The Wallflowers got the last laugh with Bringing Down the Horse

The fairytale almost ended before it began for Jakob Dylan and the Wallflowers. The band’s 1992 debut flopped mercilessly, despite generally favorable reviews, causing a split with record label Virgin after its release. It’s tempting to blame the label for mishandling the band or argue that audiences simply slept on the album, but the country-flavored rock record never stood much chance of landing with any real impact. Part of the blame is on bad timing: the Wallflowers sounded nothing like the alienated, distortion-heavy rock music dominating the popular airwaves. But the Wallflowers also seemed to be a crack live outfit still finding its footing in a studio setting. Their debut sounds like a bar band that’s been told not to worry about curfew or last call. As talented as they are, the songs are woefully bloated and without a memorable chorus, and Dylan is still tinkering with his signature husky baritone. After a single dance, the music industry sent the Wallflowers back to the sidelines.

The following years proved trying for Dylan as the band’s songwriter and frontman. The Wallflowers returned to the LA club scene, hoping to land another record deal, but no labels were ready to bite on the one-time losers. It also didn’t help that Dylan had been labeled, fairly or not, as being difficult to work with. The group suffered through personnel changes: original bassist Barrie Maguire was let go, and drummer Peter Yanowitz left to play with his girlfriend Natalie Merchant’s band. These were early signs that Dylan, who founded the Wallflowers with guitarist Tobi Miller in 1989, would come to be the lone permanent fixture in the band. Still, Dylan remained determined to help the Wallflowers make it on their own merits, never trading on the fact that Bob Dylan was his famous father. His perseverance was finally rewarded when Interscope Records signed the band in 1994, but it was just as challenging to find a producer who wanted to work with the group—someone who could help Dylan solve the riddle of why studio magic eluded the Wallflowers the first time around.

That match turned out to be fixer T Bone Burnett, who had played guitar in Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue in the Seventies. Not yet a full-blown legend, Burnett had recently worked with Elvis Costello on a trio of records and helped rejuvenate Roy Orbison’s fading recording career. More interesting, though, was how at the forefront of the Americana revival he was. In 1993, he produced Counting Crows’ chart-shattering debut, August and Everything After, a hybrid record that mixed traditional instruments—pedal steel, mandolin, accordion, and organ—with a contemporary, radio-friendly sound. Neither Dylan nor Burnett wished to make an old-timey record, but both wanted to explore how roots music and bigger rock and roll structures could blend compellingly. That dynamic led to the unique fusion heard on 1996’s Bringing Down the Horse, a record that sold four million copies and allowed Dylan to have the last laugh over his doubters.   

Nowhere does that marriage of styles align more perfectly than on opening track and radio juggernaut “One Headlight.” That famous ripple of guitar breaks the stillness like a stone skipping across a murky pond late at night. Session drummer Matt Chamberlain’s beat kicks in—part heartbeat, part piston—before keyboardist Rami Jaffee’s Hammond B-3 rolls in on a breeze. With Miller having exited the band prior to recording, Jon Brion and future Wallflower Michael Ward joined Dylan on guitars and Greg Richling on bass, adding depth and shadow to this elegy to innocence. A layer deeper, guest Leo LeBlanc adds slides and twangs on dobro, while Jayhawks singer Gary Louris and Burnett’s then-wife, singer-songwriter Sam Phillips, help Dylan get that massive chorus off the ground. The songs that Dylan wrote between labels and during the Bringing Down the Horse sessions practiced a newfound economy and ticked familiar structural boxes (like dynamic choruses) that allowed listeners to step inside these songs in ways prior efforts hadn’t. Combined with nuanced nods to folk, country, and bluegrass, “One Headlight” sounded both fit for modern radio and distinct from whatever the Wallflowers’ contemporaries were making. 

