Infidels

[in-fi-dl, -del]

Infidels is Bob Dylan's 22nd studio album, released in 1983 by Columbia Records.

Produced by Mark Knopfler and Dylan himself, Infidels is seen as his return to secular music, following a conversion to Christianity and three evangelical, gospel records. Though he never publicly renounced his faith or abandoned religious imagery, Infidels gained much attention for its focus on more personal themes of love and loss, in addition to commentary on the environment and geopolitics.

The critical reaction was the strongest for Dylan in years, almost universally hailed for its songwriting and performances. The album also fared well commercially, reaching #20 US and going gold, and #9 in the UK. Still, many fans and critics were troubled by several songs inexplicably cut from the album just prior to mastering - primarily "Blind Willie McTell", considered a career highlight by many critics, and not officially released until it appeared on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 eight years later.

The recording sessions

Critics and historians often make a note of Infidels' polished, tasteful production. One of the main contributors to the album's overall sound is Mark Knopfler, best known as the guitarist from Dire Straits. Dylan wanted to produce the album himself, but feeling that technology had passed him by, he approached a number of contemporary artists who were more at home in a modern recording studio. David Bowie, Frank Zappa, and Elvis Costello were all approached before Dylan hired Knopfler.

Knopfler later admitted it was difficult to produce Dylan. "You see people working in different ways, and it's good for you. You have to learn to adapt to the way different people work. Yes, it was strange at times with Bob. One of the great parts about production is that it demonstrates to you that you have to be flexible. Each song has its own secret that's different from another song, and each has its own life. Sometimes it has to be teased out, whereas other times it might come fast. There are no laws about songwriting or producing. It depends on what you're doing, not just who you're doing. You have to be sensitive and flexible, and it's fun. I'd say I was more disciplined. But I think Bob is much more disciplined as a writer of lyrics, as a poet. He's an absolute genius. As a singer - absolute genius. But musically, I think it’s a lot more basic. The music just tends to be a vehicle for that poetry."

Once Knopfler was aboard, the two quickly assembled a team of accomplished musicians. Knopfler's own tough and flinty guitar tone was paired with Mick Taylor's; formerly the lead guitarist with the Blues Breakers and, more famously, the Rolling Stones, Taylor was best known for his fluid, melodic improvisations that were firmly placed in the blues tradition. Having been introduced to Mick Taylor the previous summer, Dylan had developed a friendship with Taylor that resulted in Taylor hearing the Infidels material first during the months leading up to the April sessions.

Knopfler said about the instrument he plays on Infidels: "I still haven't got a flat-top wooden acoustic, because I've never found one that was as good as the two best flat tops I ever played. One...was a hand-built Greco that Rudy Pensa, of Rudy's Music Stop lent me. I used...the Greco on Infidels."

Knopfler suggested Alan Clark for keyboards as well as engineer Neil Dorfsman, both of whom were hired. According to Knopfler, it was Dylan's ideas to recruit Robbie Shakespeare and Sly Dunbar as the rhythm section. Best known as Sly & Robbie, Shakespeare and Dunbar were famed reggae producers who were major recording artists in their own right. An unlikely but inspired mix, the chemistry between these players is largely responsible for the album's sweet, pop-bent while maintaining a tough, rocking core.

"Bob's musical ability is limited, in terms of being able to play a guitar or a piano," said Knopfler. "It's rudimentary, but it doesn't affect his variety, his sense of melody, his singing. It's all there. In fact, some of the things he plays on piano while he's singing are lovely, even though they're rudimentary. That all demonstrates the fact that you don't have to be a great technician. It's the same old story: If something is played with soul, that's what's important."

The songs

Though Infidels is often cited as a return to secular work (following a trio of albums heavily influenced by born-again Christianity), many of the songs recorded during the Infidels sessions are filled with Biblical references and strong religious imagery, although this is not terribly new ground for Dylan. The most explicit example of this can be found on the opening track, "Jokerman".

Although as stated earlier, Dylan never publicly renounced his faith, from Infidels on he has not continued to preach a specific religion like on his earlier records and has revealed little about his religious state. In 1997, after recovering from a serious heart condition, Dylan said in an interview for Newsweek, "Here's the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don't find it anywhere else...I don't adhere to rabbis, preachers, evangelists, all of that. I've learned more from the songs than I've learned from any of this kind of entity."

A number of critics have also called "Jokerman" a sly political protest, addressed to a "manipulator of crowds...a dream twister." Underneath the arcane Biblical references are words weary of populists who are all surface ("Michelangelo could've carved your features") and more about action than thinking through the complexities ("fools rush in where angels fear to tread"). The reviewer at Contemporary Christian Music magazine opined that it was about the ambivalent position of the modern Jew from an evangelical Christian perspective.

