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Jaques Levy
Lyricist, director and teacher who co-wrote Bob Dylan's album Desire and penned Fame - The Musical
WHEN Bob Dylan was struggling with his lyrics in the mid-1970s, the man he turned to for help was Jacques Levy. Their songwriting collaboration helped to cement Levy’s reputation as one of popular culture’s renaissance men. After training as a clinical psychologist, he became involved in 1960s off-Broadway theatre productions and made his mark directing the New York production of Oh! Calcutta! In the pop world he went on to work not only with Dylan, co-writing the lyrics to his acclaimed 1975 album Desire, but also with Roger McGuinn and the Byrds. When he returned to the theatre, his credits included the lyrics to the longrunning hit Fame — The Musical. In recent years he had become a respected academic as head of the theatre programme at Colgate University, New York.
Born in 1935, he was educated at City College, New York, and Michigan State University, where he obtained a doctorate. While practising as a clinical psychologist in New York, he pursued an interest in theatre, directing such off-Broadway productions as Sam Shepard’s play Red Cross (1965) and Jean-Claude van Itallie’s American Hurrah (1967). Then in 1969 he was invited to direct the New York production of Oh ! Calcutta!, the controversial musical devised by Ken Tynan.
The music and lyrics to the show were written by a loose collective, assembled by Tynan and known as Open Window. Levy contributed alongside the likes of John Lennon, Samuel Beckett, Joe Orton and his close friend Sam Shepard. The show opened off-Broadway and, despite its nudity, was swiftly promoted to Broadway where it stayed for 1,314 performances, running until 1972. Four years later Levy revived the show and it ran from 1976 to 1989.
Shortly after Oh! Calcutta! had opened in 1969, Levy was asked by Roger McGuinn of the Byrds to co-write the book for a rock musical called Gene Tryp, based on Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. The show was never produced, but several of the songs Levy co-wrote appeared on albums by the Byrds, including Just a Season and Chestnut Mare, which gave the group a British Top 20 hit. Levy went on to contribute lyrics to several solo albums by McGuinn during the 1970s.
In June 1975, Levy met Dylan by chance in Greenwich Village and the songwriter suggested that they try working together. Repairing to Levy’s New York loft, they came up with the song Isis, and Dylan was so pleased that he invited Levy to stay at his beach house on Long Island to work on further material. Over ten days they came up with 14 more songs.
When he had first approached Levy, Dylan had never intended to record a new album, for it was only six months since he had completed the outstanding Blood on the Tracks. But their collaboration went so well that by the end of July 1975 he was back in the studio recording Desire, one of the swiftest follow-up albums in Dylan’s career. Seven of the nine songs on it were the product of his writing session with Levy, including Joey, about the New York Mafia boss Joey Gallo (whom Levy had briefly known), Black Diamond Bay (based on a story by Joseph Conrad), Mozambique (which had begun life as a game between them to see who could find the greatest number of rhymes with the African country) and, perhaps most notable of all, Hurricane.
Dylan had recently taken up the cause of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, who had been given a life sentence for shooting dead three people in a New Jersey bar in 1967. The former professional boxer insisted that he was innocent and had been framed by the police, and when the case was re-opened in 1974 after two key witnesses admitted lying, Dylan offered to write a song.
He complained to Levy that he felt so passionately involved in the campaign to “free Hurricane” that he was having difficulty expressing his feelings and compressing the complex story into song form. “Bob wasn’t sure that he could write a song. He was just filled with all these feelings about Hurricane,” Levy said later.
He suggested that what was required was the hard-hitting punch of a newspaper report. The dramatic lyric he assisted Dylan to write opened like a tabloid story with a description of pistol shots ringing out in the bar, or as Levy put it, “like stage directions you would read in a script”.
Carter’s conviction was eventually overturned in 1985 and his story was made into the film The Hurricane, starring Denzel Washington, with Dylan and Levy’s song leading the soundtrack.
When Dylan decided to take to the road in late 1975, he again turned to Levy, explaining that he didn’t want a routine rock show but a full-scale travelling circus involving a cast of friends from Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez to Allen Ginsberg and Roger McGuinn. Dylan dubbed it the Rolling Thunder Revue and Levy came up with a suitably theatrical stage setting that re-created the feel of an old-fashioned vaudeville show, even going on the road to conduct rehearsals to try out new ideas and keep the performances fresh.
Back in the theatre, in 1983 Levy wrote and produced a musical comedy based on the Doonesbury cartoon. He went on to direct further off- Broadway productions, including, most recently, Brecht on Brecht with the Irondale Ensemble (2000). He also wrote the book and lyrics for Miami Lights and Back Country and the lyrics for The Golden Land.
In 1988 Fame — The Musical played its first performance in Miami. Levy’s lyrics, set to music by Steve Margoshes, took account of the Fame tradition — started by Alan Parker’s film in 1980 and continued in an ever-staler TV series until 1987 — but added a contemporary spin to the tale of the all-singing, all-dancing students at the High School of Performing Arts in New York. The Fame package spawned fast and shows every sign of intending to live for ever; there are currently around 40 productions touring across the world.
In 1992 Levy became Professor of English and director of theatre at Colgate University, Hamilton, New York, where he taught courses on performance, acting, directing, and playwriting. His productions included Marat/ Sade (1994), Bus Stop (1997), The Three Sisters (1998), Frankenstein and Dylan (both 2000).
He is survived by his wife, Claudia, and two children
