It’s just this dream he keeps having
Thoughts on a Summerteeth reissue and Wilcos past and present.
I’ve been having some strange dreams the past couple weeks. The typical anxiety stuff, naturally, but some really pointed ones involving a maddening, slow-motion failure to complete a formerly ordinary task (like, say, getting to a venue for a shoot on time). Jeff Tweedy singing about a seemingly meaningless recurring dream on Summerteeth‘s title track has, thusly, been bouncing around my head quite a bit recently.
If nothing else, 2020 has been a pretty generous year to the Wilco fan. Sure, Ode to Joy dates back to a comparatively-joyous 2019, the band’s signature Solid Sound festival had a conveniently-scheduled off year, and their co-headlining summer trek with Sleater-Kinney is off the table til who knows when, but the pandemic hasn’t left a devotee wanting. Frontman Jeff Tweedy live-streamed from home, taught the masses how to write one song and released a solo record, while guitarist Nels Cline unleashed a space-y post-jazz-rock epic with his eponymous Singers and the band reissued its aforementioned 1997 bummer-pop masterpiece in a revealing super-deluxe fashion earlier this month. And to top things off, director Barry Jenkins teamed up with Houston’s Chopstars to, for some reason, release a chopped-and-screwed remix of Wilco’s turn-of-the-century magnum opus Yankee Hotel Foxtrot last week.
“NOBODY asked for this,” Jenkins tweeted of the project, but sometimes we don’t know how to ask for what we need. If you were to confront me on the street, prior to last Tuesday morning, and demand to know which canonical Wilco release most demanded the codeine-haze filter of the Chopstars, YHF would certainly be the answer. Its tempos already skew slower than any other Wilco record’s batting average, after all, and its fragmented space-junk sonics feel the most suited to a DJ’s tinkering. And indeed, the results of this extremely left-field experiment are by and large…extremely dope. An unseasonably warm and sunny November morning was perhaps not the envisioned context for the experience, but even then, the stoned sprawl of this “Jesus Etc.” and the refracted ambiance of its “Reservations” outro were weirdly affecting. One could picture this coming in handy as a nightcap to a particularly indulgent evening.
And at the risk of mythologizing the timing in too heavy-handed a fashion, it does seem appropriate for a narcotized rethinking of a Wilco record to manifest just days after the deluxe Summerteeth hit shelves and streaming. That album, the band’s last with the late Jay Bennett acting as Tweedy’s foil, carries with it a notorious Brian Wilsonesque backstory of the pair belaboring its lushly orchestrated, fussed-over songs in a chemically-fueled fervor, of which the outtakes and demos collection on this reissue feel like supporting evidence.
On the largely solo acoustic sketches of downers like “She’s a Jar” and effervescent cuts like “Nothing’severgonnastandinmyway (Again)” alike, Tweedy sounds spellbinding but not…well. There’s a harrowing quality to these performances that shine a light into the shadows of the record’s darker lyrical corners, and render the relatively sunny end result a bit of a shock.
The live show that caps off the new edition follows suit, contrasting the well-oiled machine of the modern-day Wilco live unit with a ramshackle performance led by a “heavily sedated” –in his own words – Tweedy. It’s not quite a Replacements-style descent to oblivion or Pollard polishing off a case of High Life on stage, but a certain undercurrent of unpredictability, and of things threatening to go terribly awry, runs through the set. Hell, a fight even breaks out in the crowd at one point. When’s the last time you saw that in a Wilco audience, now largely consisting of bearded dads sipping Lagunitas with bemused toddlers on their shoulders?
Recorded eight months after the record’s release at Colorado’s Boulder Theater (a little less than two weeks before the band would swing through Boston’s Avalon), the show swerves from Being There and A.M.‘s road-tested rockers and heartbreakers to the more adventurous new material on which the group sounds more tentative. “Via Chicago,” for instance – now a deep setlist staple and signature song whose bridges regularly erupt into cathartic cacophony – opens this night in a considerably more subdued arrangement.
The main point I hammer away at here is that in both its behind-the-scenes demo reel and accompanying live set, this Summerteeth redux pulls back the curtain on a band in several different forms of transition.
If I ran the raw numbers, I’m positive Wilco would rank top-five among the artists I’ve seen the most times in my decade-ish of showgoing. In every one of those instances, their style has always been that of old pros, assured and in command of generous set geared to audience satisfaction; reliable but not rote. I tried to articulate this in reviewing last fall’s tour for the Dig, too – it’s a fine line that Wilco walk these days. Their sets are hardly lifeless, yet one still gets the sense that these guys could do it all in their sleep. This current lineup – a stable sextet since 2004 – is a much different beast than the one that hit the road supporting Summerteeth in ’99 (only Tweedy and affable bassist John Stirratt remain from that configuration of the band), but the difference is still striking.
Of course, all of this speaks to the importance of the listener’s (or viewer’s, since we’re talking live sets here) perspective. Friends twice my age who’ve caught multiple iterations of every Tweedy tour since Uncle Tupelo probably won’t hear anything revelatory in this unearthed live set. But while I’m no concert neophyte, the consummate professionals grounded by the years are the only Wilco I know on stage. I kinda do.
My bridge from this back to Jenkins’ slanted-and-enchanted YHF, which feels more in the pantheon of the wearier, druggier Wilco of the late ’90s and early aughts than that of today, is admittedly a little tenuous. But I guess the takeaway is that I’m grateful for stable, dependable ’10s Wilco. I don’t mean to once more extrapolate too much from these box set observations, though I probably have, but Tweedy’s struggles with painkillers in the ensuing years are well-documented, and erstwhile bandmate Bennett left us just 10 years later. The personal turmoil simmering under Summerteeth‘s hood was both real and consequential, and in this year, of all years, having some reliable future gig to look forward to from Tweedy and company means a lot.