The hit music video Bob Dylan hated: “Fuck him, I know better”
The early 1980s was a strange time for Bob Dylan. Emerging out of his divisive exploration of evangelical music and conversion to Christianity, his return to secular music was 1983’s Infidels. It’s an eight-track blend of heartland rock, reggae and folk and was well-received at the time, with the world glad that ‘The Voice of a Generation’ had finally seen the light and returned from his period of self-obsessed artistic eccentricity.
While Infidels mostly does not stand up today, it did produce the undeniably catchy ‘Jokerman’, featuring a warm, rolling dub groove and a typically soulful chorus line from the curly-haired troubadour. While the song still had heavy Biblical imagery, it seemed to be used to highlight the political ills of the world, and this, in tandem with the music, heavily suggested to fans that the 1983 album was not just a flash in the pan and that Dylan was re-centring.
Given that ‘Jokerman’ was something of a return to form for Dylan, he and label Columbia knew it needed a great video. To do so, they brought in author and journalist Larry Sloman, who’d written On the Road with Bob Dylan, the 1978 account of the artist’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour three years earlier, and esteemed director, designer, and author George Lois. It was an unlikely duo, but it had great promise; together, these two surely knew how to augment the song’s substance and the man behind it.
While the video itself is one of the most famous by Bob Dylan, featuring him lip-syncing the chorus amid illustrated photographs of historical figures from himself to Muhammad Ali and Adolf Hitler, famous paintings by the likes of Goya and Hieronymus Bosch and lyrics of the songs superimposed over them, it wasn’t as easy as it should have been. Dylan, a man notoriously difficult when he wants to be, famously ignoring HBO executives when discussing his slapstick comedy series, didn’t give Sloman and Lois what they wanted.
Sloman’s account paints a hilariously impetuous image of Dylan. It affirms a side of him that greatly juxtaposes the mystique of the songwriting maestro, who some even think sold his soul to the devil to earn such talent.
In an interview, he recalled putting the musicians in a white t-shirt and sports jacket, with him lip-synching the chorus: “For the whole shoot he kept his eyes closed. After every take George would plead with him, ‘Bob, please open your eyes,’ Bob would say, ‘I’m trying.’ Finally, on the last take, and to me this is the ultimate Dylan video, we got him to open his eyes and he looks cagily at the camera. We had captured that Dylan mystique, I think.”
Sloman claimed that Columbia was over the moon with the video and thought it was “the greatest video ever done”. However, Bob Dylan wasn’t done with being challenging. Just as the video was about to go on air, he wanted to “kill it”. Well, not exactly kill it; he liked everything, apart from, crucially, what was shot of him. He wanted Sloman and Lois to go to Malibu and shoot handheld 8mm scenes of him on the beach.
Sloman explained: “George says, ‘Fuck him, I know better, I don’t want him to do that.'” Ultimately, Columbia agreed with the pair over Dylan, and they finished the video as it was.
Knowing this anecdote affords a great sense of comedy to the final product, as Dylan is seen singing with his eyes closed throughout it, and when he opens his eyes at the end, he looks majorly pissed off. It was like someone had just woken him from a deep sleep.
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