by Bell, Ian
Musically, ‘Joey’ strikes a nicely wistful, elegiac note, even if the ‘Little Italy’ accordion might test the patience of a few Italian Americans. Once again, it is possible to assert that if Dylan-Levy had stuck to outright fiction they would have stayed clear of trouble. This piece of Mafia chic was asking for that trouble. Americans, New Yorkers above all, were hardly ignorant of organised crime by the middle of the 1970s. The testimony of the informer Joseph Valachi during the 1963 McClellan Hearings had exposed the existence of the Mob’s ruling ‘Five Families’. Those hearings had led to the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations legislation in 1970. The 1972 House Select Committee on Crime had then investigated the connections between gangsters and horse racing. Thanks to the word of another informer, one Joe ‘The Baron’ Barboza, allegations – vigorously denied – had been made against the original superstar, Francis Albert Sinatra. ‘Joey’ said nothing new about hoodlums. Its treatment of bloody reality was the problem.
The fact that Francis Ford Coppola’s film of The Godfather had appeared in 1972, and had brought forth a masterful sequel in 1974, is clearly relevant. Call it an influence. The first film of the eventual trilogy was based on Mario Puzo’s 1969 novel. That had taken its title, in turn, from an expression first heard publicly during Valachi’s 1963 testimony. There was something to be said, thought author and film-maker, about honour beyond the law, about bonds of loyalty transcending society’s demands, about working to survive and surviving to work. Dylan-Levy followed along behind. As the latter would tell Larry Sloman, one of the ‘wonderful’ things about the co-written songs of Desire was that they gave Dylan ‘a chance to do some acting’.36
On one reading, Coppola created an allegory of American capitalism. According to several other readings, he romanticised, even glorified, men of unspeakable violence who corrupted everything they touched. A fair verdict might be that the director managed both feats. Where’s the contradiction, after all? The movies are explicit in portraying the corruption and the destruction, physical and moral, to which inevitably corrupted ‘honour’ must lead. Equally, the pictures are fiction: parallels might be drawn and interpretations made, but Coppola and Puzo were free to reject them. Nevertheless, when you cast Marlon Brando, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro as your stars, Hollywood’s dazzling lustre overwhelms most of the distinctions between light and shade, squalid and heroic.
When you name your song for a real person and employ documented incidents from his career, a burden of proof descends. If you have made your reputation as a truth-teller, meanwhile, responsibilities are unavoidable. Dylan-Levy did not linger much over moral gradations. They made an outlaw hero not from a Billy the Kid, a figure mired in legend, but from an individual who had been shot to pieces – back, elbow, backside – in that clam house on New York’s Mulberry Street in 1972. They (or Levy) even introduced an improbable godfather of their own at Gallo’s grave, come ‘to say one last goodbye to the son that he could not save’.
The real Joey had launched a Mob war and died as a result. Whatever his literary pursuits in prison, whatever his friendships with incarcerated black men (who ‘seemed to understand / What it’s like to be in society with a shackle on your hand’), he was a hit man, an enforcer, a racketeer preying on the weak, and an individual party to certain scenes of mayhem that might well have inspired passages in The Godfather. Gallo read Tolstoy; it didn’t make him a hero.
As though to demonstrate how deluded celebrity folk can be, ‘Joey’ appeared while America was enduring a justified panic over rising crime rates. In 1960, 288,460 crimes of violence had been recorded, 9,110 of them murders. By 1970, the equivalent figures were 738,820 and 16,000; by 1975, still climbing, the numbers said 1,039,710 and 20,510.37 The romanticising of Gallo in such a circumstance was crass. To call ‘Joey’ ‘just a song’, to argue that all artists blur the difference between truth and fiction, to say that art has its prerogatives, does not answer the case for a singer with Dylan’s pedigree, even if he did not contribute a line to the finished piece. The argument would ring hollow, in any case, when in ‘Hurricane’ he was hammering away at the need for unpolluted truth and demanding an end to lies.