The second track, "Sweetheart Like You", is sung to a fictitious woman. Oliver Trager's book, Keys to the Rain: The Definitive Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, mentions that some have criticized this song as sexist. Indeed, NPR's Tim Riley makes that accusation in his book, Hard Rain: A Dylan Commentary, singling out lyrics like "...a woman like you should be at home/That's where you belong/Taking care of somebody nice/Who don't know how to do you wrong." However, Trager also cites other interpretations that dispute this claim.

A few critics like Robert Christgau and Bill Wyman claimed that Infidels betrayed a strong, strange dislike for space travel, and it can be heard on the first few lines of "License To Kill." ("Oh, man has invented his doom/First step was touching the moon.") A harsh indictment accusing mankind of imperialism and a predilection for violence, the song deals specifically with mankind’s relationship to the environment, either on a political scale or a scientific one. It should be noted that a skeptical opinion toward the American space program was shared among a minority of evangelicals of Dylan's generation, most famously articulated by "Jesus Rock" icon, Larry Norman, whose songs declared variously "you say you beat the Russians to the Moon but I say you starved your children to do it" and "We need a solution/We need salvation/Let's send some people to the moon to gather information/And all they brought back was a big bag of rocks/Only cost 13 billion/Must be nice rocks".

The song "Neighborhood Bully" is often regarded as a thinly-disguised defense of Israel's foreign policy. In the first nine stanzas, Dylan defends Israel by offering up several justifications, whereas in the last two stanzas, the accuser asks questions to an imaginary audience. In the fourth stanza, Dylan references a historical event that led to further quarrels between Israel and Iraq: Israel's bombing of the Osirak nuclear reactor near Baghdad on June 7, 1981, in Operation Opera. Most of the world condemned Israel's attack, but Israel claimed that the plant was involved in the production of nuclear weapons that would have been used against it. Dylan commented extensively on the song in a 1984 interview with Rolling Stone Magazine. In 2001, the Jerusalem Post described the song as "a favorite among Dylan-loving residents of the territories".

Israeli singer Ariel Zilber has covered "Neighborhood Bully" in 2005 in a version translated to Hebrew. Zilber's version makes use of the original text but is commonly taken as referring to a different affair, Israel's unilateral disengagement plan, the subject of several other songs in the album, Anabel.

"Union Sundown" is another political protest song against lowest bidding sweatshops overseas. It displays Dylan's penchant and ability to take a concept and hit it from every angle in a single song: a.)The hypocrisy of Americans who complain about the lack of American jobs while not paying more for American-made products ("Lots of people complainin' that there is no work./I say, 'Why you say that for? When nothin' you got is U.S.-made? They don't make nothin' here no more'") b.) Unions being more interested in their own perceived interests than improving the lot of American workers generally ("The unions are big business, man/And they're goin' out like a dinosaur.") c.) Federal, state, and municipal laws that treat as pollutants the chemicals farmers believe are necessary to make their small family farms viable ("They used to grow food in Kansas/Now they want to grow it on the moon and eat it raw./I can see the day coming when even your home garden is gonna be against the law.").

Because Dylan never spoke clearly about his religious views during this period, it's difficult to explain his intentions in the recording of Infidels.

"I And I," according to author/critic Tim Riley, "updates the Dylan mythos. Even though it substitutes self-pity for the [pessimism found throughout Infidels], you can't ignore it as a Dylan spyglass: 'Someone else is speakin' with my mouth, but I'm listening only to my heart/I've made shoes for everyone, even you, while I still go barefoot.'

"Dylan's relationship with himself has always been at the heart of his best work - the way the man who was born Robert Zimmerman communes with the songs, odyssey, and mystique of Bob Dylan. But 'I and I' is perhaps the only song to take this subject on as an artistic issue...without giving up very much of his true self, he conveys the distance he feels between his inner identity and the public face he wears.

On an album filled with topical numbers and brooding self-examination, Infidels' closer, "Don't Fall Apart On Me Tonight," stands out as a pure love song. On past albums like John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline, Dylan closed with love songs sung to the narrator's partner, and that tradition is continued with "Don't Fall Apart On Me Tonight", with a pleading chorus that asks "Don't fall apart on me tonight, I just don't think that I could handle it./Don't fall apart on me tonight, Yesterday's just a memory, Tomorrow is never what it's supposed to be/And I need you, yeah, you tonight."

Outtakes

As with most Dylan albums, outtakes and rough mixes from Infidels were eventually bootlegged. This a partial listing of known outtakes. All titles with parentheses are "working titles".

