Continuing our celebrations of Bob Dylan’s 80th birthday, here’s the second instalment of two part feature exploring Dylan’s weirdest and most controversial decade: the Eighties. This originally appeared in Uncut’s August 2014 issue.

• READ PART ONE: Inside Bob Dylan’s 80s: “He was an agent provocateur; he had a saboteur in him”

The years of turmoil. In the second part of our Dylan In The ’80s epic, we re-evaluate Bob Dylan’s most confounding decade. From the travesty of Live Aid, via hook-ups with the Grateful Dead, the Heartbreakers and the Traveling Wilburys, to the start of the Never Ending Tour, we enlist some of Dylan’s key collaborators to uncover the riches hidden in an oft-vilified body of work. “I literally had to sort the human from the myth,” says one associate – and so, perhaps, did Dylan.

‘‘Some artists’ work speaks for itself. Some artists’ work speaks for a generation. It’s my deep personal pleasure to present for you one of America’s great voices of freedom. It can only be one man. The transcendent Bob Dylan…”

• ORDER NOW: The Complete Bob Dylan – a meticulous, left-field guide to Bob’s outstanding output since 1962

June 13, 1985. Live Aid is in its umpteenth conscience-stricken hour when Jack Nicholson excitedly introduces Dylan as the closing act at Philadelphia’s RFK Stadium, where he appears with Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood, looking flabby and distressed. In the opinion of the millions who witness it, he delivers a performance of shocking ineptitude, made worse when he dares mention the fact that people are starving in America as well as Ethiopia and maybe some of the money being raised by Live Aid could, you know, be used to pay off the debt of American farmers to US banks. This apparently gormless insensitivity confirms him in the eyes of most of the watching world as a raddled old twerp whose grasp of reality has fatally loosened. But some people are listening to what he has to say. Within two months, Farm Aid is underway at the University Of Illinois, organised by Willie Nelson with the support of Neil Young. Dylan appears with Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers as his band, and if they’d been playing under a roof, they would have blown it off.

It’s the start of a two-year touring alliance with the Heartbreakers, the True Confessions tour opening in Australasia in February 1986. There are US dates scheduled for June and July, and Columbia prompt Dylan for a new album to coincide with them. Dylan duly obliges with his sixth studio album in seven years. Knocked Out Loaded is assembled – haphazardly, even desperately, in subsequent opinion – from sessions going back as far as November 1984 at Cherokee Studios in LA, where many of the basic tracks that Arthur Baker turns into Empire Burlesque are recorded.

“Empire Burlesque and Knocked Out Loaded are essentially one album,” says guitarist Ira Ingber, younger brother of Elliot Ingber, who was in the original Mothers Of Invention but is perhaps better known as Winged Eel Fingerling in Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band. Ira, a veteran of the LA music scene who’s played with JD Souther, Jennifer Warnes and Van Dyke Parks, gets a call in late 1984 from an old schoolfriend, Gary Shafner, who’s now working for Dylan. According to Shafner, Dylan’s putting a band together for an unspecified project, perhaps a new album. Would Ira be interested in being part of whatever might happen next?

“They had just done Infidels,” Ingber tells Uncut, “and Bob was back pretty much living at his place in Malibu. There was some new-found interest to go in another direction, but it wasn’t clear what it was.” Ingber is duly summoned to Dylan’s Point Dume compound in Malibu.

“Bob was an idol, just huge. The first thing I had to do was get over my schoolgirl crush. We talked for a minute or two, then he pulled out three or four pages of typewritten song lists, and he said, ‘D’you know any of these?’ I said, ‘…yeah.’ So we started playing. He’s playing acoustic, I’m playing acoustic, and one voice in my head is saying, ‘I’m playing “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue” with Bob Dylan. Right now.’ And the other part of my head is saying, ‘You’re playing with Bob Dylan but don’t think about it.’ I had to sort the human from the myth. But it worked out fine. We got on, and then we started talking about a band.”

Ingber calls some friends: Vince Melamed, a keyboard player he’s worked with in JD Souther’s band, bass player Carl Sealove and drummer Charlie Quintana, who is eventually replaced by Don Heffington from Lone Justice. “This core group came together in late 1984,” Ingber goes on. “The three of us went up to Bob’s house, on a daily basis for some weeks. There were a number of houses on the property and this one was empty, except for a bunch of equipment he had in there. We would play some of his old stuff, or he’d bring a tape, or he’d start playing a song and we wouldn’t know what it was – sometimes an old classic, sometimes even a demo that someone had sent him. Not all of it was his material, which I thought was interesting. He came to me one day and he told me he wanted to learn to play Ray Charles’ ‘Come Rain Or Come Shine’ on guitar. Because it’s arranged for an orchestra, not a guitar, there are some very complex chords. ‘I said, “Wouldn’t it be easier if we just did it and you could sing it and not bother playing?” He was insistent – so I did an arrangement and I don’t even know if we got as far as trying to play it, because the chords involved were a little beyond his comfort level on the guitar, so the whole thing kind of went away. But the scope of this work we were doing up in Malibu was very far ranging, that’s the best way I can describe it.

“Dylan taped everything on this boom box he had. It was funny, there was a PA set up in this house we were rehearsing in. But he’d never sing into the PA. He would sing either into one of our ears – like, stand next to me, and sing straight into my ear – or he’d sing into the boom box. I kept saying, ‘You know, if you sang into the mic, it might sound…’ And he’d be, ‘No. No. I donwanna do that.’”

After several weeks of rehearsals, the band is assembled at Cherokee Studios in Hollywood, where among the tracks recorded is “New Danville Girl”, which Dylan re-writes and re-records subsequently as “Brownsville Girl”. Sessions continue at Cherokee through November, before Dylan completes what has become Empire Burlesque in New York, with Arthur Baker producing. When the album comes out, Ingber is not impressed by what he hears.

“I was disappointed based on what I had heard at the original recordings,” he says. “Charitably, I think Empire Burlesque and to a lesser degree Knocked Out Loaded were victims of what I call ‘’80s-itis’. Both those albums had some really wonderful performances, but the production obscured a lot of it, because back then the overuse of things like digital reverb was really prevalent. The records suffered because of it – I suspect that if somebody went back into the master tapes and had another look, I bet that these would be amazing recordings.”

The True Confessions tour of Australia and Japan with Petty and the Heartbreakers finishes on March 10, at Tokyo’s Budokan Hall. In mid-April, Dylan’s in Skyline Studios in Topanga Canyon. He’s tried to accommodate modern recording methods with Mark Knopfler and Arthur Baker on Infidels and Empire Burlesque and been frustrated and dismayed by the process. He now wants to return to the way he made records in the ’60s – live in the studio, quickly and intuitively. He thinks he can record a new album in a week to meet the deadline for the upcoming US dates with the Heartbreakers. A large cast of musicians are invited to Skyline for sessions that seem to have no coherent direction, including Los Lobos, T Bone Burnett, Al Kooper, Steve Douglas, the saxophonist with the Wrecking Crew, Stevie Wonder’s drummer Raymond Pounds, bassist James Jamerson Jr and Blasters guitarist Dave Alvin. Ira Ingber is also present and like Kooper is dismayed by Dylan’s startling lack of confidence in what he’s doing.

