Greg Kot: Wilco: Learning How to Die
[Published in PLAYBACK:stl, August 2004]
Did you hear the story about P. Diddy—though at that point still Puff Daddy—strolling the aisles at the Grammys and mistaking our beloved Jeff Tweedy for an usher? (Tweedy was holding extra programs for his bandmates back home; he and the boys had been nominated for Mermaid Avenue.) Or how about the time a young Tweedy went to interview Soul Asylum for the St. Louis fanzine Jet Lag and the Minneapolis rockers drank the writer’s beer, then hit on his girlfriend? There’s also the tale of the first Farrar-Tweedy collaboration, which, in ninth grade, may have started their relationship off on the wrong foot. Farrar’s peach-fuzz band the Plebes rocked house at a junior-high dance. Tweedy’s role? He hauled in the man’s amp.
Perhaps the best thing about these stories is that the book they’re in has even better, more substantial things going for it. Far from a string of anecdotes, and it has many memorable ones, Wilco: Learning How to Die (Broadway Books, 247 pgs, $14) is a comprehensive look at the evolution of Jeff Tweedy, songwriter; both humorous and serious, it’s a portrait of an artist becoming a man.
Kot, music critic for the Chicago Tribune and interviewee on the Wilco documentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, does two things especially well here: he offers rich background and smart commentary on Tweedy’s creations (“There are nights when ‘Misunderstood’ sounds like a back-alley mugging”); and then he gets out of the way to let the characters tell us the story themselves. It helps everyone’s cause that those he interviewed—among them Gary Louris, Tony Margherita, Wade and Jay Farrar, Brian Henneman, Peter Buck, Wilco past and present, even Tweedy’s wife and mother—are articulate, clearheaded, funny, and willing to admit the shakiness of particular judgments.
Kot chronicles the early years that led to Uncle Tupelo and to the band itself, including those basement shows at the old Cicero’s and the recording of each album. Of their debut, No Depression, Tweedy now laughs a bit at how the band “romanticized the songs’ subjects. “I wrote a song about being drafted,” he jokes, “when there was no draft.” After an east coast recording of Still Feel Gone—Tweedy’s songs now carrying more weight—UT headed to REMer Peter Buck’s house in Athens to make the March album. Though making an acoustic record just as Nirvana’s Nevermind was pulling huge numbers wasn’t the best career move, for Tweedy it held, and still holds, a certain uniqueness and rightness. “I felt with March we made the loudest record we ever made,” he says. “It was the feeling that it spoke much, much more directly than anything we’d done before, when we were banging away on stuff.”
Moving onto the band’s final album, Anodyne, Kot is at his most speculative when considering the lyrics (“‘Chickamauga’ could be the first draft of a breakup letter to Tweedy and the rest of the band”). Again, though, he lets the primary action come out in the voices of those who were there. A few days after Farrar called quits on the band—with a phone call to their manager—the two songwriters faced off in their Belleville apartment.
Farrar: “You don’t know what it’s like to stand onstage with somebody every night who loves themselves as much as you do!”
“You’re right,” Tweedy replied, “I don’t have any idea.”
Not a zinger of a come-back line, true, but Tweedy was stunned and stung. Incredibly, the band would soon head out for one last tour, as well an appearance on Conan O’Brien. When the band played their final two shows a few months later—April 30 and May 1, 1994, at Mississippi Nights—Kot writes that the show was “a fairly somber affair,” with Farrar and Tweedy “splitting the lead vocals so evenly it was as if a lawyer had brokered the set list.” In the parking lot after the final show, Farrar left Tweedy with a nod.
The remaining two-thirds of Learning How to Die covers, as the title suggests, the band Tweedy formed soon after—maybe too soon after—Uncle Tupelo played its last. We learn about Wilco’s first record, A.M., which was soon artistically leapfrogged by Farrar’s far richer and more substantial Trace. (Brian Henneman: “The first Son Volt record was pretty fucking good. It was like watching a prize fight at that point. Wow! He slammed him there! Ouch! What a counterpunch!”). We follow Tweedy’s invitation to what would become the supergroup Golden Smog, an invite given from the same rockers who drank his beer and hit on his girlfriend during that interview years earlier. The reader’s there for the introduction of the “mad professor” Jay Bennett, the ambitious and redefining Being There, Tweedy’s severe pre-show anxiety attacks, and his fruitful yet occasionally bristly collaboration with Billy Bragg. (“I never did understand,” Tweedy says, “why we were recording songs about brownshirted Fascists clobbering people in the streets of Italy during the ’30s.”)
Perhaps most interestingly, the reader’s able to follow the sharpening of Tweedy’s songwriting skills. “I definitely wanted to get better at writing, and those things happened simultaneously with trying to read better,” Tweedy says, noting a conscious shift in his commitment to the craft that occurred around the time Summerteeth’s songs were coming in. “By writing things down, and putting more words into my head, it put more words into my mouth when I turned on the tape recorder to sing. There was just more stuff to choose from. I didn’t have to resort to the first thought: ‚ÄòI’m sitting on the couch, and you hurt my feelings.’ I worked harder at laying the groundwork to generate inspiration.”
But, as Summerteeth’s lyrics can attest, inspiration can sound awfully dreary. Tweedy’s response, guided by studio and instrument specialist Jay Bennett, was to “bury those lyrics safely under glass.” In hindsight, however, Tweedy admits, “I wish now that I left those lyrics naked, that we hadn’t spent so much time trying to cover them up. I wasn’t as brave as I could have been.”
Maybe he was saving his bravery for sacking Bennett, which he did in August 2001, after Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was written. “A circle,” Tweedy told him, “can only have one center.” (Bennett says he wishes he would’ve replied, “Ah, but an ellipse has two focal points.”) Bravery would remain key for Tweedy as he continued to stretch himself as an artist, joining the experimental side projects The Minus 5 and Loose Fur.
There’s a story involving the last of these that holds a moment telling of Tweedy’s continuing, growth-seeking relationship with his art. While he had a record of fan-friendly decisions (Being There’s single-disc price, the free streaming of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot), the songwriter was treated, during an experimental Loose Fur show in Chicago, to a new three-word cheer from a certain fan: “You suck, Tweedy!”
His night was made.
“It had been a long time since I’d played in front of something other than a cultish environment, where people don’t feel as free to voice dissent,” Tweedy tells Kot says near the book’s end. “I took more abuse in that one night than I have in a long time. It makes me feel like I’m on the right track.”
It’s enough to make P. Diddy proud.
