He bristled in an interview that year with the New York Times when they questioned him on his father’s parenting.

“When I was a kid he was a god to me for all the right reasons. Other people have put that tag on him in some otherworldly sense; I say it as any kid who admired his dad and had a great relationship with him,” Jakob said.

“He never missed a single Little League game I had. He’s collected every home-run ball I ever hit. Maybe he doesn’t want people to know that.”

This week his band The Wallflowers release their first album in over a decade, Exit Wounds. It sounds like punked-up Americana, more like rootsy Tom Petty or Bon Iver than you-know-who.

Jakob digs deep to question all things spiritual and existential on tracks like ‘I Hear the Ocean (When I Wanna Hear Trains)’, ‘The Dive Bar in my Heart’ and ‘Who’s That Man Walking Round My Garden’.

He takes the listener with him on his sometimes bizarre lyrical journeys. “You’re in your evening gloves/You’re off the farm taking big city drugs,” he sings on the current single ‘Roots and Wings’.

 

The Wallflowers’ seventh album is the band back close to their best (after the relative mediocrity of their 2012 album Glad All Over). It has them searching for something inside.

“I think everybody – no matter what side of the aisle you’re on – wherever we’re going to next, we’re all taking a lot of exit wounds with us. Nobody is the same as they were four years ago. That, to me, is what Exit Wounds signifies,” Jakob said recently.

You could write a novel on the genesis of Jakob Luke Dylan’s exit wounds. In 1964, when Bob Dylan’s muse and girlfriend Joan Baez went to visit Bob on tour in England, Sara Lownds opened his hotel room door. Baez said later: “That’s how I found out there was a Sara. It was most demoralising experience of my life.”

Sara and Bob married on November 22, 1965, under an oak tree on Long Island, New York, and lived in Woodstock.

Prior to Jakob’s birth on December 9, 1969, they relocated to a townhouse in Greenwich Village, New York. In 1973 they moved to a mansion in Malibu, California. It didn’t take long for Sara to feel demoralised like Baez before her.

“I hate myself for lovin’ you, but I’ll soon get over that,” Bob sang on ‘Dirge’ in 1974, the year he and Sara first separated. Released the following year, Blood on the Tracks was a bitter record about the disintegration of a marriage.

“When I’m listening to it, that’s about my parents. That’s my parents talking,” Jakob said.

His parents’ marriage came to a definitive end on the morning of February 13, 1977, when Sara came down to breakfast in Malibu and found Bob at the table with their children and a woman named Malka.

On March 1, she filed for divorce at Los Angeles Superior Court. It was as acrimonious as it was public. Jakob was seven years of age.

He went to see The Clash in concert when he was 12 and deemed it pivotal in his musical journey. Earlier this year he wrote the liner notes for the late Clash frontman Joe Strummer’s retrospective album Assembly and recalled how Joe gave him the “sweat-drenched military vest” off his back.

At 18, and in his first semester, he dropped out of New York’s Parsons School of Design, where he was studying art, and returned to Los Angeles. In 1989, he formed The Wallflowers with his childhood friend, Tobi Miller.  

The first song Jakob wrote, ‘6th Avenue Heartache’, was about a homeless man on his street in LA. Its storytelling prowess had echoes of his father: “Look out the window, down upon that street/And gone like a midnight was that man.”

Released in 1992 (the year he married screenwriter/actor Paige Dylan née Denny; they have four sons), The Wallflowers’ eponymous debut album sold only 40,000 copies.

In 1993, they were ditched by their record label, Virgin. Three of the band left. The following year, The Wallflowers were signed by another major label, Interscope Records.

“It had nothing to do with Bob Dylan,” Interscope head Jimmy Iovine said. “Bob Dylan is Bob Dylan, but Jakob had the songs.”

This was borne out in spades by their 1996 album Bringing Down the Horse. It sold five million copies and won two Grammy Awards: Best Rock Performance by a Group with Vocal and Best Rock Song for ‘One Headlight.’ The latter was performed at the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards with Bruce Springsteen.

Its verse, “I turned the engine, but the engine doesn’t turn”, bore a striking resemblance to the work of the man Jakob was sharing the mic with. Afterwards he felt obliged to tell Springsteen that he took that line from him. “I know,” he replied.

In 2010, his second solo album, Women and Country, produced by T-Bone Burnett, had echoes of Springsteen’s Nebraska, especially on the stand-out track ‘Everybody’s Hurting’.

In 2012 The Wallflowers returned with the middling album Glad All Over. Seven years later, they briefly returned to the popular consciousness when their big hit ‘One Headlight’ was used in the Judd Apatow film The King of Staten Island.

It’s good to have them back.

Despite the long shadow of his daddy, Jakob Dylan’s songs stand true, exit wounds on his soul and all.