Saved By Rock'n'Roll: Jeff Tweedy and Wilco
Chris Norris
The leader of the Great American Band made his most celebrated album while puking his guts out in a studio bathroom with crippling migraines. He made its successor so lost in a Vicodin haze that the whole period was something of a lost weekend. Both events had their upsides: The albums were rock masterpieces—odd and comforting, full of dislocation, radio static, and melodies meant to heal the pain of being adrift in the modern world. They won Wilco phenomenal critical acclaim and a huge, rabid following for live shows where they play experimental music as kick-butt rock’n’roll. The downside of these albums is that they nearly killed Jeff Tweedy.
Yet here he sits in a rambling Chicago loft, enjoying a Diet Coke, a quiet Monday, and the new (and excellent) Wilco (The Album). All this is contrary to some very durable rock clichés, the druggy tortured artist chief among them. “There’s all these different ways in which that mythology has beaten itself into people’s heads, mine included,” Tweedy says in a slightly creaky voice. “Well-adjusted, happy, and productive artists don’t get a lot of ink. Nor does how many awful, awful records are made on drugs, or how many don’t get made because people are dead. The fact of the matter is I didn’t really write when I was f-ed up.”
The most notorious Sturm und Drang was captured in the 2002 documentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, which covered the making of Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot—an album that, in typical Wilco fashion, both got them dropped from their major label and launched them as a commercial powerhouse. When Reprise Records balked at the disc’s static-shrouded, hook-light songs, Wilco streamed it on their website, where it won a devoted following and, eventually, a deal with Nonesuch Records. Less an album than a paradigm shift, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot went on to sell 647,000 copies (despite being offered for free) and win pretty much every critical superlative there is.
But while the album’s story cemented Wilco as a triumphant David to the Goliath of a doomed record industry, it also revealed ominous fissures: between the band and longtime member Jay Bennett (who was fired from Wilco in 2001) and in the mental health of Tweedy, who spends the film’s more memorable moments racked in visible agony, his battles with anxiety and migraine headaches punctuated by gut-hurling genuflections in the toilet stall.
Those chronic ailments drove the yet darker events that accompanied YHF’s follow-up album, A Ghost Is Born, during which the singer, who had become addicted to painkillers prescribed for his migraines, made a desperate attempt to quit all medication and suffered a complete collapse. “He was in the worst state I had ever seen him in,” recalls bassist John Stirratt, Tweedy’s sole consistent Wilco bandmate from the beginning. “Just completely in pain, panicky, not able to be in a room with anybody. I thought it could be the end of the band.”
The album’s 2007 successor, Sky Blue Sky, was to some extent a head-clearing exercise for Tweedy, who was fresh from rehab. “Around that point it was really important for me to be as direct as possible,” he says. Sky Blue Sky was Wilco’s highest-charting album, although its ’70s-tinged guitar jams strayed far enough into Seals and Crofts territory to prompt the barbed critical epithet “dad rock.”
Wilco (The Album), on the other hand, sounds neither nostalgic nor pointedly experimental. Instead, it offers a focused collection of poetic, emotionally direct songs that explore fear, loss, and love from a midlife perspective. The critical response has been typically rapturous, and as the band’s summer tour has proved, the album lends itself to some epic live performances. “To me it’s a lot of the things that are identifiable as Wilco,” Tweedy explains. “Just done more confidently and in one place.”