Few names in popular music carry as much weight of expectation as Bob Dylan.
Jakob Dylan, the youngest son of Bob and Sara, is well acquainted with the weight of his family name. As the lead singer/songwriter for the Wallflowers, he has conscientiously sought to distance his band from the complications of an inherited reputation, or the “fame that stops and starts,” as his father put it in a song 18 years ago.
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Last year the Wallflowers released their eponymously titled debut to critical acclaim but modest sales, a feat that placed the 23-year-old Dylan squarely in the old man’s company, ironically enough.
After half a year of touring as the opening band for 10,000 Maniacs and the Spin Doctors, the Wallflowers are now touring in a series of concerts in which they get the billing.
“It’s going really well,” Dylan says. “This is what it takes if you want your band to be taken for its own merits. . . . You have to crank it out and keep going.”
The current Wallflowers lineup includes Dylan on piano and guitar, Rami Jaffee on Hammond organ, Peter Yanowitz on drums, Tobi Miller on guitar and ex-Momma Stud bassist Jimmy Snyder subbing for the recently sacked Barrie Maguire.
Lyrically, the band occupies a space far removed from the elder Dylan’s landscape of jesters, sword swallowers, visionaries and slow trains. Jakob’s lyrics are dark, elliptical vignettes.
Asked if the Wallflowers shared a common sensibility with bands such as the Black Crowes and the Spin Doctors, Dylan was quick to discount it.
“I don’t see any lineage to that kind of stuff; I don’t feel any connection to other bands,” Dylan says, adding that he wouldn’t place the Wallflowers on any musical continuum. “I don’t notice what we’re doing or what I’m doing as a `thing.’ It just seems natural for us to do it or for me to do it.”