“His inclination to add more and more musicians, certainly in the latter set of recordings I did with him – as opposed to that small core group we started out with in 1984 – I think that indicates that he did lose confidence in the songs themselves, and his place in the songs,” Inbger says. “I think he thought it could be made up by just obscuring it, with more instruments, background singers, whatever. It happened a lot even during his vocal recordings. I think he’s one of the world’s greatest singers, period. I believe everything he says when he sings. There’s a complete credibility. But a lot of times back then, the vocal take wouldn’t show that.

“There was a moment early on in working with him at Cherokee Studios, when I found myself in the recording booth, and, again, there was no producer. It was just me and an engineer, George Tutko. Bob was singing and he blew a line. He said from out in the recording room, ‘How was that?’ I said George, ‘Do I tell him or do you tell him?’ George said, ‘I’m not gonna tell him.’ I’m thinking, if I tell him that this isn’t working and he gets pissed off, then that’s the end of that. But if I don’t tell him, then I haven’t done my job. So I push the talkback and I say, ‘It sounded good, Bob, but I think you’ve probably got a better end part to that than the one you got there…’ There was this looooong pause. I’m thinking, oh, here we go. But finally, he said, ‘OK. Let’s do it again.’ This wave of relief came over me, because at that moment he started trusting me. Somebody had to drive the bus, there was no producer, and for someone like Bob out there singing and playing, it’s very difficult to know when you’re on target. That’s one of the jobs of a producer to, hopefully, gently, guide without interfering.

“So that’s what I started doing in that early set of recordings. Then in the second set, a lot of that was gone. Bob was hearing from a lot of other people, sometimes too many people. That lack of confidence was surprising to me. It would vary from day to day, song to song, and it didn’t feel to me as though there was a singular focus, of ‘This is what I’m doing. This is the record I’m making. This is my point of view.’ It seemed very scattershot.”

Reviews of the album are unilaterally hostile, as derisive as anything written about Saved or Shot Of Love. In another opinion, the opening version of Junior Parker’s “You Wanna Ramble” is a gas. Take away the backing vocals, toughen up the guitars, thicken up the sound and it could be something you might hear on Modern Times or Together Through Life. “Maybe Someday” and “Got My Mind Made Up” are good-humoured loose-limbed lopes. The version of the country gospel standard “Precious Memories”, meanwhile, has an appealing end-of-the-trail feel to it and an affecting vocal. The steel drums are an eccentric if lovely touch that make the thing sound somewhat like the Carter Family via the Caribbean. Carole Bayer Sager gets a co-writing credit on the creepy “Under Your Spell”, which has echoes of Planet Waves’ “Wedding Song” and the fevered desperation of “Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat)” from Street-Legal.

Best of all is “Brownsville Girl”. It’s a song, one of the finest in his pantheon, about memory, identity, legend, loyalty, death and love across 11 action-packed minutes, Dylan throwing everything at this version, where the original was spare, acoustic and drifting. The KOL take is almost frantic, with Dylan often delivering its many great lines in a kind of delirium, the song revolving around half-remembered scenes from a Gregory Peck Western about an ageing gunfighter shot in the back by a craven young gunslinger. With Dylan’s Queens Of Rhythm, hollering like a cross between the Ikettes and the chorus in a classical Greek drama, the song follows two young lovers on a roadtrip across Texas and Mexico, and back to New Orleans, Dylan singing his ass off in one of his most audacious vocal performances ever. The album doesn’t even make it into the US Top 50.

The US True Confessions tour ends in Paso Robles on August 6. By the end of the month, Dylan’s in England
for Hearts Of Fire, a movie so dire it’s barely shown in UK cinemas and goes straight to video in the US, Bob playing a washed-up rock star a bit too close to the bone for many.

The only good thing to come out of the experience is the BBC Omnibus documentary, Getting To Dylan, in which he gives an interview in Ontario in his trailer, during which he draws director Christopher Sykes, sniffs a lot and appears quite lost.

In May 1987, Dylan goes out with the Grateful Dead for a six-date stadium tour that makes him a lot of money (he insists on a 70-30 split of the profits) but is considered otherwise worthless, a view reinforced when the Dylan & The Dead live album is released in February 1989. Whatever turned out to be the incompatibilities that prevented Dylan and the Dead from sounding at any given point like they were actually playing the same songs, Dylan, so jaded by now and adrift of himself and who he has been, digs the way the Dead make music. As strained as the short tour is, he feels by his later admission in Chronicles the beginning of a personal revival.

In September, he’s back with Petty and the Heartbreakers for the start of the Temples In Flames tour, the first shows of which are in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and not well-received, things picking up somewhat when they reach Europe. On stage at the Piazza Grande in Locarno, Switzerland, on October 5, nine days before I see him at Wembley, Dylan is consumed by rejuvenation and a new sense of mission.

“It’s almost as if I heard it as a voice,” he later recalls. “It wasn’t like it was even me thinking it: ‘I’m determined to stand, whether God will deliver me or not.’ And all of a sudden everything just exploded every which way. I sort of knew – I’ve got to go out and play these songs. That’s just what I must do.”

Let’s say this about Bob Dylan in the ’80s, those years of turmoil. He stands his ground, even when it’s shifting beneath him. Whatever the ferocity of critical opinion, self-doubt, the vilification of his deepest beliefs, he keeps going. You have to hand him that. And here he is in early 1988, with George Harrison, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne in The Traveling Wilburys. The group comes together when Harrison, Orbison, Petty and Lynne fetch up at Dylan’s Point Dume compound to record a B-side for “This Is Love”, a single from Harrison’s Cloud Nine album. When the chums are assembled, they bash out a song called “Handle With Care” and have so much fun apparently they decide to make an album together. Bill Bottrell, who engineers the session and has worked extensively with Lynne, remembers, however, that Dylan, prior to the recording, summons Lynne, who he doesn’t know, over to Malibu for a kind of audition.

“Jeff called me one day,” he recalls, “and said, ‘We have to go to Bob Dylan’s house…’ At that point, Bob was the only one of those guys Jeff hadn’t worked with. George had made the phone calls to get everybody together, I think, but before anything else happened, Bob wanted to check out Jeff. So Jeff and I went to Bob’s house one day and they sat down with two acoustic guitars and recorded a version of ‘I’m In The Mood For Love’ together.

“It may have been a couple of months, maybe more, that the guys got together at Dylan’s house to record. I drove Jeff down there and we started setting up in the garage. There was all this gear Dylan had bought from Dave Stewart sitting there, not really working. Jeff and I had to quickly plug it all together and make it work as much as possible. It was hilarious.

It was a real garage. You know, like Sheetrock, plasterboard walls, a metal garage door, the kind that rolls up. There may even have been lawnmowers in there. But when you’ve got Roy Orbison singing, the room doesn’t matter. It’s still going to sound like Roy.”