16 Tons (Merle Travis)
Across The Borderline (Ry Cooder, John Hiatt, Jim Dickinson)
"Angel Flying Too Close To The Ground" (Version 1), released as a B-side to the Infidel singles.
"Angel Flying Too Close To The Ground" (Version 2)
Aquarium (Robbie Sly - Instrumental)
Back To The Wall
"Blind Willie McTell" (electric take, different from The Bootleg Series take)
"Blind Willie McTell" (later released on The Bootleg Series Vol 1-3)
(Buttons + Buns)
Buttons (Great Buttons Again)
Choo Choo Ch'Boogie (Horton/Darling/Gabler)
Christmas Song (Mel Tormé)
"Clean Cut Kid" (Brooklyn Anthem) (later reworked for the Empire Burlesque album)
Cold Cold Heart (Hank Williams)
Columbus Georgia (or) Columbus Stockade Blues.
(Dadada Grateful Dead)
Dark As A Dungeon (Merle Travis)
"Dark Groove" (Instrumental)
"Death Is Not The End" (later reworked for the Down in the Groove album)
(Diddling)
Don't Drink No Chevy (?)
"Don't Fly Unless It's Safe" (Instrumental)
"Foot of Pride" (later released on The Bootleg Series Vol 1-3)
From Paul
(Goin' Up Let It Roll)
Glory To The King (Darlene Zschech)
The Green, Green Grass Of Home (J. Curly Putman)
Green Onions (Booker T. Jones, Steve Cropper, Lewis Steinberg, Al Jackson, Jr.)
(Half-Finished Song I)
(Half-Finished Song II)
He's Gone (?)
Home, Home On The Range (William Goodwin, B. Bigley & D.Kelly)
How Many Days (?)
I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out Of My Hair (Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II)
I’m Movin' On (Hank Snow)
(Instrumental Jam)
Instrumental (Blues)
Instrumental (Bluesy Jam: Slow)
Instrumental (Bluesy Jam: Bluesier)
Instrumental (Bluesy Jam: Pickup Again)
Instrumental (BLues Riff)
Instrumental (Bob Lead Jazz)
Instrumental (Bob Said Tape This)
Instrumental (Boogie 1)
Instrumental (Boogie 2)
Instrumental (End Bob 12-String)
Instrumental (G Boogie)
Instrumental (Harmonico Jam 1)
Instrumental (Harmonico Jam 2)
Instrumental (Harmonico Jam 3)
Instrumental (Harmonico Solo)
Instrumental (Instrumental Jam)
Instrumental (Jam Groove)
Instrumental (Mark Pickin' Groove)
Instrumental (Mark Soop Pick Up)
Instrumental (Mark Plunks Tasty)
Instrumental (Reggae Jam)
Jesus Met The Woman At The Well (trad.)
"Julius and Ethel" (fully realised outtake, never released)
(KIM)
"Lord Protect My Child" (later released on The Bootleg Series Vol 1-3)
(Love You Too Jam)
Lovers Concerto (Sandy Linzer & Denny Randell)
Prison Station Blues
Oh, Babe
Oh, Susannah! (Stephen Foster)
Oklahoma Kansas
(Reggae Toms Toms Jam)
Silent Night (Franz Gruber & Joseph Mohr)
Slow Try Baby
"Someone's Got A Hold Of My Heart" (later reworked to "Tight Connection to My Heart)
"Tell Me" (later released on The Bootleg Series Vol 1-3)
"This Was My Love" (Jim Harbert) (Version 1)
"This Was My Love" (Jim Harbert) (Version 2)
(4/20 Trees Hannibal Alps)
Unidentified Song 1
Unidentified Song 2

Also, alternate versions of every single song on the album are in circulation as well. None of these alternate takes has been commercially released.

"Jokerman"
"Sweetheart Like You" (alternate version 1)
"Sweetheart Like You" (alternate version 2)
"Sweetheart Like You" (Several rehearsals)
"Neighborhood Bully" (alternate version)
"License To Kill" (alternate version)
"Man Of Peace" (alternate version)
"Union Sundown" (alternate version 1)
"Union Sundown" (alternate version 2)
"I And I" (alternate version)
"Don't Fall Apart On Me Tonight" (alternate vesion)

While Dylan was known to be prolific and had numerous outtakes for most of his albums, Infidels in particular garnered considerable controversy over the years regarding its final selection of songs. By June 1983, Dylan and Knopfler had set a preliminary sequence of nine songs, including two songs that were ultimately omitted: "Foot Of Pride" and "Blind Willie McTell." Other notable outtakes like "Someone's Got A Hold Of My Heart" (later re-written and re-recorded for Empire Burlesque) were recorded during these sessions, but only "Foot Of Pride" and "Blind Willie McTell" received serious consideration for possible inclusion.