In his Village Voice comment on Desire, early in March 1976, Lester Bangs would peel ‘Joey’ apart.38 Otherwise forgiving of outrageous outlaw behaviour (much of it his own), Bangs made the obvious point that certain New York gangsters had been given sufficient cause to ‘blow away’ Joe Gallo. The crook had been the opposite of an innocent man swept along by events. Crazy Lester didn’t care for the song at any price – ‘ponderous, sloppy, numbingly boring’ – or for Dylan, most of the time. Among other things, a writer long disenchanted with his former hero had decreed Blood on the Tracks to be an instrument, variety unspecified, of self-abuse. The artist scrambled most of the big Bangs theories about ‘rock’ and its ineffable potency.
In the Voice, the journalist nevertheless asserted that Gallo had been a wife-beating thug who was fed the anti-psychotic drug Thorazine routinely, by the same suffering wife, after his release from prison. Bangs also managed to speak to Jacques Levy, who appears not to have mentioned that Dylan might have contributed little, if anything, to the lyrics of ‘Joey’. Instead, the co-writer asserted, as if it was news, that, ‘You know, Bob has always had a thing about outlaws.’ Levy then asked if anyone would call John Wesley Harding ‘a small-time hoodlum’ (in point of fact, the real Wes Hardin was a murderous medium-scale hoodlum). Dylan’s collaborator further defended Gallo as no psychopath and, indeed, right on cue, as ‘a victim of society’.
Bangs, for his part, offered the view that Dylan was simply lazy, that Desire was ‘an exploitation record’. In answer to the wholly rhetorical question, ‘What is Dylan thinking?’ relentless Lester got the jump on his own last coma – 30 April 1982, wrong drugs in the wrong order at the wrong Manhattan time in an apartment above a Chinese restaurant – by asserting of the artist that ‘he is not thinking at all’. In the case of ‘Joey’, there was some truth in the statement. The only journalistic trick missed by Bangs involved another simple question. When even the murdering subliterates of the Mafia knew an individual by playful nicknames involving ‘mad’ and ‘crazy’, what hope was there for the usual, folk-type liberal Greenwich Village defence of a poor boy forced to live outside the law?
In Rolling Stone’s review of the album, also in March, Dave Marsh would demonstrate that the once-deferential magazine was no longer awestruck on demand. Reviewers, some of them, were losing patience with Dylan’s presumed right to please himself. Desire had become an odd and confused piece of work. Of ‘Joey’ and the artist, Marsh – who otherwise praised the album highly – wrote that the track was ‘musically seductive’, but argued that
his neatest ellipsis is to avoid all mention of the public execution of Joseph Colombo [the crime family boss survived the execution attempt], which the evidence suggests the Gallo mob ordered. In which case it is hardly relevant that Joey Gallo did not carry a personal weapon [reports of his killing state that he drew a handgun when the attack began] and much more understandable that he himself was gunned down in front of his family. Gallo was an outlaw, in fact, only in the sense that he refused to live by the rules of the Mob … Is an intellectual Mafioso really that much more heroic than an unlettered hood? This is elitist sophistry of the worst sort, contemptible even when it comes from an outlaw radlib like Bob Dylan.
Sheer fiction saved the record. Clinton Heylin describes ‘Black Diamond Bay’ as ‘something of a lost gem’, apparently because Dylan has never played the song in concert.39 If the artist pays no attention, why should we? A degree of neglect for the piece might also have arisen from first impressions – everyone’s first impressions – of the Desire album, when any long ballad was liable to wind up becalmed in the wake of ‘Hurricane’. ‘Black Diamond Bay’ was nevertheless a striking piece of art and craft to begin with. It grows in stature with the years.
The song is beset with literary association
s, chiefly involving Joseph Conrad, and is weighed down by its apparent debts. Dylan-Levy didn’t just set a few bits of a novel to a tune, but the temptation to justify the artist in terms of literature has often beguiled the citationists who treat all references as cultural price stickers, marks of artistic worth and quality. If Dylan shows that, for a wonder, he has read a serious work or two, he becomes a serious proposition. On the other hand, the parallels between ‘Black Diamond Bay’ and at least one of Conrad’s later books are hard to ignore.