The album’s charming, just about, with Dylan’s affectionate “Tweeter And The Monkey Man” a terrific highlight, and puts Bob back in the charts, which is more than can be said for his own new album, Down In The Groove, which has again been assembled from a sprawl of sessions, Dylan drawing on a lot of cover versions. Melody Maker exclusively announces the album in January 1988. Columbia seem in no hurry to put it out, however, and it’s anyway damned before release when in February, The Observer carries a story about it under the dramatic headline, ‘Dylan’s disaster’, that claims the album – full of “unsavoury boogie” – has been indefinitely postponed, which seems like a euphemistic way of telling us it’s been unceremoniously dumped from their schedules. When I call Columbia in New York for an update, I’m told by someone who sounds like she’s chewing gum and balancing a small balloon on her nose that it will eventually come out, but is currently “unassigned”, which makes it sound like it’s languishing in some shadowy netherworld, unreachable by man.

When it’s finally released in June, Dylan again is largely criticised for not being the Dylan people want him to be (which is to say, the last Dylan he would himself want to be). It’s another album mostly of covers of R’n’B, folk, country and rock’n’roll standards. The most notable of the Dylan originals is the hilariously bleak “Death Is Not The End”, originally written for Infidels. The album’s another resounding flop, although we wouldn’t end up arguing if you told me you were a fan of its rowdy clatter and enjoyed it as a passing insight into the kind of music Dylan grew up listening to, like a harder rocking Self Portrait, Paul Simonon of The Clash and former Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones helping things along on a booting version of “Sally Sue Brown”, which by presumable coincidence had just worked its way into sets by Elvis Costello, then touring with The Confederates. Elsewhere, The Stanley Brothers’ “Rank Strangers To Me” is eerily covered, the traditional “Shenandoah” is a shimmering hallucination and “Ninety Miles An Hour Down A Dead End Street” gloriously sombre.

A tour’s announced for June to coincide with the album’s release, something Bob calls Interstate 88. No-one’s in a rush to buy tickets to see what they imagine will be a dead horse being flogged on another tour to promote an album they’re not going to buy. Interstate 88, however, is the start of something else. Dylan’s been rehearsing with guitarist GE Smith, bassist Kenny Aaronson and drummer Chris Parker who – with Neil Young in tow – make their debut at the Concord Pavilion in California. Their first number is “Subterranean Homesick Blues”. It’s never been played live before, an indication that something’s afoot. The show is in many respects chaotic, with Neil and GE Smith screaming chord changes at each other behind an oblivious Dylan. Not many people there realise they are witness to a historic moment. It’s the first night, of course, of what becomes known as the Never Ending Tour, which comes sensationally to London in June 1989, Dylan looking trim in a gambler’s black frock coat where two years earlier he’d looked like a bedraggled derelict.

There are terrific takes on hallowed songs from his back catalogue, played with a ferocious intensity, scalding versions of “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and “Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again” still livid in the memory. There’s a marvellous acoustic interlude, too, featuring just Dylan and GE Smith on lovely versions of “It Ain’t Me Babe”, “The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll” and an exquisite “Boots Of Spanish Leather”.

Dylan that unforgettable night at Wembley Arena is rejuvenated, born-again if you like. He’s been writing, too, although by 1988, according to his own version of things, he no longer even thinks of himself as a songwriter. In Chronicles, Dylan alludes to a hand injury that leaves him in a cast. During his recovery from this vague injury and unable to play guitar, paint or draw, he writes, adding little more about this apparently miraculous creative recovery. The songs aren’t coming quite as fast or easily as they once did. But there are enough of them eventually – more than 20, he reckons later – for a new album he’s soon making in New Orleans with Daniel Lanois. The Canadian producer’s worked successfully with Robbie Robertson and Peter Gabriel and more recently with U2 bringing the kind of atmospheric textures to The Joshua Tree that Bono tells Bob over dinner will be perfect for the new songs Dylan has played him.

Back in September 1988, the Interstate 88 tour hits New Orleans and Dylan turns up at Lanois’ studio on St Charles Street, where Lanois is working with The Neville Brothers on their Yellow Moon album. Lanois’ recording methods appeal immediately to Dylan. For all his studio expertise, Lanois favours the feel and atmosphere of spontaneous performance over technical perfection. The Interstate 88 tour climaxes in October with a barnstorming four-night run at New York’s Radio City Music Hall. In March 1989, he’s back in New Orleans to start working with Lanois on what becomes Oh Mercy. Perhaps mindful of the disarray Dylan has recently brought to recording sessions by inviting all and sundry to call in and play on whatever he’s doing, Lanois insists that Oh Mercy will feature only his own hand-picked crew of engineers and musicians, people who can work quickly and intuitively to accommodate Dylan’s whims. The hot little band he assembles includes Lanois himself on guitar, dobro and Omnichord, engineer Malcolm Burn on guitar and keyboards, supplemented by guitarist Mason Ruffner, percussionist Cyril Neville and The Neville Brothers’ rhythm section of drummer Willie Green, bassist Tony Hall and guitarist Brian Stoltz.

“We had a party one night here in New Orleans,” Stoltz tells Uncut. “The Grateful Dead were coming to town. I was playing with The Neville Brothers at the time and they threw a party for the Dead. They rented a fishing camp out on Lake Pontchartrain and just had a big crab-boil. During the party Dan asked me, ‘Brian, if you had the opportunity to produce either Stevie Ray Vaughan or Bob Dylan – which one would you do?’ I busted out laughing. ‘Man, do you even have to ask? You already know the answer to that. You gotta do Bob.’ Dan started laughing, that was his way of asking if I’d play on the album. There was no further discussion until I got the call and went to the studio.

“The Neville Brothers had worked in a big room on St Charles Street but by then Dan had moved everything over to Soniat Street, uptown. It was a big, old Victorian house. The whole place was set up for Bob – Dan really likes to set things up geared toward the artist. Bob had already been over to the house on St Charles Street, to listen to some songs and he really liked the set-up. He liked the idea that it was in a house, he liked that it wasn’t some sterile, generic studio.”

The first song Stoltz works on is “Political World”, one of the first Dylan writes for the new album. Dylan’s already had one stab at recording it, but is unable to find the right arrangement. Lanois now thinks he can make the song work with a new one he’s come up with.

“Dan had an idea for a little groove,” Stoltz recalls, “kind of a funkier groove. I remember we ran through it a few times before Bob got there. Bob came walking in the room when we were playing. He said, ‘What’s that?’ Dan said, ‘It’s a little something we’re working up for “Political World”.’ And Bob said, ‘“Political World”? It don’t go like that! It goes like this.’ He picked up a guitar and started playing it and we all jumped in – and my memory is that’s the track you hear on the record. If you listen to ‘Political World’, you can hear how Willie [Green] doesn’t even come in with the beat because he was jumping in after Bob.

“There wasn’t a lot of time getting to know each other. It was immediately getting to work: here are the songs. Bob would show us something and if it didn’t work, we’d try it again. If it still didn’t work, we’d move on. When we were tracking, there wasn’t a whole lot of time spent trying to rework tracks. It was either happening or it wasn’t.

“For the most part, it seemed like he had a lot of lyrics and he had melodies for some of them, but for many he didn’t and it seemed like he was just working them out. He’d sit down and show us what he had and we took it from there. I think he had a really good idea what the songs were, he knew where they were going lyrically – obviously, because he would come in with, jeez, just unbelievable amounts of lyrics, verses and verses. ‘Political World’ must have had, like, 25 verses. I remember he would come in every night and head straight to the kitchen, pour a coffee and start working on his lyrics, editing, rewriting. When we were working on ‘Political World’, he had a sheet in front of him that he was singing off, but then there were all these other sheets lying on the floor. I’ve never seen anybody who could fit so many verses on one page – and it was just amazing to watch how he’d rework them and then get it down to how it ended up. In most instances he knew what the song was, the spirit of the song, the essence of it. The way they got interpreted was another thing.”