"Blind Willie McTell" is perhaps the most heatedly discussed outtake in Dylan's catalog. "On the surface, 'Blind Willie McTell' is about the landscape of the blues," writes Tim Riley, "and the figures Dylan pays respects to on his 1962 debut. But it's also about the landscape of pop, and how an aging persona like Dylan might feel as he casts his experienced gaze over the road he's walked. Always skeptical about the quality of his own voice, he didn't release 'Blind Willie McTell' at first because he didn't feel his tribute lived up to its sources. The irony here is that his own insecurity about living up to his imagined blues ideal becomes a subject in itself. 'Nobody sings the blues like Blind Willie McTell' becomes a way of saying how Dylan feels displaced not just by the industry...but by the music he calls home." Clinton Heylin gives "Blind Willie McTell" a more ambitious interpretation, describing it as "the world's eulogy, sung by an old bluesman recast as St. John the Divine."

Both "Foot Of Pride" and "Blind Willie McTell" were dropped from consideration soon after Mark Knopfler ended his involvement with the album. In later years, Knopfler claimed that "Infidels would have been a better record if I had mixed the thing, but I had to go on tour in Germany, and then Bob had a weird thing with CBS, where he had to deliver records to them at a certain time and I was away in Europe...Some of [Infidels] is like listening to roughs. Maybe Bob thought I'd rushed things because I was in a hurry to leave, but I offered to finish it after our tour. Instead, he got the engineer to do the final mix.

Dylan spent roughly a month on remixing and overdubbing, holding a number of sessions in June rerecording vocal tracks using newly rewritten lyrics. During this time, he decided to cast aside "Foot Of Pride" and "Blind Willie McTell," replacing them with "Union Sundown."

Aftermath

While Infidels was better received than its predecessor, Shot of Love, Graham Lock of New Musical Express still referred to Dylan as "culturally a spent force...a confused man trying to rekindle old fires. Rolling Stone and The Village Voice critic Robert Christgau wasn't impressed either, writing that Dylan had "turned into a hateful crackpot. Worse than his equation of Jews with Zionists with the Likud or his utterly muddled disquisition on international labor is the ital Hasidism that inspires no less than three superstitious attacks on space travel. God knows (and I use that phrase advisedly) how far off the deep end he'll go if John Glenn becomes president."

But even the skeptics found some merit in Infidels. In the same review, Christgau wrote, "All the wonted care Dylan has put into this album shows...His distaste for the daughters of Satan has gained complexity of tone--neither dismissive nor vituperative, he addresses women with a solicitousness that's strangely chilling, as if he knows what a self-serving hypocrite he's being, but only subliminally. At times I even feel sorry for him, just as he intends." Indeed, critics were unanimous in praising the overall sound, "one case where the streamlined production doesn't seem to work against the rugged authority he can still command as a singer," wrote Tim Riley. Music critic Bill Wyman conceded that "the songs are mature and complex."

Infidels would place tenth on The Village Voice's Pazz & Jop Critics Poll for 1983, Dylan's highest placement since 1975 when The Basement Tapes placed #1 and Blood on the Tracks placed #4. Years later, when outtakes like "Someone's Got A Hold Of My Heart," "Blind Willie McTell," and "Foot Of Pride" began to circulate, the album's stature would in some ways grow, becoming a missed opportunity at a potential masterpiece to some critics like Rob Bowman and Clinton Heylin.

Without a tour in 1983, Infidels still generated modest sales, selling consistently through the Christmas shopping season. CBS even produced a music video for "Sweetheart Like You," Dylan's first in the MTV era. It was followed by a second video for "Jokerman," which CBS issued as a single in February of 1984.

Meanwhile, Dylan spent the fall of 1983 recording demos and various songs at his home in Malibu, California. Rather than work alone, Dylan brought in a number of young musicians, including Charlie Sexton, drummer Charlie Quintana, and guitarist J.J. Holliday. As Heylin notes, "this was Dylan's first real dalliance with third-generation American rock & rollers." These informal sessions set the stage for Dylan's first public performances since 1981.

Late Night with David Letterman had only aired since 1982, but the groundbreaking, critically-acclaimed talk show was already a hit on late night television. After months of phone calls, Dylan agreed to appear on Late Night, and on March 22, 1984, he appeared with Quintana, Holliday, and bassist Tony Marsico. Performing three songs with his band of post-punk musicians, Dylan delivered what many consider to be his most entertaining television performance ever. The poorly-prepared but energetic combo first performed an unrehearsed version of Sonny Boy Williamson's "Don't Start Me To Talking", then a radically different arrangement of "License To Kill". The final song was a peppy, somewhat new-wave version of "Jokerman" that was to end with a harmonica solo. However, Dylan began playing before he realized the harp was in the wrong key, and the band had to riff endlessly while he stepped off-camera to retrieve the correct one. After the performance, Letterman walked onstage and congratulated Dylan, asking him if he could come back and play every Thursday. Dylan smiled and jokingly agreed.

Dylan would soon dissolve his impromptu band after their one performance on Late Night, but within a few months, Dylan would begin his first tour since 1981, and from that compile his next record.