The worst period of Bob Dylan’s career, according to Bob Dylan
One of the scariest things an artist can face is when their work suddenly feels alien to them. In fact, it’s probably the worst thing that could possibly happen, and yet it’s something most musicians go through at least once in their careers. Yes, that includes the almighty songwriting maestro himself, Bob Dylan.
While it may come as a surprise to some, Dylan has never actually claimed immunity when it comes to career peaks and troughs, and in fact has actually chased his own flaws on multiple occasions. Some might say this is fairly far-fetched, but these are the risks that are necessary to take if you’re someone who favours artistic progression over stagnation, and Dylan has never been able to stick around in one place for too long.
That said, it’s hard to say whether this has been a product of his own commitment to constantly evolving or an inability to sit still, especially as someone who’s always trying to one-up themselves. Even before the infamy that ensued at Newport Folk Festival (gasp! Dylan’s gone electric!), fearmongering with the promise that nothing he does can be predicted has always been his thing, and in most cases, it’s paid off.
However, even Dylan can’t escape the inevitability of the plateau, and in the late 1980s, his worst nightmare had come true. The folk troubadour turned musical innovator had quickly lost his spark, and everything he wrote down felt like words scribbled by someone he no longer recognised. In other words, he’d lost his touch, and it seemed like there was no quick fix or easy remedy that would pull him back from the brink. Not this time.
This is probably why, to most people, Down in the Groove seemed like nothing more than a poor imitation of who Dylan once was: a shadow of a former legend who no longer knew who he wanted to be or how to steer the times with the same fervour he always had. He’d “lost it”, some said, which was frustratingly a sentiment also shared by the singer himself. “I was what they called over the hill,” Dylan wrote in Chronicles. “The mirror had swung around, and I could see the future – an old actor fumbling around in the garbage cans outside the theatre of past triumphs.”
He also elaborated on how this entire period of time made him realise something he never anticipated: that the moment was no longer his, and there was nothing he could do about it. “Everything was smashed. My own songs had become strangers to me, I didn’t have the skill to touch the right nerves, couldn’t penetrate the surfaces. It wasn’t my moment of history anymore,” he said.
As it marked the moment when everything came crashing down and Dylan’s career officially hit an all-time low, emerging from the depths could only happen once he re-learned how to rehash his old flame, and while he’d still have to go through the turbulence of re-discovering himself through the rest of the decade, it was touring that kept his head above water. As he recalled while discussing the 1987 tour with the Grateful Dead: “Miraculously, something internal came unhinged.”
The Dead’s Jerry Garcia actually helped Dylan through these moments of immense uncertainty in more ways than one, not just with on-stage energy but with how songs were entities that could transform over time, fluid remnants of ideas that eventually improved when a clearer direction emerged later down the line. Dylan might have experienced what seemed like career-ending stagnation, but it seemed that all he needed was to learn how to take songs “a step further” and breathe new life into them.
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