Bob Dylan’s Infidels: Don’t Call It A Comeback

When Bob Dylan released 1983’s Infidels, Rolling Stone responded with a rapturous hallelujah.

Christopher Connelly proclaimed it “his best album since the searing Blood on the Tracks nine years ago, a stunning recovery of the lyric and melodic powers that seemed to have all but deserted him… Who could have expected so strong a rebound at this late date, especially after such flat, lifeless records as Saved or Shot of Love?”

In other words, “He’s back!” Again? No artist has released more comeback albums than Dylan. He has way more comeback albums than lesser artists have actual albums. Dylan would subsequently acknowledge the cycle and lend some credence to it. In the “New Morning” chapter of his Chronicles memoir, he wrote that “in many camps this record was referred to as a comeback album—and it was. It would be the first of many.”

Actually, the first had been 1967’s John Wesley Harding, the earth-toned enigma that he had snuck into the marketplace a couple days after Christmas in 1967. While no one was looking, he had returned from the motorcycle accident that had sidelined him a year and a half earlier. Some had speculated that he would never record or tour again, maybe never walk again. Now here he was, looking and sounding very different, but undeniably back.

With 1970’s New Morning, he was back from the debacle of Self-Portrait, which had been released to universal derision just four months earlier. Then in 1974, he was back on the road with The Band, for the first time in eight years, with Planet Waves heralding what was hailed as a return to form.

Then came the next year’s Blood on the Tracks, when he was back with the first album in almost a decade to scale the peaks of his mid-‘60s work. Even the subsequent Rolling Thunder Revue and Desire album had a comeback quality—back to the Greenwich Village gang and to the protest anthemry of “Hurricane.” Something, it seemed, had come full circle.

So, how many times can a man come back, before you call him… whatever? Where had he come back from or where was he coming back to? It’s easy to see why such a prolific shapeshifter would inspire such comeback claims, particularly among those who put his phases into little boxes with labels on them, though Dylan famously has resisted such attempts, refusing any attempts to understand him too easily.

With the “comeback” of Infidels, the elephant in the room was Jesus. This would purportedly be his return to the secular world from what had generally considered a trilogy of born-again albums. Which was a suspect assertion even then, because the previous Shot of Love had featured a similar share of secular material and some first-rate songwriting to boot. And Dylan’s spiritual streak and Biblical influences had been there from his earliest days as a recording artist. What’s more, if you’re closing the door on spiritual inquiry, you’re not likely to title an album Infidels.

What remains most impressive about Infidels is its sonic shimmer. Forty years later, it still sounds great, unlike some of the studio efforts that had preceded it (the messy Street-Legal) and would follow (the dated mid-‘80s dance-mix technology of Empire Burlesque).  Producer Mark Knopfler, from Dire Straits, had already established himself as a kindred spirit on Slow Train Coming, the first (and best) of the Jesus albums, with his spare, stinging guitar snaking its way through the album’s Muscle Shoals grooves.

Instead of the guest luminaries and drop-ins from other Dylan album sessions, Infidels featured a tight unit, providing a cohesive dynamic from track to track. Joining Knopfler on guitar was Mick Taylor, in recovery from the Rolling Stones. The world-class rhythm section was Jamaica’s premier team of drummer Sly Dunbar and bassist Robbie Shakespeare. The sessions had the sound of a working band, one that worked really well together. 

The album benefitted from this band’s snap, crackle and pop, especially when the material turned a little soggy. Though this release plainly targeted the commercial marketplace, as evinced by the videos for its first two singles, the mix of secular and spiritual wasn’t much different than on Shot of Love. And there was nothing on here that matched the firepower of that album’s “The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar” or the amazing grace of “Every Grain of Sand.”

In a pair of topical entries, Dylan offers a sharp-elbowed defense of Israel in the irony-laced “Neighborhood Bully” and more of a throwaway nod of trade-union support with “Union Sundown.” Then there’s the Satan-invoking “Man of Peace,” as strident as any of the evangelical music, and the quizzical “License to Kill.” (“Man has invented his doom/First step was touching the moon.”)

There are only eight songs on the album, with three of them more-or-less love songs, none of them ranking with Dylan’s best. Which leaves the opening “Jokerman” shouldering the “He’s back!” banner, as the accompanying video made plain. Combining iconic imagery, archival shots and contemporary footage of Dylan performing, it tries to encompass whatever “Dylanesque” might possibly mean to contemporary listeners. 

Too often, Shot of Love has been dismissed as the end of the “born-again Bob” trilogy—with diminishing returns over the course of three albums—with Infidels hailed as a new beginning, a return to some sort of form. A closer listen suggests that the two have much more in common than with the albums that came before or after. They comprise a period of profound, uneasy transition, with Dylan having determined that he didn’t need to forsake secular music for his spiritual devotion—that the two could co-exist on the same concert stage, the same album, even the same song.

The tricky part was finding the balance, as the material on both albums makes plain. (The concerts showed no similar issues, as fans had rejoiced at the return of classic material performed by this crack band.). Shot of Love was plainly more of a grab bag, where Infidels benefitted from the unified sound of the producer and band. Yet Dylan was obviously still feeling his way, not quite sure what each album should be, how it should hold together. As subsequent releases of his Bootleg Series have made plain, he had the nucleus of a stronger album than either in material he had recorded but shelved in sessions for both: “Blind Willie McTell,” “Foot of Pride,” “Caribbean Wind,” “Angelina” and some fascinating covers in a return to Self-Portrait mode.

AUDIO: Bob Dylan “Blind Willie McTell”

The problem with the whole “comeback” arc is it depends on a binary understanding. Like something out of “Amazing Grace”: He once was lost, but now he’s found, was blind but now he sees. Over this particular span of time, he had sounded a little lost well before finding Jesus, and the rest of the 1980s would seem him back on the roller coaster, close to hitting bottom over the course the decade than he had ever been before.

Flash forward to the next album, 1985’s Empire Burlesgue, which really raises the “He’s back” ante. Not only were the dance-mix drums and synths aimed squarely at the commercial marketplace of the day, but the cringeworthy videos showed how desperately he was trying to re-establish himself with the MTV Generation. The subsequent world tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers intensified the comeback clamor—he was back to the dynamic of that previous comeback tour with the Band, two decades earlier.

Yet, he would later write of that tour with Petty in Chronicles that “Tom was at the top of his game and I was at the bottom of mine.” A couple of dreadful, tossed-off albums would follow, but Dylan himself was seeing some light at the end of this tunnel: “The shows with Petty finished up in December, and I saw that instead of being stranded somewhere at the end of the story, I was actually in the prelude to the beginning of another one.”

Yes, he would be back. Again. And again.

VIDEO: Bob Dylan “Sweetheart Like You”

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Don McLeese

Don McLeese has been writing about popular culture since the Carter presidency. He was the pop music critic at the Chicago Sun-Times and the Austin American-Statesman, a senior editor at No Depression and a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone. He teaches journalism at the University of Iowa. 

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