Dylan offers his own account of the making of Oh Mercy in Chronicles that hints at an inner turmoil that makes the initial sessions unexpectedly fraught and brings him into conflict with Lanois. Nothing seems to satisfy Bob at this point. He rejects the producer’s ideas and the arrangements cooked up by the band, despite the enormous patience Lanois displays as he attempts to accommodate Dylan’s indecision, constant revisions and general stubbornness. At times, it must have seemed like an impossible task, like hammering a nail into a plank with a feather. An album, however, is eventually made.

There is a further confrontation between Dylan and Lanois, however, over what will be on the final version. Chuck Plotkin, Mark Knopfler, Ira Ingber and Arthur Baker have all been left aghast at Dylan’s perverse omission of key tracks from Shot Of Love (“Caribbean Wind”, “Angelina”), Infidels (“Blind Willie McTell”, “Foot Of Pride”) and Empire Burlesque (the E Street Band version of “When The Night Comes Falling From The Sky”, “New Danville Girl”). Lanois is now appalled when Dylan drops the miasmic “Series Of Dreams”, a fantastic track unlike anything Dylan’s previously essayed, and decides also to ditch one of the first songs written for the album, “Dignity”. Lanois argues for the inclusion of both, risking Dylan’s wrath. It’s another tense moment in their relationship.

For the best of the decade, Dylan has been mostly vilified by fans who have felt betrayed by his perverse waywardness. They have perhaps not fully grasped what possibly can be seen as a protracted attempt in these years by Dylan to strip away the mystique that has attached itself to him, to deny the predictive powers attributed to him by fans convinced of his far-sightedness to shed himself of the burden of unreasonable expectation, to always be the Dylan his fans expect him to be. This is the Dylan who in their presumption he has lost sight of, the Dylan of cascading visions, infallible.

If it has indeed been Dylan’s intention to turn himself into a journeyman musician, he has all too often in the recent past succeeded. But these fans listen to Oh Mercy and there are glimpses of the Dylan they have missed on the churning rockers “Political World” and “Everything Is Broken”, jittery litanies of woe, anxiety, terror and dread. There are echoes of his earlier militant evangelism on “Where Teardrops Fall” and “Ring Them Bells”, but even at its most oratorical, Oh Mercy is largely free of the scalding sermons of Saved and Shot Of Love. There is appreciation, too, of “Man In The Long Black Cloak”, whose chilling narrative can be traced back to the traditional “House Carpenter” but owes perhaps as much to the Southern Gothic of the Robert Mitchum movie The Night Of The Hunter.

The stark nocturnal blues and self-examination of “What Good Am I?” and the lacerating “Disease Of Conceit” are regarded as highlights, too. Better yet, though, is the deep-hewn regret of “Most Of The Time”, Dylan sounding both wry and vulnerable over the low rolling thunder of guitar feedback, fractured harmonics, cloudbursts of melting dissonance. The two songs that close the album, meanwhile, seem to directly address his audience and their demands of him. “What Was It You Wanted” is chiding, “Shooting Star” elegiac.

There is some dissent over the sonic landscape Lanois contrives for the album, but on the whole Oh Mercy on its release in September 1989 is hailed as a great return in a year that also sees major comeback albums from Neil Young with Freedom and Lou Reed with New York. Dylan’s back, the headlines proclaim, although as ever no-one is quite specific about which Dylan they’re talking about. Whatever, hallelujahs generally abound.

The euphoria doesn’t last, of course. Dylan’s next album is panned, Under The Red Sky dismissed as a sorry follow-up to Oh Mercy, largely misunderstood. There will be no new original songs for seven long years, until he returns in 1997 with Time Out Of Mind, when the last great act of his career begins.

Continuing our celebrations of Bob Dylan’s 80th birthday, here’s the first instalment of two part feature exploring Dylan’s weirdest and most controversial decade: the Eighties. This originally appeared in Uncut’s July 2014 issue.

• READ PART TWO: Working with Bob Dylan: “I had to sort the human from the myth”

As the 1970s draw to a close, BOB DYLAN is embarking on the weirdest and most controversial phase of his storied career. He has embraced Christianity with apocalyptic fervour. His fans, though, are less faithful: “Jesus loves your old songs, too,” notes one infidel. In the first part of a major new survey, Uncut and many of his old collaborators reconsider Dylan’s 1980s, and discover a neglected treasure trove of music. “People felt that Bob disappeared into a kind of black hole. Whereas Bob would say, ‘No: that’s a hole full of light…’”

October 14, 1987. A couple of nights later, a hurricane roars through the south of England, but it’s nothing compared to the inclemency that attaches itself to Bob Dylan’s appearance this evening at London’s Wembley Arena. Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers are already lined up onstage, waiting for him, when Bob blows out of the wings like something scary out of Revelation, that book of wrath and apocalypse, a wicked messenger, fire in his eyes and blood coming to the boil. He’s wearing a bandana around his head, Apache-style, a grubby silk shirt tied in a knot at his waist, weather-beaten leather trousers and jacket, biker boots and fingerless motorcycle gloves.

• ORDER NOW: The Complete Bob Dylan – a meticulous, left-field guide to Bob’s outstanding output since 1962

His arachnid scurry brings him quickly to a microphone, already singing the opening lines of “Like A Rolling Stone”. Petty and The Heartbreakers, perhaps not expecting this as the show’s opening number, jump to attention like dozing sentries startled by gunfire. There’s an all-hands-on-deck bustle about them as they manfully respond to what looks like being caught on the hop – and not for the first time, you imagine, on a two-year tour of duty with Dylan that most nights have found them on a knife edge, no predicting where from moment to moment Bob’s legendary whim will take them.

That night at Wembley Arena in October 1987, one of the last dates of the aptly named Temples In Flames tour, storm clouds already massing somewhere and a great wind beginning to stir, Dylan’s 15-song setlist is a generous career-span that includes alongside more recent songs from largely unpopular albums crowd favourites “Maggie’s Farm”, “Forever Young”, “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight”, “I Want You”, “The Ballad Of Frankie Lee And Judas Priest”, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” and “Chimes Of Freedom”. These aren’t, however, songs that Dylan revisits happily and few of them bear an exact resemblance to what they sounded like when the audience first heard them.

The sound that comes to me now when I think of the show is a garage band howl, abrasive, unruly and loud. It’s at times cacophonous and ragged enough to make large sections of the audience feel witness to a kind of desecration, Dylan vandalising his own past in what seems as the show goes on increasingly like a conscious attempt to reconnect with songs that by his own later admission had lost all meaning for him by first dismantling them. By the time the set ends with a delirious version of “Shot Of Love” that at one point begins to resemble the calamitous rumble of “Gimme Shelter”, and the nightmarish two-chord shriek of “In The Garden”, the audience is for the most part palpably aghast.

