his free agency is over. "Within a day, the phone was ringing off the hook. By the end of that week, we played a show and had all these bigwigs looking at one another. Suddenly, they all had to have us. It was unbelievable. You didn't know if you should start to laugh or start to cry. None of it made any sense. It was the same demo tape, the same set, the same guys in the band playing the same club; we didn't get our hair styled—but suddenly everybody had to have it."

The songs selected for Bringing Down the Horse hang together to create a portrait of a city full of sleazes and hypocrites, a narrator looking for one honest person to trust and a dream of a last chance escaping the trap and making everything better. These ideas have powered rock songs from "Help" and "We Gotta Get Out Of This Place" to "Thunder Road" and "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For." The people buying the Wallflowers' album didn't need to know that Dylan was writing about being chewed up and spit out by the record business—and then begging to come back and do it again.

"I prefer not to write records that are a reflection of our treatment by a business," he says almost defensively. "But that's what we were stuck in for a couple of years. The cliches' about the Hollywood record—and, I imagine, movie—business are pretty accurate. You want to make music and play. But if you also want to make records, you have to learn a second side of it. You have to play two roles. And they contradict each other. You want to create from a pretty honest position, but the other side is you've got to go to meetings and deal with people's impressions of you. You write a song and get it the best you can, and then someone says, 'OK, now for two days you'll be an actor and act out this song in a video.' You find out there are so many different jobs."

Some of the best songs on the new album make the case that for any artist, failure or success is a crapshoot. The emotional hook of "6th Avenue Heartache" is when the singer, listening to a New York street musician singing songs to no one, realizes that there but for the grace of God goes he.

"The character in '6th Avenue Heartache' is a homeless person," Dylan explains of the song's inspiration, "which I'm obviously not. But there is more to people's lives than what your possessions are. In a lot of ways, I felt just like that person. He would wake up every day and play these songs that I knew really well, Beatles and Everly Brothers. Those were songs I wanted to play and wished I could have written. I felt some kind of connection to him even though we had drastically different lives."

Making that connection, Dylan's ability to take his specific circumstances and hone them down to a universal emotional core, is why the second Wallflowers record resonates for people with no interest in record deals, Hollywood or the politics of being in a rock group. Dylan's songs express not just what his situation is but how it feels. It turns out that a lot of people feel the same way.

This autumn, with their star rising, the Wallflowers were back on Sixth Avenue in much improved condition. The original group played New York several times during the short life of its first album, usually as an opening act. During those shows, Dylan kept his head down, did not talk much to the audience and tried to blend into the music of his band. Now he was a changed man with a changed band—hot enough to headline its own show at the Westbeth Theatre for college-age fans who probably did not know any of the Wallflowers' history. Not only was this show better, this band tighter and these songs more compelling than in the last incarnation, but playing to his own audience made Dylan a far more confident front man. He sang great, held the stage with authority and made funny asides to the crowd. At one point, he finished a song and then addressed himself to a photographer he'd spotted sneaking pictures: "I don't think you're getting all my best rock-star moves." He smiled and then proceeded to model a series of MTV poses for the camera.

In "Bleeders" he sang about "swimming up this river of sentimental fever" and his fear that he would be caught and "thrown back forever." It fit the general tone of the songs, but I didn't understand why the chorus goes, "I guess I should be ashamed."

I told Dylan I didn't get it, and he admitted it was about being perceived only as Bob Dylan's son.

"'Bleeders' is probably a little more introspective," he said. "A lot of people didn't want to believe in me. Since I started his it's been a lot of people's tendency to not want to think I'm any good. That song is directed at that. I think people expected me to lay down and roll over. People expect me to be ashamed of doing this. They assume I'm doing it for all the wrong reasons."

"Because you have a famous name?"

"Yeah, they think it's easy for me. They think I just said, 'Why not?' I wrote that song when I finally got to the place where I could make another record. I thought this band had got really good with the new people. And I thought, I've got no reason to lie down."

Now that they've come out the other side, it's easy to figure that things worked out for the best for the Wallflowers. Dreams quickly turned to dirt forced a young songwriter to get tough on himself, shook down his band and made him work harder than he might otherwise have made himself work. Oh yeah, it also gave him the raw materials from which to create one of the best rock albums of the year.

"I think of it as going through the same initiation as anybody else," Dylan says. "The business has been around a lot longer than I have. A lot of bands go through a lot worse."

It's just like your mom, your coach, and your sergeant told you: A few good whacks never killed anybody.

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