He’s Cool With the Family Legacy

Jakob Dylan was so guarded about his family history when he formed the Wallflowers in 1990 that he went six years before mentioning the word “dad” in an interview.

It’s a sign of how much the times have changed in Dylan’s world that now--5 million album sales later--Jakob refers to his famous father, Bob Dylan, within the first seven minutes of an interview about his band’s new album.

“I had to wait for things to line up in my life,” he says about the anxiety of following in the senior Dylan’s musical footsteps. “Most people don’t go out when they are 21 with no record sales, nothing on the radio, no video being played . . . and still have people wanting to interview them. I was always aware that there was no story to talk about except my family, and that made me uncomfortable.”

The younger Dylan isn’t exploiting any family secrets as he sits in a West Hollywood office before an afternoon rehearsal with his band, but he’s finally comfortable with who he is--and he understands how some of his family history may be relevant to better understanding him as a songwriter.

That’s no small adjustment--considering that his notoriously private father is enough of a pop culture giant to be chosen, along with the likes of Albert Einstein and John Lennon, to have his image plastered on the sides of buildings in Apple’s “Think different” ad campaign.

Jakob Dylan was right years ago. He had no story if you took away the family ties. The Wallflowers’ first album was released by Virgin Records in 1992 during the heart of the aggressive grunge era. There wasn’t much interest in a new group that was aligned with the melodic sweep and lyric consciousness of classic ‘60s rock. The self-titled collection sold only about 40,000 copies.

But the band’s fortunes took a dramatic turn with the 1996 release of its second album, “Bringing Down the Horse.” The success of Counting Crows had renewed radio programmers’ interest in a classic rock sound, and the Wallflowers’ album was filled with songs that echoed that period, including the richly appealing “One Headlight.”

MTV fell in love with the band, which had moved to Interscope Records, and the album sold more than 4 million copies in the U.S. Jakob Dylan was suddenly on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, and he won two Grammys (for best rock song and rock group performance) on the same night in 1997 that his father’s “Time Out of Mind” was named album of the year.

Jakob Dylan knew by this time that he was finally worth a story himself. More important, he also began shedding his defensiveness as a writer.

“When I look back at ‘Bringing Down the Horse,’ I see that a lot of the songs were very cloudy,” says Dylan, 30. “I was censoring myself a lot. If anyone was looking for any kind of clues or anything interesting [about my background], I didn’t want them to be there.

“With this album, I wanted to move forward. With the songwriters I’ve always admired, I felt like I had got to know them through their records--and I realized that if I don’t start [revealing] more of myself, no one is going to have an idea of who I am.”

The result is “Breach,” a more personal and introspective work that’s due in stores Oct. 10. Dylan told some engaging stories in “Bringing Down the Horse,” but he chiefly crafted songs that drew from the territory outlined years ago by such celebrated artists as Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, Van Morrison and his father.

In the best of the new songs, Dylan moves forward in winning fashion. He writes about a musician’s alienation--the dehumanizing demands of constant touring (“Letters From the Wasteland”) and the disorienting sensation of fame (“Sleepwalker”).

Even better, in “Hand Me Down” he outlines the struggles of dealing with the extraordinary expectations of following in his famous father’s footsteps. The song begins with the taunting lines “Now tell me what you were thinking of / How could you think you would be enough?”

You can understand the sting of those lines when Dylan explains how he used to walk on stage during the early days of the Wallflowers and have people request his father’s songs or tell him afterward how much they love his father’s music.

But there’s no real bitterness in the song or in Dylan’s manner. In fact, one senses he is pleased to finally be able to talk about his family in interviews. By not commenting on his family, he may have led some observers to believe there was a distance or tension in the relationship. He is, it turns out, a loving son.

“The funny thing is I get asked every once in a while why I didn’t choose a stage name . . . so I could avoid all the comparisons,” Dylan says. “But I saw it as a fruitless effort to change my name or pretend I’m not who I am because it could lead to a bigger incident. People would ask, ‘Why are you denying it?’ And the truth is I am very proud of my heritage. It’s nothing to run from. The only thing I ask is to be taken at face value, and I feel that is starting to happen.”