Allen Ginsberg would make the first move in the allusion-hunting game with his Desire sleeve note – presumably based on a conversation with Dylan – exulting in those ‘surrealist mind-jump inventions line by line, except D. says he’s reading Joseph Conrad storyteller’. For whatever reason, some who paid attention to the song then made an erroneous connection with Heart of Darkness (1899). The idea would have been intriguing, save for the fact that the connection doesn’t exist; there is no match. The clear family relationship, in structure, bits of plot and lots of set dressing, is with 1915’s Victory, the finest of Conrad’s pre-modern melodramas. In the book, as in the song, structure is paramount.
You can well believe that the song sprang, in some form, from Dylan’s reading. Its other, better reason to exist was as a continuation of his investigation into the possibilities of metaphysical ballads that began with ‘Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts’ on Blood on the Tracks. The two songs have a lot in common but several important differences. At eighty-four lines, seven and a half minutes and seven expertly constructed verses long, ‘Black Diamond Bay’ might meanwhile count as another good example of Dylan’s ‘cinematic’ writing, or what Michael Gray has called, accurately enough, his ‘movie-spinning’.40 The description, a self-confessed species of faint praise, overlooks what might be involved in creating a drama that lasts only 450 seconds, with a startling, audacious inversion of perspective at its end. Dylan-Levy got that from Joe Conrad, but its use in the song is a feat of technical daring.
Mercifully, ‘Black Diamond Bay’ owes nothing whatever to anything Joseph Campbell had to say about primal narrative, mythic or otherwise. There is no hero, certainly no epic journey, least of all a spiritual rebirth. Instead, the song owes everything to Conrad’s use in Victory of doubled perspectives, physical and moral, and to the idea of fate, blind and mute, that permeates Blood on the Tracks. In ‘Black Diamond Bay’, good and evil contend; people scurry around on their plots, affairs and petty human errands; the volcano explodes regardless. The End.
Back home, at the song’s actual end, the narration is halted by a new voice, possibly a version of Dylan’s own, as he sits at home alone in LA, drinking beer and ‘Watchin’ old Cronkite on the seven o’clock news’. Nothing much happening; some earthquake somewhere; some flotsam; just ‘another hard-luck story that you’re gonna hear’. After the long preceding fin de siècle drama ‘there’s really nothin’ anyone can say’. There is no mystical revelation to be had from this version of the human condition.
Dylan-Levy handle all of this brilliantly. They pinch details from Conrad – period, island, gambling room, a Panama hat – but adapt only fragments of Victory’s plot to get the gist they need. In the novel, a narrative that at first seems realistic, if preposterous, turns out to be nothing of the kind. The reader who sees beyond heroes and devilish villains is given an allegory. In the song, in place of Conrad’s tale of Heyst the ‘forgotten cast-off’, the son a disillusioned ‘philosopher’, one who becomes locked in a struggle with an evil hotelier, Schomberg, for the heart and soul of a teenage girl, Lena – performer in a ‘ladies’ orchestra’, no less – we get high, sardonic comedy. Conrad was writing about faith, love, fate and the challenge of evil. Dylan-Levy offer up a tale of human vanity getting what it deserves. One self-involved character, ‘the Greek’, is even trying ineptly to hang himself while the volcano explodes, the lava flows and the island sinks out of existence. This is, if you are that way inclined, very funny.
‘Black Diamond Bay’ has more sheer vivacity than the rest of the songs on Desire combined, ‘Hurricane’ always excepted. If Dylan did not perform it in concert that might have had something to do with the dispassionate, stoic and comical secularism of a piece that makes ‘Isis’ and ‘Oh, Sister’ seem fatuous. Even the stratagems and conceits of high literature are given a kind of comeuppance. Conrad’s genius in Victory was in the management of viewpoint: first that of a sailor, then that of Heyst as teller of the tale, then the perspective of Heyst within himself, then a position within a neutral, authorial denouement. Dylan-Levy cut through it all to leave us with a bored guy drinking beer and watching the news. This, says the song, is how we these days understand ourselves: through a screen, through a background filter, through bland announcements that somewhere far off something might have happened that might have mattered to someone, but not to us.
