June 13, 2004

'Wilco': Alt-Country Roads

n the beginning, there was rock and it was fun. Then Bob Dylan plugged in at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, and the music fractured into hyphenates -- folk-rock, punk-rock, heavy metal, hip-hop -- and a never-ending struggle between fun and pretense was born. Pretense usually loses. Only a stray genius like Dylan can transform lyrics, back beat and electric guitar-playing into an existential statement, let alone a political one. Most attempts at ''serious'' rock are beyond dreadful -- indeed, serious rock may be an oxymoron -- but then, occasionally, you come across something like this:

I am an American aquarium drinker
I assassin down the avenue.

These are the opening lines of ''Yankee Hotel Foxtrot,'' the brilliantly annoying album by Wilco, the band led by Jeff Tweedy. The first line slouches toward surrealistic claptrap, but the use of ''assassin'' as a verb is, I think, as pure an expression of rock 'n' roll's outlaw sensibility as you are likely to find. Tweedy sings the words tentatively, from a distance -- from a psychological rut, perhaps -- backed by free-range clanging and scraping, the melody overwhelmed by electronic anarchy. Totally annoying, but stuck in my brain for more than two years now.

Jeff Tweedy's struggle with music, the music business, his bandmates, his family and himself -- but mostly with music -- was the subject of a fine documentary by Sam Jones, ''I Am Trying to Break Your Heart'' (2002), and now it is the subject of Greg Kot's brisk and entertaining biography. Rarely has so much attention been paid to a musician who has never quite succeeded commercially, or in his own mind, or in the minds of his oft-perplexed fans. But Tweedy is worth it, for his failures as much as his successes, for the cloudy clarity of his work.

Tweedy was born in 1967, in Belleville, Ill., a working-class suburb of St. Louis. The son of a railroad worker, he wasn't much of a student, and he wasn't much of a musician at first, either. He was besotted by music, though, and spent much of his time hanging out at the home of his classmate Jay Farrar, whose father, mother and three brothers were relentlessly, eclectically musical. Farrar was a natural talent, with a fabulous American twang of a voice -- but he was a daunting, enigmatic and preternaturally silent partner. ''He actually called me one time,'' Tweedy tells Kot, ''and it was a big deal, because it meant that it always wasn't going to be me calling him. It was really tough to tell what he thought of anyone. I was insecure about that, and I still am to an extent.''

Farrar led Tweedy through a series of garage bands, which culminated in Uncle Tupelo -- a breakthrough group routinely described as legendary by rock critics, and one of the pioneers in a latter-day rock hyphenate: alternative-country. I am going to attempt a definition here: alt-country is either more traditional than the pop music that emanates from Nashville, or less traditional. It certainly is less commercial. In Uncle Tupelo's case, the music blended punk energy -- Farrar's favorite band was the Sex Pistols and Tweedy's the Ramones -- and Ozark Mountain country themes. Farrar, who spent a fair amount of time reading in his mother's used-book store, was more of a traditionalist. His songs tended to be about poverty and liquor. Tweedy, very much the junior partner at first, played bass and sang backup -- and then, tentatively, began to contribute a song here and there, songs that were far more modern than Farrar's, songs about loneliness and anxiety and his utter inability to communicate with Farrar. The breakup was inevitable. Farrar took his voice and formed Son Volt; Tweedy took most of the band and formed Wilco.

Greg Kot is the best sort of music writer: a modest one, who actually does reporting. He asks questions and quotes his subjects at length; he doesn't go all hyperbolic about the music or the musicians, but he has a solid grasp of Tweedy's musical intelligence and can make the Wilco sound come alive in words. His theme is a familiar one, the constant tension between the virtuosity of musicians like Tweedy and the ephemeral lure of big bucks, arena crowds and hit singles. From the start, Tweedy and Farrar made it clear that if they succeeded, it would be on their own terms. Actually, for Tweedy, it was more vehement than that: he actively worked to confound the commercial expectations of the music executives -- fairly adventurous sorts, by definition -- who backed his work. He chose to do this during a decade when the music business became terminally cautious, corporate and corrupt. Independent radio evaporated. The stations willing to play alt-country or ''Americana'' -- even during a period of tremendous musical creativity by performers like Lucinda Williams, Mark Knopfler and Alison Krauss -- were limited to college towns and the public radio ghetto on the left-hand side of your dial. (In New York, for example, only Fordham University's excellent WFUV-FM plays this music.)

Wilco made a couple of attempts to produce a hit single and migrate to the middle of the dial, but the deck was stacked against them: ''Record companies were funneling as much as $300 million annually to radio stations through independent promoters to gain access to programming decisions,'' Kot writes. ''Most labels say it takes at least $100,000 just to get a song on radio, with no assurance that it will be added to a station's regular rotation.'' For a band, like Wilco, that ''had never sold more than 300,000 albums domestically, such spending would have been absurd.'' Even as Wilco became well known, touring nationally and in Europe, its members were averaging a modest, solidly middle-class $50,000-$80,000 per year; when not on tour, several worked in record stores or recording studios.

Tweedy became something of a basket case trying to outwit the system and create music he could live with. He suffered from severe migraines, took to berating his audiences, self-medicated with a pharmacopeia consisting mainly of booze and painkillers, and he pitched some world-class anxiety attacks. Before opening for R.E.M. in 1999 at a soccer stadium in Bologna, Italy, ''He's pale, they call the medic, they're giving him oxygen, he's shaking,'' the drummer Ken Coomer tells Kot. ''He's having a severe anxiety attack, bawling his eyes out. And somehow he gets it together just in time, five minutes before he has to go on.''

Through it all, Tweedy has produced some terrific (and not so terrific) music. Each Wilco album is different from the last. Tweedy is a classic autodidact, inhaling books, constantly pushing himself to grow and change. Over time, he has become a better guitar player and learned how to mess with the computerized gimmickry of the modern recording studio. Most important, he has figured out how to sing in an entirely distinctive and compelling way. Like Dylan, Neil Young and others, Tweedy has a scratchy, nasal, good-bad voice, which depends on his emotional intelligence and phrasing, rather than timbre, for its effectiveness. His delivery is purposefully nervous, artfully irresolute. He will bend or slur a phrase, pause uncomfortably, allow a note to shatter in mid-attack; at times, it sounds as if he's very close to a nervous breakdown. There is a terrible sadness to it. (As affecting as Tweedy's postmodern angst can be, I sometimes miss the occasional lacerating jolt of angry energy Jay Farrar brought to their collaborations.)

''Yankee Hotel Foxtrot'' is Tweedy's apogee, an album that was notorious even before it was released; it skates the border of brilliance and pretense, filled with memorable songs that are constantly subverted, or perhaps augmented, by electronic mayhem. It takes some listening, which, apparently, was more than Reprise Records was willing to give it. The label refused to release the album and dropped Tweedy, who soon signed with Nonesuch. (In a lovely twist, both labels were part of the Time-Warner megalopolis.) Of course, ''Yankee Hotel Foxtrot'' turned out to be a critical triumph and even a mild commercial success.

And now, Jeff Tweedy will have a crack at the unutterable anxiety of trying to top that. Wilco's new album, ''A Ghost Is Born,'' will be released later this month. Tweedy tells Kot that the album is more straightforward than the last, but it will include an extended ''sound installation'' that ''99 percent of our fans won't like. . . . Even I don't want to listen to it every time I play through the album.'' Terrific. I eagerly anticipate being annoyed again.