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One thing you learn after years of scheduling interviews with rock musicians is to block out hours in the late afternoon or evening for your meeting. That’s the time of choice for most of them. In their world, noon is the equivalent of sunrise in ours. So it’s surprising when Dylan’s representative asks how early you can meet with him. He is normally up by 7, she explains.

“I have kids,” he says with a smile in his manager’s West Hollywood office, when asked about his early schedule .

“If I don’t get up early when I’m working, I don’t get to see them at all. When I was writing songs for this album, I rented a little studio real close to my house. I would take my older son to school and then run back up to the studio.”

If you didn’t know better, you’d think Dylan was an actor or a model. He is quiet and self-assured in an unassuming way, and would probably be rejected by casting directors as too handsome to play his father in a film, though his rugged good looks would make him a natural for the big screen.

But he says he has no interest in movies. ‘It’s flattering when people approach me about acting, but I wouldn’t know the first thing about being in a movie,” he says, with a shrug. “I can barely get through my videos.”

Many rock musicians work hard during interviews to convince you they are as exotic as their images. Dylan is quick to apologize for being too boring.

The words you hear over and over from those who work with him are “well-adjusted,” “centered,” “loyal” and “normal.” You hear the testimony from the people who work closest with him, including Wallflowers bassist Greg Richling, who has known him since high school.

Apart from his music, his life seems to revolve around his family. Dylan and his wife, actress Paige Dylan, have three children, the latest of whom was born this month. They recently moved from a home in the Hollywood Hills to a five-bedroom place in Brentwood.

He’s even written a song about a parent’s love for his children--”Babybird,” a hidden track at the end of the new album. Although the more quotable “Hand Me Down” is going to get the most attention, “Babybird” may be the most revealing track on the album, because it can be seen as his “Forever Young,” the Bob Dylan song that was reportedly inspired by Jakob’s birth.

“This is the kind of song I would have censored in the past because I would have told myself that people are going to draw the connection to ‘Forever Young,’ and I didn’t want to deal with it.

“The song is my subtle way of turning the table on things at the end of the record,” he says. “I operate so much under the connection people make of my family, and this song is kind of pushing things forward. It’s like a letter to my wife and children.”

One also senses in the song a tip of the hat to his own parents.

“I know people have this image of how rough it is growing up in a famous family,” Dylan says. “But it really didn’t seem that big a deal at the time. I had friends. I had a home. I had a family.

“Dealing with [the attention] was just one other thing to learn. Just as you learned to look both ways when you cross the street, you knew that when you went up to bat at Little League, I realized that people in the stands were quieter than they were when other kids came up and you expected to see a camera.

“The idea of ‘fame’ wasn’t an issue in the house. There weren’t gold records on the walls or displays of magazine covers. It was irrelevant. What was going on in the house was infinitely more important--and closer to the truth than what was going on outside. I was always aware of that.”

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Jakob Dylan was born in New York in 1969, the youngest of Bob Dylan and Sara Lowndes’ five children. He was around 3 when the family moved to Los Angeles, where he spent a good amount of time with both parents after they divorced in 1977.

Jakob says his first memory of music was seeing his father on stage in front of 20,000 people during the whirlwind 1974 reunion tour with the Band. The rest of his musical education was more intimate.

“I didn’t really know what kids my age were listening to one way or the other because we didn’t play the radio around my house as kids,” he recalls, sitting on a sofa near a giant U.S. map--a reminder of the hundreds of shows he played in support of “Bringing Down the Horse.”

“I found the music that was played around the house very daunting. . . . Very old, dusty kind of records and music that were often terrifying. . . . The music of Lightnin’ Hopkins and Hank Williams. This music was not just for entertainment. It was for learning.”

While intrigued by the old records, the youngster felt intimidated about bringing new music around the house because he thought his father would dismiss it as too fluffy. It wasn’t until the early ‘80s that he found a contemporary band with the spirit of those old records.

“The Clash were both popular with other kids and still had something valuable to say,” Jakob says. “When Dad took us to see them at the Santa Monica Civic, I took it as vindication that I was right about the band. That’s when I first asked for my own electric guitar.”

