By Mark Brown

It's the same journey that the Beatles, Michael Jordan and even Jimmy Carter have taken. Once you're successful beyond your wildest dreams, what do you do? ``You kinda have to go through life looking forward to something,'' says head Wallflower Jakob Dylan. ``You think when you get to that goal, your life is suddenly gonna make sense. But for a great number of people, you get there and you realize a lot of the problems you had before, you still have them. A certain part of your life suddenly feels a lot better . . . but a lot of those answers are still unanswered.''

He's not whining about stardom; he's just fascinated at how it all works. No matter how big your hits become, you're still just a guy who goes home at the end of the day.

``You're chasing this thing for so long, thinking `If I can just sell X-amount of records or play to X-amount of people, or if we can do the cover story for Rolling Stone or open for the Rolling Stones, suddenly it's going to make a lot of sense,' '' Dylan says via phone from his L.A. office. ``But it's a sad moment when you get there and realize that as great as all that stuff is, there's a huge rest of your life that you haven't really been addressing.''

That realization gave him a rich mine of personal experiences to draw on for Breach, the Wallflowers' new follow-up to their breakthrough album Bringing Down the Horse. He and the band are at the Fillmore Auditorium on Wednesday.

Far from complaining about the tough life of rock stars, he loves the success - the Grammys, the sales, the concerts, the fellow musicians who have jumped onstage with him, and the huge hit singles in One Headlight and Sixth Avenue Heartache.

``Momentarily, all those things are incredible,'' Dylan says. ``When you're away from them, you're still stuck with yourself. Certainly, having someone like Bruce Springsteen acknowledge the group and wanting to get onstage and play with them is a huge deal. But in some moment, Bruce is gone and you're with yourself again.'' Dylan describes himself as a somewhat reluctant songwriter, yet acknowledges that it has been what he wanted to do ever since he saw The Clash open at The Who's farewell tour in '82. In a nice twist of fate, the Wallflowers ended up having that same honor in September, 18 years later.

``I got to do four nights at Madison Square Garden on The Who's new farewell tour,'' he says with a laugh. ``I got the Clash's spot!''

Breach came out four years after Bringing Down the Horse simply because Dylan was tapped out after touring exhaustively.

``I didn't feel like I had anything interesting to write about,'' he says. ``I don't think writing records that are reactionary to being successful or a failure makes interesting music. I wanted to come home and do something a little more mundane so I could find things about human nature interesting again.''

After taking some time off to just live, he settled down to the task of writing.

``I wrote them (the songs) all in a five- or six-month block of time,'' he says. A lot of substandard songs came out, then he got to I've Been Delivered.

``I just kind of wrote that song about not knowing what the hell I wanted to do. It's a journey of trying to figure out what your point is and why you started doing this to begin with. Somehow it made things more clear to me.''

From there the ideas flowed, with themes of emotional battering in Hand Me Down to the loss in Letters From the Wasteland and its line ``It takes two to tango / but one to let go.''

Critics picked up that Dylan was writing more about his life than he had in the past, ``which I don't really confirm or deny,'' he says. ``I think they're being confused by one song that they're picking up on, Hand Me Down, and expressing the whole record to be that way.''

The success of Bringing Down the Horse made people respect Jakob Dylan for his own merits, taking away some of the onus of being the son of a legend. That makes it easier to talk about, he admits, though he still is guarded and gives away little information. ``The simple truth is if people don't like the record, it has nothing to do with who I am. If they don't like the record, it's just a bad record. It's not because of who I am or where I was brought up or who my parents are.''

But being the son of Bob Dylan is simply inescapable. ``It's the same story with me. I'll spend an hour talking to somebody and 10 minutes is devoted to (my father) and the other 50 minutes are on the band, but those 10 minutes are the focus.''

He has a point. But at the same time, this isn't, say, Shaun Cassidy's son. Bob Dylan profoundly changed music and society, and getting away from that shadow is impossible.

Witness the people Jakob Dylan had help him with Bringing Down the Horse. Producer T-Bone Burnett was on the Rolling Thunder Revue. Singer Adam Duritz sang ``I wanna be Bob Dylan'' in Counting Crows' breakthrough hit, Mr. Jones. Heartbreakers Mike Campbell and Ben Tench toured with Bob in the '80s. For Jakob Dylan to make an album that has no connection to his father, he'd have to turn his back on much of the best musicians and technicians that the industry has to offer.

While being the son of the most famous songwriter of all time certainly has its influence, Jakob Dylan points to Paul Westerberg, former leader of The Replacements, as the prime influence on his own writing.

``I do find him to be one of the better songwriters America has ever offered,'' Dylan says.

``To me, Paul Westerberg sounded like he never wanted to be a songwriter. He just wanted to be engulfed in this rock 'n' roll outfit and make a lot of noise, play songs by the MC5 or something. Then one day it just dawned on him that it was undeniable - that he had this way of writing things that maybe he did or didn't want to do.''

Dylan says he felt the same resistance. It wasn't because of the fear in following in his father's footsteps, but because he had a different view of himself.

``I wanted to be a guitar player, but I wasn't getting good enough,'' he says. ``I was aware of that. I didn't want to be a songwriter, not for any particular background issue as much as I didn't want to be anybody's focus. But I always had songs going around in my head. No matter what else I did, writing songs were always around me, always interesting.''