There’s a rippling disgruntlement in the seats around me where many venerable Dylan fans are gathered in muttering disapproval of what’s happening, which is as dreadful to them as it is a revelation to me. John Peel about now taps me aggressively on the shoulder and asks if I agree that what we are sitting through is a grim travesty, a reduction of a formerly great artist to abject mediocrity and worse. He’s shocked, I’d say even angry, when I contrarily offer a different opinion. He subsequently writes a scathing newspaper review describing Dylan as an irrelevant has-been, an embarrassment to his loyal and now long-suffering fans.

This is increasingly the prevailing view of Dylan. For many at this point in the ’80s, Dylan is coming to the end of a dismal decade during which he has found God, embraced messianic evangelism and as a born-again Christian fundamentalist cast himself as a fire-and-brimstone preacher, the stage a pulpit from which he delivers hell-fire sermons about the coming end of the world that have made him seem like a demented crackpot. His faith, it’s commonly held, has ruined his music, reduced its former poetry to harsh dogma to a point where it’s mostly rejected, at best held up to ridicule. His albums have stopped selling, their rapidly declining sales alarming his label who are as distraught as his audience by the ‘new direction’ he’s stubbornly been determined to follow whatever the cost to a reputation that by now has also been tarnished by the further embarrassments of the dire Hearts Of Fire movie and an appearance at Live Aid in July 1985 whose apparently crass incompetence leaves even staunch admirers cringing in disbelief. As the decade ends, in other words, Dylan is almost universally reviled as hapless, bereft of anything you could call inspiration, creatively bankrupt, in terminal artistic decline, a deluded clown, a religious fanatic unmoored from reality, or what usually passes for it, pathetic and forlorn.

This at least is one way of looking at Dylan in the ’80s. What follows is another.

Christ comes to Dylan in a hotel room in Tucson, Arizona, in November 1978. Bob senses “a presence in the room that could only be Jesus”, feels the hand of Christ upon him, his body, in his later account, trembling at the holy touch. “The glory of the Lord knocked me down and picked me up,” he subsequently attests. He is ready to be born again, accept Christ as his messiah, in contradiction of the Jewish faith in which he has grown up – and even now will not fully relinquish, as he tries to reconcile Judaism’s rejection of Christ as the son of God with the evangelical Christianity he now fully embraces, in which Christ will deliver salvation to the true believer even as the agnostic are eternally damned.

In the years that follow, there’s much speculation about the apparent suddenness of Dylan’s conversion, as if religion has not been central previously to so much of what he’s done. You could point to John Wesley Harding, that great album of parable and myth, as perhaps the most obvious manifestation of the Bible’s influence on Dylan’s writing, but by any reasonable assessment it’s no more a singular example than his conversion is the result of unpredictable whim.

In one emerging narrative, Dylan at this time is made vulnerable to conversion by the exhausting mental and physical toll of recent events – a costly and bitter divorce, the nine-month slog of the so-called Alimony Tour during which he would play 114 shows in 10 countries on four different continents. Drugs, a lot of them, and much hard drinking would also play their part in this version of things and make him easily susceptible to the word of the Lord. It should not be forgotten, however, that his band at the time includes several musicians who had already, as they say, ‘received Christ’ – Steven Soles and David Mansfield, who along with fellow Rolling Thunder revue veterans T Bone Burnett and Roger McGuinn have lately converted to Christianity.

Whatever, Dylan soon commits himself to 14 weeks of intense Bible studies with the Vineyard Fellowship, an evangelical group based in Reseda, in the San Fernando Valley, from which he emerges gripped by the idea of a returning messiah and an unshakable faith in the inevitability of a coming apocalypse, as predicted in the Book Of Revelation, that will only be survived by the truly righteous. For good measure, he is also now wholly convinced that man is born in sin and Satan is everywhere a malign presence. He also has a bunch of songs that give voice to his new beliefs that he now wants to record, hiring Jerry Wexler as producer and a band including Mark Knopfler on guitar that convenes in April 1978 at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Sheffield, Alabama to record Slow Train Coming, a full-blown Christian rock album, the first of three records that test to the point of estrangement his relationship with his audience.

When it comes out in November 1979, the album’s religious ‘message’, the strident imperatives of “Gotta Serve Somebody”, “Slow Train”, “Gonna Change My Way Of Thinking” and “When You Gonna Wake Up”, is not an immediate concern. Most people are simply relieved that they have a Dylan album that unlike his last, Street-Legal, they can listen to without wincing at its plodding production and largely leaden playing. They make Slow Train Coming an enormous commercial success that sells more in its first nine months of release than Blood On The Tracks does in nearly a decade. “Gotta Serve Somebody” even wins him a Grammy for Best Rock Vocal of the year. Dylan is not yet cast as a crass Bible-thumper, despite the dark murmurings of some critics disturbed by what seems to them a terrible allegiance with the emerging Christian Right, the so-called Moral Majority mobilised by Ronald Reagan, Republican evangelists with sorry views on abortion, gay and women’s rights, liberal inclinations of most kinds, to which Dylan now seems also to appallingly adhere.

They listen to Slow Train Coming and hear only the harsh word of Dylan’s unforgiving sermonising. The album for them was pitiless, cold and austere. Nick Cave, whose favourite album it apparently is, would describe Slow Train Coming as “full of mean-spirited spirituality. It’s a genuinely nasty record.” How could anyone who’d been besotted with the libertarian hipster that Dylan had been relate to the grim prophet of doom now before them? The goodwill that has elsewhere been extended to Dylan and Slow Train Coming on its release doesn’t go much further. It in fact almost entirely evaporates when Dylan announces that on his upcoming tour he won’t be playing any of his old songs, the pre-conversion favourites his audience will be disappointed not to hear, some of them now turning against Dylan.

In November 1979, the Slow Train Coming tour opens with 14 shows at the Warfield Theatre in San Francisco with a terrific band featuring Jim Keltner on drums, Muscle Shoals veteran Spooner Oldham on keyboards, Tim Drummond, who’s served time with both James Brown and Neil Young, on bass and lead guitarist Fred Tackett, who’s been touring with Lowell George until Lowell’s sudden death in June. There’s a host of backing singers, too, most of them at one time or another romantically involved with Dylan. The shows in many respects are fantastic, as tapes of the dates serially attest. But there are howls of critical disapproval and elements of the audience are made restless and uncomfortable by Bob’s relentless Bible-bashing, song after self-righteous song, and what come to be known as Dylan’s ‘Jesus raps’, fevered sermons about persecution, betrayal and, up ahead, the end of the world.

“Bob was on a mission and we were all doing everything we could to promote it,” recalls Fred Tackett. “And there was a combination of different responses. It was like a circus, sometimes. We had Madalyn O’Hair, the famous American atheist, picketing in the streets outside some of the places we played back East. And at the same time, there was a guy dressed up like Jesus carrying a cross up the street. So, out in the street, outside the shows, there was a complete circus going on. The best thing I saw was when we were playing at the Warfield in San Francisco: there was a guy sitting in the front row, and he’d made this big sign: JESUS LOVES YOUR OLD SONGS TOO. I remember seeing that and thinking, ‘Yeah, well, good point.’”

