Contra Band
New book about Wilco presents leader Jeff Tweedy as willful contrarian
Anyone who has seen Sam Jones' 2002 documentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart knows the essential story about Wilco. The band we meet there thrives on conflict and tension, makes music that willfully defies expectations and celebrates the organic process of making music, flaws and all.
At the center of the film, and of Greg Kot's new book, Wilco: Learning How to Die (Broadway, 256 pp., $14), is leader Jeff Tweedy, a character of fascinating contradiction. Wary, passive, ambitious and defiant, Tweedy is a singer with a sad, resigned voice and inimitable delivery. Kot follows Tweedy through his rock star-hopeful adolescence (Tweedy admits to being "physically attracted" to Paul McCartney's photo on the "White Album"), his days with Uncle Tupelo and rift with Jay Farrar, his recurring migraines, panic attacks and self-medication, and his often combative relationship with the music industry—even his own fans. "He is not even an artist his most ardent fans can always embrace," Kot writes, "because his music is less about meeting expectations than about upsetting them, including his own."
At first glance, Wilco looks like Sam Jones' documentary warmed over as literary seconds, but Kot, music critic for the Chicago Tribune, offers more than just a palatable cover of someone else's tune. He takes the plot of Wilco's storybook clash with the music industry (Warner Bros. paid Wilco twice for 2002's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot when one division, Reprise, dropped the group only to have another division, Nonesuch, sign them) and fills in the gaps with anecdotes, interviews and criticism pinpointing the many influences that converge in Wilco's eclectic music.
Tweedy—who shares songwriting royalties with his bandmates but cuts them loose when they stop challenging him artistically—emerges as an artist ruthlessly dedicated to the song. About firing one band member, Tweedy says, "I made a decision to honor inspiration as opposed to honoring loyalty to a friend. It was about loyalty to the music." When it isn't about music, though, Tweedy comes off as lackadaisical. "He is not the most assertive person in the world," his wife, Sue Miller, confesses. "He can't even order a damn pizza."
Wilco's music reached a critical and commercial zenith with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Now comes A Ghost Is Born, even more deliberately strange and difficult to label. Kot concludes that Tweedy's inspiration is "the idea of making his audience and himself uncomfortable," adding that he always seeks "confrontation rather than compliance, radical change rather than the status quo." In an industry thriving on compliance and the status quo, Tweedy emerges—despite his insistence otherwise—as a contrarian hero, and Kot's book is a fascinating glimpse at the dysfunction and beauty of his relentless pursuit of rock 'n' roll.
—Ben Vore
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