The teenager was soon searching out other musicians to play with, and heading down a road that he now sees as inevitable. Yet he was anxious about the pressures that he would face in the music business, and he made one dramatic attempt to sidestep them.

Shortly after high school, he headed to New York to enroll in the Parsons School of Design. “I just wanted to see if there was anything else for me . . . something that was more powerful to me than making music,” Dylan says. “But I knew right away that art wasn’t my future.

Rather than ask his folks for fancy equipment, he made his own way.

Andy Slater, who manages the Wallflowers as well as Fiona Apple and Macy Gray, met Dylan during the struggling days in 1990, and he was impressed by the youngster’s determination and independence.

“It was always obvious to me that Jake was someone who wasn’t interested in making it on his family name,” says Slater in a separate interview. “When I first met him, he was playing in this dingy, rented rehearsal studio with this crummy equipment.

“And he maintained that attitude all through that period. Even after the first record came out, when he could have used a boost, he refused to compromise. He wouldn’t let the record company or club owners use his name in ads. They could only use the band’s name.

“I remember him playing this small town somewhere, and Jake was furious because the club owner put up a sign that said, ‘The Wallflowers Featuring Jakob Dylan.’ I had to get on the phone to the agent to get it taken down--and we’re talking about a club that could only hold 100 people. But it was a matter of principle.”

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It’s tempting to think the success of “Bringing Down the Horse” was the climax of the Jakob Dylan story--all those sales, all those awards, all those dreams come true. But Dylan was drained and confused when he got home from almost three years of touring in 1998.

He had imagined that all that success would make him feel validated and lift his self-esteem. But the insecurities remained.

“The song ‘Hand Me Down’ is partially about that,” he says. “There’s some tail-between-the-legs feeling there. If all this wouldn’t make me feel validated, then maybe I needed to see a therapist or something.”

Dylan ended up using his songwriting as his therapy. He realized he hadn’t found himself yet as a writer. The easy thing would have been to try to duplicate the successful sound of “6th Avenue Heartache” and the other songs on the second album. But his favorite artists had always moved forward. In a test of his artistic fiber, he poured the insecurities and frustrations into the songs.

The question now is how the rock audience will adjust to the increased depth in his work. Things have changed since “Bringing Down the Horse.” Rock stations have turned once more to a harder, more aggressive sound, and pop stations are leaning toward novelty tracks. So where does that leave the Wallflowers’ classic stylings?

“I’m not in the business of having delusions,” Dylan says when asked if he expects to duplicate the sales of the last album. “Most people get that once, maybe twice during their entire career. Some of the biggest artists don’t get to do that ever again and yet they are around for 30 years.”

Jeff Pollack, a programming consultant for more than 100 radio stations and MTV, thinks radio’s response to the album will be positive. “The [tone] at rock radio may be toward hard rock, but I think the Wallflowers album and the U2 album are both arriving at a good time. There’s always a need for intelligent lyrics and strong melodic sensibilities. It’s a way for stations to complement what is dominating their formats--a way to extend their potential audience.”

Tom Whalley, president of Interscope Records, is also optimistic about the album and is impressed by Dylan’s growth as a songwriter. “He has made a great step forward, addressing issues he would not have addressed before and giving us a record that feels ‘complete.’ That’s rare at a time when so many albums are just built around one or two tracks. This shows he and the Wallflowers are long-term artists.”

Before leaving for rehearsal with the rest of the band--keyboardist Rami Jaffee, bassist Richling, guitarist Michael Ward and drummer Mario Calire--Dylan pauses, as if to put everything into perspective. He’s a student of rock history. He knows more than his father’s story. He was fascinated with Peter Guralnick’s two-volume biography of Elvis Presley and the tragedy surrounding Presley’s dramatic decline.

“The truth is I’ve got quality problems and I realize it,” he says. “And you can deal with them if you’re surrounded with good people and if you were taught the right things. Besides, nothing that happens to me is going to seem that extreme in some ways. Selling a lot of records and being on magazines are great achievements, but not really that impressive, considering what I’ve been around.”

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Robert Hilburn, The Times’ pop music critic, can be reached atrobert.hilburn@latimes.com.