Dylan’s sets across the 14-night stand at the Warfield mainly put a spotlight on Slow Train Coming, but he also debuts new songs, including “Saved”, “Saving Grace”, “Covenant Woman”, “In The Garden”, “What Can I Do For You” and “Hanging On To A Solid Rock Made Before The Foundation Of The World”. There are enough of them in fact for a whole new album, which he starts recording in Muscle Shoals on February 11, 1980, with Jerry Wexler again producing with Barry Beckett.

Pathologically opposed to modern recording techniques, unswervingly attached to the idea that his songs are best-served by spontaneity, suffer when they are over-rehearsed and inevitably ruined by overdubs, multiple takes and constant revision, Dylan sets aside a mere four days during a break from touring to make the record.

“Saved was done real old-style,” says Fred Tackett. “Jerry Wexler was talking to us about it and he said it was just like when he worked with the Ray Charles band. We were on the road, doing the tour, and we basically just pulled the bus into Muscle Shoals, Alabama, went into the studio for four days, then got back on the bus and drove away. And, you know, Bob’s basically saying as we leave, ‘Send me a copy when it’s done.’ He didn’t participate in the mix: we recorded the songs, basically live, and then got back on the bus to get to the next show. And, yeah, Jerry Wexler pointed out, that’s the way Ray Charles and all those other people would do it, too. There wasn’t like some big, months-long preparation, and then months spent in the studio. It was, ‘Well, today, we’re dropping by the studio, and we’re going to record.’ That’s the way that one worked. It was a real lot of fun, it was great. It felt kind of historic.”

Dylan’s first album of the decade, Saved is released in May, 1980. Critics and fans agree it’s entirely superfluous. They’ve indulged Dylan one religious album, much as they had allowed the country eccentricities of Nashville Skyline. They are not now inclined, however, to accommodate more of the same from an artist not previously known to repeat himself. Reviews are scathing, sales poor. This is a nadir for Dylan many high-handedly decide on everyone’s behalf – even the few who find it demonstrably a more exciting album than either Slow Train Coming or the lumpy Street-Legal. Such is the contempt in which Saved continues to be held that even now such an admission is sure to bring down the wrath of know-it-all Dylan scholars upon the lonely contrarian.

The opening version of the venerable “Satisfied Mind” is genuinely weird, Dylan and his four backing singers murmuring and wailing, a mingling of testifying voices over snatches of scratchy guitar, speculative bar-room piano and military snare drum rolls. It sounds like something made up on the spot and lasts barely two minutes. “Saved” itself is as sensationally rowdy as “Covenant Woman” is dreamily lovely. “Solid Rock”, meanwhile, blasts off like something hard-riffing by the Allman Brothers while “What Can I Do For You” has a warmth and humility entirely absent from Slow Train Coming, although the subservience to which Dylan attests is disturbing for a lot of people who have invested so much in Dylan’s supremacy and are uncomfortable with this subordinate version. “Pressing On”, in John Doe’s version one of the highlights of the I’m Not There soundtrack, is wonderfully stirring and is even to the unbeliever genuinely uplifting. “In The Garden”, meanwhile, vividly dramatises the arrest of Christ in Gethsemane, from which he was taken for trial and crucifixion, more measured in its telling here than the firestorm it would be in concert.

The album may, however, be best remembered by many – typically, with an unpleasant shiver – for its sleeve, a lurid illustration by Tony Wright based on a dream Dylan had of the bloodied finger of Christ pointing down to the upraised hands of the suffering world. It looked like something you might see tattooed on the back of a serial killer, Robert De Niro as Max Cady in Scorsese’s fevered remake of Cape Fear coming quickly to mind.

There’s slightly better news for Dylan fans who have not been thrilled by the turn of events that has delivered Dylan to God when he goes back on tour and surprises them by relenting on his earlier dedication to playing only post-conversion songs and reassuringly including in his sets a raft of old classics. Was this a tactical retreat on Dylan’s part, an attempt to appease disgruntled followers, or early evidence that he too was beginning to find the religious songs confining?

“There was nothing said about it,” Fred Tackett recalls. “We just started rehearsing them again at this place he owned in Santa Monica. One day we started playing ‘Girl From The North Country’ and ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ and stuff like that. It was just that we’d be doing that instead of ‘Saved’ or something. But we were still doing those tunes as well, and we were also doing songs from what would be the next record, Shot Of Love, which had some more secular songs on it. But I’ll tell you, the tour we did then, we played two or three weeks at the Warfield Theatre in San Francisco – we did that twice at the Warfield, first in ’79 and then again at the end of 1980 – and the first night of the second time was the first time we came out and we did ‘Like A Rolling Stone’. I think we’d done a couple of the religious-style songs first, but when we started to play the intro to ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ and the crowd started to realise what was going down, people were going, ‘Oh, my God…’ You could hear the joy from people, just hearing this song – it honestly sent a chill down my spine. That was really, definitely, a big moment in my musical life, being on that stage when he started doing that again. People were just hollering out, you know.”

April, 1981. Chuck Plotkin who’s recently mixed The River for Bruce Springsteen after earlier working on Darkness On The Edge Of Town gets a telephone message at Clover, the funky little recording studio he owns in Hollywood. It’s someone who says he’s Bob Dylan, which makes Chuck think it’s a hoax. He doesn’t bother to call back. Three further calls later, though, a startled Plotkin is on the phone to Bob.

“He said, ‘I’m getting ready to start a record. Are you familiar with my work?’” Plotkin remembers. “I said, ‘Yes,’ and he said, ‘Well, jeez, can you come by and take a listen to what I’m up to here?’ I said, ‘Sure, when?’ He said, ‘How about now?’ He gave me an address, and I drove to this place, where he had some of his band assembled. He was sort of interviewing possible producers. There was a list of people, people were coming by, and they’d hear a bit of a rehearsal, have a bit of conversation, and somehow over a period of time, Bob figured out what’d work best for him.”

As Plotkin now discovers, Dylan’s been working since the previous September at studios all over LA on the follow-up to Saved. He’s amassed a formidable batch of new songs that hint at a return to his song-writing of poetic evocation, ambiguity, doubt, a way of saying things in a language that is exact but not explicit, among them “Caribbean Wind”, the apocalyptic “Groom’s Still Waiting At The Altar” and “Every Grain Of Sand”. Most recently he’s been in the studio with producer Jimmy Iovine, who walks out of one particularly chaotic session and doesn’t come back. On the day Plotkin arrives at Dylan’s Rundown Studio and rehearsal space in Santa Monica, Dylan’s just recorded a version of “Shot Of Love” produced by Little Richard’s legendary producer Bumps Blackwell that will become the title track of the album he’s struggling to finish. Plotkin’s first instinct is to get Dylan into his Clover studio as soon as possible, to get these tracks down before Dylan, notoriously restless, loses interest in the songs.

“I had picked up that he was doing a lot of writing, and I was afraid he’d burn out by the material that I’d been hearing. This guy is a powerhouse as a writer, and when he’s in writing mode, he can write and write and write. I was thinking, there’s just too much good stuff here, and if we don’t get in before his focus shifts, this material that I’m hearing now might be lost. I was afraid if we delayed much longer, we were going to lose the songs – which sounded amazing to me. I could hear something in this material, a tone of his pre-Christian mode, if you know what I mean, that was mixed in with the Christian vision in a way that was enormously appealing. The religious stuff was still there, which was great, it was Bob’s thing, but there was this hint of the earlier Bob. So I said, ‘Look. Let’s just go in, and not worry about what it is, let’s just record while it’s fresh.’ And he said, ‘Great,’ and that’s what we did.”