Other tracks are far less subtle in their Americana leanings. “God Don’t Make Lonely Girls” two-steps through swinging saloon doors on the back of honky-tonk guitar. Jaffee’s Hammond B-3 on the band’s hit third single “The Difference” whistles through an onslaught of guitars and drums unlike anything else on alt-rock radio at the time. Dylan later said that he wrote the lonely, lilting closer “I Wish I Felt Nothing” with LeBlanc’s soulful pedal steel in mind, a perfect partner for his harmonies with Texan Stephen Bruton. Most famously, Burnett and Dylan leaned on friends to resurrect the eventual hit single “6th Avenue Heartache,” an old song Virgin had rejected for the band’s debut. One of the album’s most distinctive songs, “6th Avenue Heartache” boasts slide guitar from Heartbreaker Mike Campbell and Counting Crows frontman Adam Duritz’s unmistakable, emotive whine. Dylan had called Duritz for help out of the blue, and the pair knocked out the song’s classic harmonies over a couple of beers. Credit Dylan for an inspired use of a lifeline. 

Dylan has been almost apologetic in later years about the “defeatist” tone of the album. After all, he wrote most of these songs at a time when the music industry was kicking him in the teeth and telling him he wasn’t good enough. But Bringing Down the Horse turns out to be a mostly uplifting record, one circling back to self-preservation rather than wallowing in self-pity. For all its bleak mood and deathlike pall, “One Headlight” urges listeners (“Come on, try a little / Nothing is forever”) to keep going through dark times, reminding us that feeling broken and being broken down are not the same. “They say, you’re only sad and lonely / And no one is impressed,” Dylan sings on “Bleeders,” aping past criticisms of his music. Yet the song’s wisdom comes from having been knocked down before and getting back up. “Just gotta keep movin’ on,” he repeats like a mantra. Similarly, rocker “Laughing Out Loud” catalogs the abuse Dylan endured, but it also looks confidently toward the day he’ll no longer be a punching bag. He also slings some of the same family snark that made his dad’s putdown songs so legendary. 

Despite his lineage, Dylan doesn’t write from a place of privilege. He has a soft spot in his heart for regular folks who make an earnest go of things and land harder than they deserve when life pushes back. The figures he emphasizes with (read: identifies with) most across Bringing Down the Horse are a homeless guitar player, a peep show dancer, and a trio of Marlenas. The germ of “6th Avenue Heartache” came after a homeless man, who once lived below Dylan, disappeared and left his things behind, including a six-string guitar. “Just like me / Just moved on,” Dylan sings, wondering if they share the same fate. He describes the Spanish dancer he pursues in “God Don’t Make Lonely Girls” as seeming out of place and “the town’s best mess.” He longs to “get inside of her barbed wire,” recognizing a fellow wounded soul who has had to develop a prickly armor just to keep going. While “Three Marlenas” is no longer a song that resonates with Dylan as it did thirty years ago, you can’t get more Americana than its final image of personal liberation: a Chevy rolling down the highway with its top down, radio blaring.

At the heart of Bringing Down the Horse sits the hushed, crushing “Invisible City.” Riding on a quiet drum roll, acoustic guitars, and pedal steel that flickers like a dying bulb in a sky full of stars, Dylan guides us through the “crash site” like a tour guide. It’s hard to listen to the song and not feel like it’s a repository for all the cynicism and hard-earned wisdom that came from years of disappointment and rejection. The ride taught Dylan that we’re all vulnerable (“every heart has a blindside”), that genuine connections are increasingly rare, and that chasing the wrong dreams can often lead to nightmares. Still, as he sings about the toxicity and compromise that might come with making it in the “Invisible City,” we can take comfort in knowing this dream of succeeding as a Wallflower won’t be the horse that brings him down. Time has been kind to Bringing Down the Horse, as “One Headlight” and the album’s other singles keep finding new stretches of open road across radio formats. It’s the record that saw Jakob Dylan come of age as a songwriter and step out from the shadows of his imposing family tree. Three decades later, the Wallflowers’ breakthrough still drives like a dream down life’s darkest highways, even with a burned-out headlight.    

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