BLOOD ON THE TRACKS

Dylan’s smile was one of poise and peace, of coming to terms with the fact that the world will always will be about the father, even when it should be about the son.

Last Tuesday, Dylan, 38, released “Seeing Things,” his first solo album. The longtime ringleader of the Wallflowers, he has enjoyed considerable success in the past decade or so. But the new album is probably his best work, certainly his most graceful, with imagery — of grown-up love and grasshoppers on a country road, but also of darkness and war — achieved only by gifted storytellers.

Dylan suggested his own headlines, that included “Another Side of Jakob Dylan,” a modern take on his father’s 1964 album, “Another Side of Bob Dylan.”

For 45 years, Bob Dylan’s fans have walked a fine line between devoted and obsessive. One piece of that fascination — to both artists’ chagrin — has long focused on Jakob Dylan, the only Dylan child who elected to become a recording artist. He was somehow elected chairman of the Child Musicians Who Could Never Live Up to Their Fathers Association.

Jakob Dylan, all along, maintained that he had no aspiration to match his father’s stature. Some still couldn’t get past the idea that the seminal album “Blood on the Tracks” was effectively a conversation between Jakob Dylan’s parents, that “Forever Young” was written, reportedly, for him.

Jakob Dylan began using “he” and “him,” not “my father”; even now, the official biography that accompanies his new album does not mention that he is Bob Dylan’s son. The Wallflowers built a following in Los Angeles in the late 1980s. Its second album, “Bringing Down the Horse” helped fuel a resurgence in post-grunge modern rock. It won two Grammys and has sold more than 5 million copies.

Three more albums — “Breach” in 2000, “Red Letter Days” in 2002 and “Rebel, Sweetheart” in 2005 — engendered a more uneven response.

The band, meanwhile, went through 10 members largely, Dylan concedes, because he “may not be that easy to work with.”

The band has never broken up; it is scheduled to play a slew of shows this year. But Dylan was searching for something new and began to find it not long after the release of “Rebel, Sweetheart,” when he agreed to open a series of concerts for T-Bone Burnett, the songwriter, an old friend.”

Dylan played short sets to open for Burnett; he had nothing but the Wallflowers catalogue to play but tapped into a bit of magic by reinterpreting the songs as solo acoustic numbers. He began to write a collection of often beautiful songs — some about the horrors of war, many laced with elements of traditional folk music — that eventually would become “Seeing Things.” “These were the sounds I wanted to hear coming out of my speakers,” Dylan said. That simple sound would be captured through a convoluted series of events.

Dylan signed with Columbia Records and the newly appointed Rubin — one of the most successful producers of his generation — elected to record the album at his home. One of his signatures is boiling an artist down to his or her essence, as he did with Johnny Cash’s recordings in the last years of the legend’s life.“I don’t listen to music by genre. I just like good music,” Rubin said. “And these are good songs presented in an honest way. And maybe for the first time, you really get to feel Jakob. It’s a pure expression of him.”
-Scott Gold (LATWP)