The album Dylan’s laboured on for nearly a year is now finished in five sessions at Clover between April 27 and May 1. Plotkin delivers a sequenced mix of the record to Dylan on May 12 that Dylan rejects, the next day going back into the studio to re-do six of the tracks he’s recorded. Plotkin spends another month re-mixing the album, Dylan rarely happy with what he hears.

“If Shot Of Love sounds at all raggedy-assed,” says Plotkin, “it’s because the mixes that got released are all just the monitor mixes that we’d get at the end of each night. We’d do a tune, get a track we liked, and we’d just run off a rough monitor mix. And those are the mixes you hear. Now, I tried to mix the record, to squeeze some little level of aural finesse in there. You know: we recorded this stuff, let’s mix it properly. I’m trying to represent the United Record Producers of the World here: if you had the chance to record Bob Dylan, wouldn’t you want to try and get everything just right, and try to bring all the tools at your disposal to the job? But every time we did a finished mix and took it to Bob, he went: ‘Naw, no. The other mix. The ones I’ve been listening to – that’s the record.’ The rough mixes had some weird quality to them. He had the sense to realise it.”

Shot Of Love is released on August 10, 1981, to even worse reviews than Saved. The sacred rapture of “Every Grain Of Sand”, which by now has undergone at least four major re-writes, is widely recognised as a major addition to the Dylan canon, but scant attention is paid to the riotous title track, the endearing Tex-Mex shuffle of “Heart Of Mine”, the vintage sarcasm of “Property Of Jesus” (the “Positively Fourth Street” of the ‘religious era’, in one critic’s sharp opinion), the hammering blues of “Trouble”, the seething “Dead Man, Dead Man” or the dappled warmth of “In The Summertime”, a nostalgic reverie that would not have been out of place on Planet Waves. As Plotkin sees it, Shot Of Love is given a rough ride as part of a general backlash against the whole Born Again period.

“Saved was his most reviled record – a lot of his regular fans felt almost betrayed that he was venturing into some zone that had already been defined by other people, if you know what I mean. Where did Bob go? They felt that Bob disappeared into a kind of black hole. Whereas, Bob would say, ‘No: that’s a hole full of light.’ Anyway, his audience was pissed at him, there’s no question about it, and it did affect the reception of Shot Of Love. But also, the record has this strange, wild, raggedy-ass quality to it that some people couldn’t hear through. But, yeah, I feel like it has been a neglected record.”

In Plotkin’s further opinion, the LP also suffers when Dylan removes three key tracks from it. The raging “Groom’s Still Waiting At the Altar” is dropped from the vinyl version but reinstated for the CD edition. However, there’s no sign of either the vast romantic turmoil of “Caribbean Wind” or the noble, piano and organ-led epic, “Angelina”, until they are belatedly included on Biograph and The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3, respectively.

“Sometimes you can fight,” admits Plotkin. “But you have to pick your fights. Part of the problem is, you know that your job depends on having the artist feel completely supported in what he’s doing. But, at the same time, he’s hired you to, from time to time, say, ‘No, I think this could be better,’ or, ‘No, I think we should use this.’ I’ve worked with Springsteen for 25 years, and there were times when I used to say to myself, ‘Well, another brave soldier bites the dust.’ It just happens. Songs go. But part of your job, while representing the artist, is also to represent the audience, and be able to make the case for a song. Sometimes you can, sometimes you can’t. If you’re too pushy about it, the trust breaks down. Since I got to work with Bruce over and over again, we’ve had some amazing battles over songs, I can tell you.”

Someone’s asked you to make a list of people who might make a good job of producing Bob Dylan’s new album, so who do you pick? Frank Zappa? David Bowie? Elvis Costello? Dylan gives some thought to each of them, before hiring Mark Knopler to produce Infidels. Since playing on Slow Train Coming, Knopfler has enjoyed huge success with smooth radio-friendly Dire Straits and mistakenly thinks their eerily clean and vacuum-sealed sound will work for Dylan. When album sessions commence at New York’s Power Plant he brings with him Straits keyboardist Alan Clark and the band’s producer, Neil Dorfman. Bob’s already there with legendary Jamaican rhythm section Sly & Robbie and former Stones guitarist Mick Taylor. There is tension from the start between Knopfler and Dylan.

“I had done Dire Straits’ Love Over Gold with Mark, which was a very worked-on and worked-over record,” Dorfman tells Uncut. “That was Mark’s process at the time, really taking a lot of time, a lot of overdubbing and attention to detail and sound. And, you know – that is not Bob Dylan, at all. So, I think, once we got into it, Bob was a little shocked at the way Mark and I worked. My impression is that Bob always has, and always will want a very immediate approach. He gets very easily bored. So, in that respect, I think Infidels was not the most comfortable situation for either Bob or Mark.

“I learned very quickly that this wasn’t going to be a normal session. I don’t want to use the wrong word, here, but Bob was also a little bit of an agent provocateur, or he even had a little saboteur in him. If things were going maybe too well, in somebody else’s definition, he would consciously make an effort to make that stop. Whether it was walking away from the piano and vocal mic while he’s doing a take, or, I remember him taking the tinfoil from a sandwich, and standing opening and closing it like an accordion into a vocal mic during a take. And, of course, everybody stops playing, thinking there was something wrong technically, but it was just his way of saying, ‘I’m bored with this, I don’t want to do this particular song anymore.’ Then he announced that he wanted to start a Christmas record that night. And, yeah, we all laughed, thinking, he’s just messing with us. But, of course, years later, he subsequently came out with a Christmas record. It was kind of intimidating, challenging, but also hilarious in its own crazy way.

“I don’t know how much I should talk out of school about this particular situation. But I know that it really, really bothered Mark, that song choices were dictated a little bit, and were turning out to be different from the song choices he thought we were going in to do. I think it just really frustrated him. I imagine that he felt a similar responsibility to the one that I felt: this is Bob Dylan; we’re going to make an amazing record, we have an incredible band, an incredible bunch of songs, and it’s up to us, we really, really have to make this happen. And I could feel the air just sort of going out of Mark a little bit, when he realised that the traditional role of the producer was not going to be in play on this record. He was going to be looked to as an advisor, or maybe a mirror in some ways. But as far as driving the bus – that was not going to happen. Bob was going to drive this bus, no matter what. I’m sure it was very frustrating to Mark.”

When it’s released on October 27, 1983, Infidels is welcomed as a return by Dylan to secular music, although suggestions he has abandoned religion, discarding Christ as he might a suddenly out of favour bass player or backing singer, are wholly misguided. After Shot Of Love, Dylan simply steps down from the pulpit. But his obsession with an approaching Armageddon remains fiercely central to his writing, up to and including 2012’s Tempest and its many songs of wrath and retribution.

