The Alternative Number Ones: The Wallflowers’ “One Headlight”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I’m reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones. The column is now biweekly, alternating with The Number Ones on Mondays.

Bob Dylan had a pretty good year in 1997. In June, he was hospitalized for a heart condition, but he made a full recovery. Can a near-death experience be part of a good year? I'm going to say that it can, since it's 29 years later and he's still on the road. In September, Dylan performed for Pope John Paul II and a few hundred thousand other people in Italy. Three days later, he released Time Out Of Mind, a beautifully bleak comeback album that probably still stands as his greatest late-career masterpiece. Time Out Of Mind won the Pazz & Jop poll and the Album Of The Year Grammy, two distinctions that don't often align. Also, somewhere in there, Dylan's son became a rock star.

Here's a discussion question: Why did Jakob Dylan get alternative rock airplay but not Bob Dylan? One might argue that the entire idea of alternative rock, the concept that the overdriven guitar music sold to teenagers could be a vehicle for artistic and subversive expression that butted up against mainstream culture, started with Bob Dylan. Even if Dylan's '60s heyday happened long before anyone coined the term "alternative rock," he's inscribed into the DNA of everyone who ever attempted to make the stuff. I hear a ton of Dylan, for instance, just in the way that Lou Reed delivered his lines even from the very beginning of the Velvet Underground, and Reed has been in this column a couple of times. Not Dylan, though — Bob Dylan, I mean.