Say this much for Jakob Dylan: the guy’s got balls. It’s one thing to pursue a career in music, a profession with a 90 percent failure rate; it’s another thing when your father is Bob Dylan, whose musical career is the gold standard by which all others are judged. And it’s another thing altogether to bounce back from the failure of your first LP, but Dylan seized his second chance, assembling a new lineup of his roots-rock band, the Wallflowers, and writing the biggest song of his career, “One Headlight.”
Dylan, the Wallflowers’ sole constant member over the decades, is the youngest of the four children born to Bob Dylan and his first wife, the former Sara Lownds, previously an actress and model. The couple met in early 1964, while Dylan was still romantically involved with folksinger and activist Joan Baez, and Lownds is cited by historians and critics as the subject of many of the songs Dylan wrote and recorded during their 12-year marriage, culminating in 1975’s masterful Blood on the Tracks, the unsparing account of their relationship’s disintegration.
Jakob Dylan is no nepo baby, however. After forming the Wallflowers in Los Angeles in 1989, he took great pains to avoid discussing his upbringing with the press, routinely deflecting questions about his relationship with his father and even going six years before using the word “dad” in an interview. Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2000, Dylan compared his decision to write and perform to joining any other family business: “How many sons and daughters do exactly what their parents did? I wanted the sound of amps turning on; I wanted to see cables run across my living room. I loved the way the bus felt. It had been there since I was small. The only way to keep it was to do it myself.”
Dylan founded the Wallflowers (originally dubbed the Apples) with childhood friend Tobi Miller on guitar. Bassist Barrie Maguire, keyboardist Rami Jaffee and drummer Peter Yanowitz completed the original lineup, which quickly became a fixture at Sunset Strip venues including the Whisky a Go Go, Gazzarri’s and the Viper Room. Andrew Slater, the Wallflowers’ manager (and later the president of Capitol Records), passed along their demo to Virgin Records, which released the band’s self-titled debut LP in 1992. The Wallflowers is a dense, moody album, indebted to traditional influences like folk and blues; Dylan is the sole credited writer on 11 of its 12 tracks, and his whiskey-and-cigarettes baritone combines with the record’s backwards-looking production ethos to conjure memories of The Basement Tapes, the classic collection of material recorded by his father and members of the Band in Woodstock, N.Y. during the summer of 1967. Reviews of the album were encouraging, but The Wallflowers sold only about 40,000 copies, and in mid-1993 Virgin cut ties with the group.
The Wallflowers immediately returned to playing L.A. club dates, and in the year it took to secure another record deal, both Maguire and Yanowitz exited the lineup. Bassist Greg Richling was eventually installed on bass, but the Wallflowers were still sans drummer when Interscope Records signed the group in early 1994. T-Bone Burnett agreed to produce their next album, Bringing Down the Horse: Burnett, the studio wizard who previously guided classic albums including Los Lobos’ How Will the Wolf Survive? and Elvis Costello’s King of America — and who later produced the Grammy-winning soundtrack and score for the Coen Brothers film O Brother, Where Art Thou? — played guitar on Bob Dylan’s celebrated Rolling Thunder Revue tours of 1975 and 1976, and met the younger Dylan when Jakob was just three years old. “I thought he was making a courageous choice to go into music, you know, in the wake of his father,” Burnett told The Washington Post in 2021. “I loved that he didn’t sing with affectations. Because we all grow up singing, and we learn tricks that we like that this singer did or that singer did — you know, a yodel here, a break there. And sometimes those are all right… but at the end of the day, it’s storytelling. And I think Jakob is a very good, pure storyteller.”
Days after the Bringing Down the Horse sessions commenced, Tobi Miller quit the Wallflowers for undisclosed reasons, reducing the core roster to Dylan, bassist Richling and keyboardist Jaffee. Filling the void were session drummer Matt Chamberlain and a rotating cast of guitarists including Mike Campbell (of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers renown) as well as Michael Ward, who went on to join the Wallflowers on a permanent basis. But Miller’s guitar and backing vocals are still present on the final mix of “One Headlight,” a song Dylan composed in the studio. It captures his hopes and anxieties in the midst of what was surely a make-or-break opportunity for the Wallflowers — maybe even for his future as a professional musician. “I wasn’t feeling like there was much support outside the group putting together the record,” Dylan explained to the Wisconsin State Journal in 1997. “In the chorus, it says, ‘C’mon, try a little.’ I didn’t need everything to get through, I could still get through — meaning ‘one headlight.’ The song’s meaning is all in the first verse. It’s about the death of ideas. The first verse says ‘The death of the long broken arm of human law.’ At times, it seems like there should be a code among human beings that is about respect and appreciation.”