It seems there was an earthquake that
Left nothin’ but a Panama hat
And a pair of old Greek shoes
On the remainder of Desire Dylan otherwise indulged his abiding need to play cowboy in a piece called ‘Romance in Durango’ and chose to end the album with a song to his wife. The former track was a (mostly) vigorous piece of writing that would have fitted well enough with the handful of sun-baked verses Dylan had conjured up for Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973). Clinton Heylin, among others, has made the association: the movie had been filmed in the western Mexican state of Durango, after all.41 On the other hand, ‘Romance’, theatrical or ‘cinematic’ according to taste, bears several of Levy’s fingerprints. As the ‘theatrist’ would tell Larry Sloman, ‘I love stories and plots.’ Would Dylan have written of ‘Hoofbeats like castanets on stone’, or had his hero promise that ‘Soon you will be dancing the fandango’? Let’s hope not.
The questions act as another reminder, nevertheless, of the issue of authorship in seven of the works on Desire. Heylin records Levy’s claim that most of the lyrics in ‘Romance in Durango’ were the director’s own work. On the other hand, Michael Gray says that in an ‘utterly marvellous’ piece, with ‘its skilful concentration of language’, Dylan ‘as often before … says more with less’.42 So who gets the credit or, if needs be, the blame? With most other songwriting collaborations the issue would not arise. In the old Tin Pan Alley partnerships, above all in the miraculous half-century working relationship between Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, a composer operated with a lyricist; the labour was divided. In Dylan-Levy, both participants came up with words, to varying degrees. Since one of the pair was Bob Dylan, a creative singularity, a writer sometimes identified as a poet, authorship is relevant.
Inevitably, Desire gives the sense of an artist who is not always wholly at one with his material. ‘Romance’ feels, for whatever the word is worth, like an example. Dylan has a genuine secondary talent for covering other people’s songs, but this album is an entirely different case. On at least one occasion, by his own account, he provided none of the lyrics. In other cases, such as in the Durango romance, his contribution is said to have been minimal. To this day, nevertheless, everything on Desire is treated, pored over and ‘analysed’, as a product of his strange, personal and individual genius. Shakespeare’s efforts as a script doctor occupy one of literary scholarship’s discrete categories. Pablo Picasso’s intense and intimate relationship with Georges Braque in the moment of Cubism – and Jacques Levy was no Braque – gets its own shelf of monographs. With Desire, everything is held to be Dylan even when the artist makes no such attribution. The mistake is odd, but persistent.
Musically, in any case, ‘Romance in Durango’ was a cliché, a skeletal melody that sounded like a parody of Tejano and exemplified one of the album’s real problems. The artist had not over-exerted himself with these tunes. The record would be a big hit; the Rolling Thunder tour that preceded Desire’s release in the first week of January 1976 would be a wayward triumph. But here, even after Blood on the Tracks, were more signs
of a falling away, of a creative decline. Dylan could not manage all of the words. In the studio, he could no longer ride waves of chaos to glory. And he could not invariably contrive, borrow or adapt the melodies he needed to make the most of the lyrics he had assembled on the fly with an eager collaborator. The Dylan who could manage such feats unaided was otherwise engaged.
It tells us something, perhaps, about the part played by Sara Dylan in his existence. It might remind us, too, as we weigh out the hits and misses in an artist’s career, that talent exists within a human life, not in ideal, temperature-controlled isolation. Dylan was heading in strange directions even as he produced another big hit of an album. He was becoming unmoored, adrift, even as he seemed to pull Desire’s last song from his back pocket. There was no doubt, however, about who had written this one.
Dylan’s confederates in the studio were given no hint of the existence of ‘Sara’. He made the recording used on the album in the early hours of 1 August, after six consecutive attempts, while his visiting wife, not forewarned, sat listening. In a manner that could not be matched by anything on Blood on the Tracks, Dylan exposed himself utterly. He seemed to plead for his life.
