WILCO GOES TO THE LIMITS
`SUMMERTEETH' CHALLENGES BAND - AND SINGER
* 02/28/99
Chicago Tribune
(Copyright 1999 by the Chicago Tribune)
Jeff Tweedy thought he had blown it. Tweedy and his bandmates in
Wilco - Jay Bennett, Ken Coomer and John Stirratt - had just finished
writing, arranging and producing their third album, "Summerteeth"
(Reprise), due out March 9. It boldly transforms the band's roots-
rock image by dipping their laid-back, countryfied melodies into a
strange brew of warped keyboards, distorted sound effects and
otherworldly atmosphere that suggests the influence of the Beach
Boys' "Pet Sounds," Brian Eno's "Another Green World" and Neutral
Milk Hotel's "On Avery Island."
But even as the band members were exhilarated about pushing their
boundaries as songwriters and producers, Tweedy couldn't escape the
notion that he hadn't lived up to his end of the bargain.
"I apologized to the band," the singer-guitarist says. "We kept
surprising ourselves in the studio, and I kept being surprised by the
things coming out of my mouth as I was singing these songs. Just the
worst things, which came out almost in spite of how (his wife) Sue
would feel when she heard them, or my parents, or anybody."
I dreamed about killing you again last night
And it felt alright to me
--"Via Chicago," by Wilco
"It was like I was letting go of myself, and how I'm going to be
perceived," Tweedy continues. The songs, and the sentiments in them,
weren't necessarily autobiographical, says the singer. "It was just
free expression, almost selfless, and I thought I had gotten closer
to where I wanted to be as a writer. The feeling of being
uncomfortable with what I had written -- that felt more real to me
than anything I could have constructed.
"But at the same time I felt like I had let the band down. We
worked really hard on this record, and my contribution was this
dismal stuff: `Oh, and here's another reminder of how terrible things
are.' "
Tweedy laughs, his voice a husky, nicotine-scarred baritone, a
voice that contrasts sharply with his cherubic face and boyishly
rumpled hair. He is upstairs in the Northwest Side home he shares
with his wife, Lounge Ax co-owner Sue Miller, and their 3-year-old
son, Spencer. The shadows obscure his face as the sun dips behind
the midwinter horizon. But there is now a smile in his voice, as he
thinks back on his bandmates' reaction.
"They basically said I was crazy -- they didn't accept my
apology," he says. "That was nice. They were so focused on the
music that they didn't hear it that way at all. To them, the lyric
writer was just some person who could be me, or never was me, saying
all these things."
In a separate interview, Bennett -- who worked up the array of
vintage keyboard textures that helped define the record -- says
Tweedy began to understand the record only after it was finished. "I
think he realized then that it was this beautiful thing, not the
wallowing record he thought it was," he says. "It has dark lyrics,
but the music we made is almost a counter to that. And that wasn't a
product of some master plan, it was more a case of, `The studio is a
really fun place, and we're making a beautiful building here.' We
wanted to take pride in every floor we made. And we were having fun
doing it."
Listening to Bennett and Tweedy talk, one begins to appreciate the
yin-yang relationship that has taken Wilco to the next level as a
band, from a respected tradition-bound combo to an exhilarating
adventurous one. Years ago, Tweedy, Coomer and Stirratt were in
Uncle Tupelo, a band in which Tweedy and Jay Farrar were the primary
songwriters. Tupelo's approach was purist in the extreme, with
country-inflected songs stripped to their essence in the studio. Any
sort of studio tinkering -- overdubs, extra instruments, weird sound
experiments -- was viewed as a heinous, avoid-at-all-costs excess.
When Farrar left to form his own band, Son Volt, the other three
carried on as Wilco and released a 1995 debut album, "A.M.," that did
* not stray far from Tupelo's traditional country-rock sound or
unadorned production.
Then Bennett joined the band, hired for his skill as a guitarist
to flesh out the songs in concert. But when it came time to make
Wilco's second album, Bennett's experience in the studio with pop-
rock bands such as Titanic Love Affair began to assert itself.
"I was a little intimidated by these guys at first," Bennett
recalls. "They had already had a sound that people really liked.
But they also wanted to make pop records -- `A.M.' was supposed to be
a pop record, but it didn't really come across. Unlike Wilco, I
didn't have a mold that I wanted to break out of, and so I was a good
fit for them. When we did the second album (`Being There'), I began
to suggest parts on keyboards that weren't part of the song as
originally written (on guitars and drums). And once that happened,
the door was just kicked open to another way of making a record."
"Being There," released in 1996, was a major step forward for
Tweedy as a songwriter and for Wilco as a band. "Y'all are
forgettin' your roots," Bennett would playfully mock as the songs
began assuming stranger, more allusive and open-ended shapes.
With "Summerteeth," that approach was expanded. Guitars, which
had been at the core of the first two records, were left in their
cases, and vintage keyboards became the soul of the music, while
Coomer and Stiratt provided the spine, a selfless rhythm section that
seemed to breathe with the melodies and cushioned Tweedy's voice
against the blows struck by his lacerating lyrics.
On one level, "Summerteeth" is about distance, the emotional and
geographical miles that a person must travel to find solace, purpose,
a home.
"I don't want to encourage autobiographical connections to the
record, but when you come home from touring for months, it's hard not
to feel like you're in somebody else's house, it's hard to make that
transition and feel integrated as a human being," Tweedy says.
"There's `dad' and there's this guy who gets a lot of attention --
`rock star' or whatever you want to call it, and that doesn't make
him feel any better. It's like, here I am in Paris wanting to visit
all the places that Henry Miller hung out, except I'm waiting in the
hotel room for the phone to ring."
How to fight loneliness
Smile all the time
Shine your teeth 'til meaningless
Sharpen them with lies
-- "How to Fight Loneliness," by Wilco
But on another level, "Summerteeth" is about a four-piece rock
band pushing against the limits of expectation, sound and its own
history. It's about pop music as a force that transcends even a
singer's self-absorption, and sweeps the listener along with it: The
mini-symphony compressed into the 3 1/2 minutes of "Pieholden Suite,"
the watery strings and Lennon-esque "I'm So Tired" vocals of "My
Darling," the bravura pop of "Nothing'severgonnastandinmyway(again),"
the way "Via Chicago" starts off as a plaintive folk-country song and
then slowly reveals its kaleidoscopic colors as it spirals off into
space.
"The sleigh bells, the horn solo at the end of `Pieholden Suite'
that replaced the third verse of lyrics -- the impulse was to
brighten things up more and more as we recorded and reworked things,
and to make the lyrics seem smaller, somewhat less serious," Tweedy
says. "That became the redemption, the way of creating a sense that
the really beautiful thing is right under your nose, no matter how
bad things might feel at that moment."
Tweedy laughs when he is asked to consider what happened to the
singer-songwriter who once shuddered at the thought of a producer
tampering with his precious acoustic guitar chords in the studio.
"I'm the same guy," he says. "The essence of that is the same as
this: To make a record that I feel good about, and that I don't feel
like I'm hearing anywhere else. We didn't have any technical
expertise back then (in Uncle Tupelo), so that was the most exciting
thing for us to be. Now we do. There's a certain amount of audacity
involved in making a record. So if you have a chance to say
something, you better make it worth your while. I love records too
much to make something that I wouldn't want to stick in my
collection."
