There’s this song on The Wallflowers’ commercial breakthrough album Bringing down the Horse called “Bleeders.” Actually, as an unrelated note, I think it would have made a better choice of single than “The Difference.”
Anyway, more along my point, in this song, Jakob Dylan seems to, in a way, address the fact of the complication stemming from being the son of Bob Dylan, the prominent all-time folk musician. Initially, in this song, Dylan sings “Once upon a time / They called me the bleeder”, evidently detailing somewhat of a level of spite and/or ill will leveld at him by his cohorts. Interestingly, the chorus possesses the apparent, general paean to melancholy and plangent artistic expression of “I did the best I could I guess / But everything just bleeds”, to the explicate the problem a little further, in the final verse, with “Sometimes I must confess / I do feel a little overdressed / Sometimes it’s hard to tell the wishing from the well / Where you threw the penny and where it fell”.
Now, in this last stanza, he seems to be particularly addressing the malady, or complication, if you will, of being Bob Dylan’s son, and so, in a way, never really actually knowing what a “normal” childhood would be like. And of course, I can hear the clamored cliches right away in my mind… “Oh who would bit** about being Bob Dylan’s son and being rich”… “Oh there’s no such thing as a ‘normal’ childhood.” Whether or not this is the case, I think, it’s pertinent to at least to put yourself in this guy’s shoes and ask a couple of questions, or at least, pontificate on a couple of extenuating circumstances surrounding the prepackaged, fabricated indictment of him as “privileged” or the beneficiary of “nepotism,” which is favoritism based on blood relation or some similar kinship.
For one thing, the guy just seems to be emotional as He**… I mean, he’s a human being. Just listen to the very first verse on the album, in “One Headlight”: “So long ago I can’t remember when / That’s when they say I lost my only friend / They said she died easy of a broken-heart disease / As I listen through the cemetery trees”. We’re talking, here, as it were, about a particularly potent concoction of melancholy, possibly even more powerful, or on an acuter level, than the Smashing Pumpkins album of the same name a year before, though I don’t know that it matters, obviously. The second song has the term “heartache” in the title. The third song is “Bleeders” and then we get into divinity and live, functional morality on “Three Marlenas,” a gorgeous radio rock song which seems to gently nudge at the notion of the immaculate conscience, as if it’s more pleasing of an entity to digest in the ephemeral than in the corporeal or tactile. “Invisible City,” then, is a stalwart, melancholy folk rock dirge and all over this album, you won’t even find an ode to a love interest, although this was kind of an unwritten “punk” rule that a lot of the alt-rock bands like Fastball, The Mighty Mighty Bosstones and Marcy Playground seemed to adopt (Third Eye Blind and Everclear staunchly notwithstanding).
But more along my point, the guy is not singing about going on cruises, vacationing in Cancun or rubbing shoulders with Joan Baez. In other words, in no measurable or obvious way is he actually USING his elevated sociological status to his advantage, within his art, unless you count the fact that he pretty much had an unlimited studio budget with which to record Horse, a process which apparently spanned several years.
Well, you could give a million dollars to lots of people and they’d fail even to belt out a spirited rendition of “The Bear Went over the Mountain,” I’m sure. I mean, what is the sound of nepotism? It would be lack of creativity, perhaps: I have to admit I’ve never cared for the solo material of Albert Hammond Jr.; but then, as lead guitarist of The Strokes, he was an absolute shark. Anyway, at least on Bringing down the Horse, an album full of gorgeous Hammond organs (correspondent to T Bone Burnett’s excellent production work), lilting steel guitar and endlessly interesting, suspenseful and brilliant chord progressions, the ideas are in no short supply. I’d even go so far as to say the sense of isolation, introspection and attention to detail on gems like “One Headlight”; “Three Marlenas” and “Invisible City” earmark an accumulation of hurt and struggle PARTICULAR to being Bob Dylan’s son, as if his predicament of leading such a high-profile upbringing and adolenscence has imbued to him a mental and emotional landscape so alien to the masses that artistic expression, by its way, is mandated.
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