Some reviewers are uncomfortable with the right-wing Zionist rhetoric of “Neighbourhood Bully” and strident patriotism of “Union Sundown”. But there’s enough here that reminds them of the Dylan they have been desperate to hear again and Infidels is generally well-received. A highlight for everyone who hears it, the six-minute opener, “Jokerman”, is immediately hailed as one of Dylan’s greatest songs, although its meaning even by Bob’s most abstract standards is at best vague. No matter. It at least sounds like vintage Dylan – densely allusive, bristling with esoteric reference, coded, the song playing out in the somewhat detached atmosphere of a dream someone else is having, perhaps due to its soporific momentum, Sly and Robbie’s ticking groove and the glossy guitars against which Dylan’s washed-out voice is dreamily pitched.

On the whole, Infidels is better regarded than anything Dylan’s done since Desire. Mark Knopfler may be forgiven for freaking out when he hears it, however, because in its released version it’s not the album he left Dylan with when he re-joined Dire Straits for a tour of Germany in June, at which point he now discovers Dylan has ‘re-thought’ the album, as he later puts it. In June, Bob is back at the Record Plant, re-recording some tracks and remixing what’s left. As far as Knopfler’s concerned this is bad enough to make Infidels sound more like an unpolished demo than the gleaming, streamlined thing he had envisaged. What appals him even more are Dylan’s baffling revisions to the nine-song tracklisting they had earlier agreed. Dylan deletes two songs – a venomous rocker called “Foot Of Pride”, later magnificently covered by Lou Reed, that Dylan under Knopfler’s stern instruction has laboured through 47 increasingly agonised takes.

Also missing from the released album is one of Dylan’s very greatest songs, “Blind Willie McTell”, which in two versions, only one of which has been officially released (on The Bootleg Sessions Volumes 1-3), evokes a terrible history of slavery in America and the suffering that found a hallowed voice in the blues that Dylan so cherishes. It’s a song in other words about how pain and anguish can be turned into art, and art in that transaction becomes redemptive, a hymn of survival, transcendence and eventual triumph over the world’s every ill whose omission from the album, in either version, is a cause of great woe to Knopfler. “Mark was committed to the recording of Infidels for, I think, three weeks,” Dorfman recalls. “And we thought that was enough to get everything done, except the actual mixing. So Mark then had to go off with Dire Straits to tour. I left with Mark. But I had the sense the record was at least recorded, if not quite finished. But there was a certain amount of rethinking by Bob – but Bob made that clear, that he was starting to rethink, in the last week of recording. We’d done a bunch of overdubs, which Bob could not have been less interested in. He hates overdubbing, man. I think he finds the whole thing phony: ‘Why are you overdubbing?’ I remember, we had a percussion player come in, and I think it was an actual torture for Bob, to have to sit there and listen to shakers and tambourines being put on stuff. His view was that could have been done live, if he’d wanted them.

So, I think he wanted to go in and either erase these overdubs, or listen to them and decide that… no, he really did not like them. So, basically, he did a bunch of re-examining once Mark left. There was nothing anybody could do, and, really, nothing anybody should have done about it – after all, it’s Bob’s record.”

Here’s another producer who gets an unexpected call from Dylan about working on his next album, and of all people it’s New York hip-hop and dance producer, Arthur Baker, best known for his work with Afrika Bambaataa, Rocker’s Revenge and New Order and recent remixes of tracks from Springsteen’s Born In The USA. He meets Dylan in a hotel on Central Park. “I was rung in, and went up,” he recalls. “And, basically, when I went into the room, I walked in the door, and there was no-one there. So I was walking around the suite going, ‘Hello? Hello?’ There were food carts, loads of them, like no-one had cleaned the room for a few days, and a whole bunch of boom-boxes. Then, he appeared and introduced himself to me, and we sat down and started listening to tunes, tapes. He played me a ton of tunes, he just kept playing more and more – and, you know, it’s Bob Dylan sitting there playing you a lot of tunes, and you trying to come up with some good ideas for each of them. A few days later I got a call that he wanted me to work on the record.”

Dylan’s been working on the album Baker will subsequently mix since the end of a grim six-week stadium tour of Europe in the summer of 1984, which includes a show at Wembley Stadium where Eric Clapton and Van Morrison turn up in support and some of the performances later make their way on to the largely drab Real Live LP. Dylan’s since sacked his touring band and because he’s now decided to produce himself, he doesn’t block book recording time, flitting promiscuously from studio to studio in a process that will be even more laborious than the long months it took to assemble Shot Of Love.

There’s an initial session on July 24, at Intergalactic in New York with Al Green’s band, quickly abandoned. A couple of days later, he’s at Delta Sound Studios with Ronnie Wood and drummer Anton Fig and records a funky thing called “Driftin’ Too Far From Shore” and “Clean Cut Kid”, a song about a Vietnam veteran that Dylan has originally demoed for Infidels. By November, Dylan’s back in LA, where nothing comes of initial sessions at Ocean Way. Moving to Cherokee Studios in Hollywood, however, Dylan cuts a version of a new song he’s co-written with playwright and actor Sam Shepard, an 11-minute epic called “New Danville Girl” that astonishes everyone who hears it, although Dylan will discard it from the finished album. With Benmont Tench, Mike Campbell and Howie Epstein from Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers, he also successfully captures the ominous “Something’s Burning, Baby”, set to a slow marching beat and embellished with menacing synthesiser.

He’s still in LA for the all-star recording of “We Are The World”, America’s response to Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”. On February 23, he’s at the Power Plant in New York where with Miami Steve Van Zandt and Roy Bittan from the E Street Band he records a sensational version of another powerful new song, the apocalyptic “When The Night Comes Falling From The Sky”. Arthur Baker is in attendance. “It was the very first session I was at,” he recalls. “We listened back to the version they’d cut, and it sounded great – I think Sly & Robbie were playing on it, also. But, Bob said, ‘Ah, you know. It sounds like Springsteen.’ And I said, ‘Well, hey, yeah – you get Van Zandt and Roy Bittan to play on it: it’s gonna sound like Springsteen.’ So he decided to cut another version of it, which is the one that ended up on the record.”

Sessions for what’s eventually titled Empire Burlesque and released on June 10 wraps with the recording of the album’s highlight, a disturbing, forlorn song, written overnight, called “Dark Eyes”, which features only Dylan’s voice and guitar, its simplicity a relief after the musical busy-ness elsewhere on the album on tracks like the irresistibly sizzling “Tight Connection To My Heart (Has Anybody Seen My Love?)”, a re-write of the more obviously personal “Someone’s Got A Hold Of My Heart”. For an album subsequently so denigrated the original reviews of Empire Burlesque are mostly positive although sales are again poor and there is a general regret that Baker has layered the record with electronics, processed drums and lashings of synthesisers. Did Dylan tell him what he wanted the album to sound like?

“No,” Baker says. “In mixing, he just wanted it to be done quick! When we were in the studio mixing at Right Track, we were working on a song, and Bob came in, and he was sitting there, and sort of just expecting it to be done. And I said, ‘Well, it’ll take a while… why don’t you go out, like go to the movies or something?’ So, he went out, he went to the movies, and he came back like, you know, three hours later, and we were still working on the same track. And he’d be saying to us how Blonde On Blonde had been mixed in like two days. And I said, ‘Well, yeah, but we’re working on 48 tracks on some of these now, and that would have been four-track, so you gotta account for that…’ But, you know, I would say maybe Bob wasn’t so patient with that whole side of the process… the time it took bothered him.”