“One Headlight” owes much in sound and spirit to Bruce Springsteen — who, it should be said, owes much in sound and spirit to Bob Dylan: in fact, Jakob’s lyrics invoke two different Springsteen songs, “Independence Day” (“She said ‘It’s cold/It feels like Independence Day/And I can’t break away from this parade’”) and “One Step Up” (“I turn the engine, but the engine doesn’t turn”). Reminiscing about “One Headlight” to Billboard in 2021, Dylan also namechecked influences like swamp-boogie maestros Leon Russell and Dr. John; see if you can hear their echoes when you break down “One Headlight” here in KORD. “We felt epic, we felt like taking these songs and putting them on a huge landscape,” Dylan recalled. “We weren’t in a mind frame of any sort of format or anything. We based a lot of the groove and the organ on [iconic soul singer Al Green]. He was one of our favorites, and still is, and wasn’t someone being talked about a lot. I thought there was certainly a place for that type of feeling and mood on the radio. But I felt strong. I wasn’t defeated in any sense. I felt challenged, and I thought it was a good challenge.”
The Wallflowers spent roughly two years completing Bringing Down the Horse, finally releasing the album on Interscope on May 21, 1996. The first single, “6th Avenue Heartache” — a song written by Dylan when he was only 18 years old — arrived complete with a music video directed by David Fincher, fresh off his Hollywood feature breakthrough, the serial-killer thriller Se7en. “6th Avenue Heartache,” which featured backing vocals from Counting Crows’ Adam Duritz, reached number 33 on the Billboard Hot 100 and netted a pair of Grammy nominations; from there, the Wallflowers toured in support of Sheryl Crow ahead of a string of headlining dates timed to coincide with the Jan. 27, 1997 release of the “One Headlight” single, which did not chart on the Billboard Hot 100 due to a technicality but reached number one on all three of the trade publication’s rock airplay charts: Modern Rock Tracks, Mainstream Rock Songs chart and Adult Alternative Songs. The latter chart, first published by Billboard on Jan. 20, 1996 as a feature in Billboard sister publication Airplay Monitor, spotlights radio’s so-called AAA format — a melting pot of fringe-dwelling mainstream rock and pop whose playlists encompass everything from indie rock to folk to alternative country. “One Headlight” so eloquently summarizes the AAA-programming feng shui that it topped Billboard’s Greatest of All Time Adult Alternative Songs chart in 2021.
“One Headlight” went on to win Best Rock Song and Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group at the 40th Annual Grammy Awards; in addition, Springsteen joined the Wallflowers to perform the song live at the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards, where it was nominated in four categories, including Viewer’s Choice. Bringing Down the Horse ultimately reached number four on the Billboard 200 and sold more than four million copies, and while the Wallflowers never again matched its success, “One Headlight” remains beloved by many, including those who grew up with the song. “The best Dylan song is One Headlight,” Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner tweeted in 2021, a year after it was prominently featured in the feature comedy The King of Staten Island, a “semi-biographical” riff on the life of Saturday Night Live star Pete Davidson, whose father was a New York City firefighter who died in service during the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. “[‘One Headlight’] was very popular when Pete was young, and he would listen to it in the car with his dad all the time,” the film’s director, Judd Apatow, told Variety. “It is a very special song to him.”
It’s still special to Jakob Dylan, too. “Some [Wallflowers] songs, you can’t believe how quick I’ll hit that dial and move on, but I’ve certainly been out and have heard [‘One Headlight’] come on the radio or in a bar, and I’m continually impressed by the sound of the record and how alive it sounds and how it still sounds like it’s a breathing thing,” he told Billboard in 2021. “I can still listen to it and say, ‘Damn, that was pretty fucking good.’”
One Headlight (KORD-0026)
