Rolling Stone
September 3, 2009
by Will Dana
DESPITE THE FACT THAT HE HAS RECORDED SOME of the most challenging popular music of the past two decades, there is not much these days about Wilco leader Jeff Tweedy that suggests the turmoil his music contains or the struggles that have marked his band's 15-year history. He gives off the air of a man who has been through fire and learned his lessons: He is warm, but not effusive, honest and forthright, but with more of a philosophical than a confessional bent. His almost violently tousled hair might suggest a night in the gutter, but one worries there may be high-end products involved.
When I meet Tweedy, 42, for lunch in New York in July, the Chicago-based Wilco are riding high. The band has just headlined its largest show ever, playing a set of its elegant country-pop songs and John Cage-meets- Lynyrd Skynyrd experimental shredding to 12,000 adoring fans at a minor-league ballpark in Coney Island. Its current album, Wilco (The Album), a collection that contemplates love, acceptance, and uncertainty, sits in the Top 10.
This, perhaps, is not a future one would have predicted for Wilco a few years ago, when the band was more a symbol of indie-rock growing pains than of mid-life achievement. Tweedy has been plagued by migraines and panic disorders since he was a child. Two of WiIco's finest albums, 2002's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost Is Born, released two years later, were usually seen by critics as groundbreaking sonic experiments. In retrospect, it seems that Tweedy was only trying to explain the world as he saw and felt it. "There's always been a certain level of self-possession that has been elusive to me," he says. "A discomfort, I don't know -- you feel really trapped in your body." While recording Ghost in 2003, Tweedy hit bottom and later admitted himself to rehab for an addiction to painkillers.
Since he cleaned himself up, Tweedy's music has found a different groove -- not as outwardly distressed but deeper, sheared of the frenetic edge that sometimes overshadowed his darker material. Even as he has circled back to the straight-forward songs of Wilco's first two albums, his music today is more sophisticated and layered, and Wilco, staffed by a murderer's row of progressive and avant-garde musicians, executes Tweedy's vision with thundering elegance. "I don't think there's anything more difficult or complex than trying to make things simple," Tweedy says.
Despite the fact that Wilco are a better band and a better business than ever, recent weeks have brought a reminder of their difficult years. On May 24th, Jay Bennett, Tweedy's onetime chief collaborator in Wilco, died suddenly. The two had never patched up their once-close friendship -- only a few weeks before, Bennett had filed a lawsuit against Tweedy for money he thought he was owed. "It was a tragic end to the story," Tweedy says. But it's clear that he is determined to keep Wilco moving forward. "My dad worked on the railroad for 46 years," he says. "That's never lost on me. Being in a rock band can be work, but what the fuck, I'm not digging ditches."
On the new album, there's something risky going on. It almost seems like you are coming out as a grown-up.
Yeah, growing up is a revolutionary stance in rock 'n' roll. We've gotten a much angrier response from fans for songs and pleasantness than we did when we put 15 minutes of noise on A Ghost Is Born. You'd think after all these years it'd be Okay, but rock 'n' roll people really guard that mythology.
There's not that many records about being a grown-up.
Well, grown-up records are usually really, really bad. That's why people are happy when you die or your band breaks up, you're locked in time. As long as those records stay static, you can go back to them and relive that glorious time in your life without having to look in the mirror. But if you look around at the people that inspired you, and they're getting older, it's an affront, like, "Who gave you the authority to change?"
Do you still relate to some of those angst-ridden songs from Wilco's first couple of records?
I still have angst, I just know what it is. That's a big difference.
The new album feels like a record by someone who has come to terms with his demons. How did you get there?
It would be a waste of suffering if you don't gain wisdom or insight from it. Maybe the album before this, Sky Blue Sky, comes off as a bit more melancholy than this one because my mom died in the middle of making it. It was set up to be the first record since I had gone through rehab. And then my mom died, and suddenly I wasn't really healthy. There's nothing really distinguishable between depression and mourning. Physiologically I think they're the same. So Sky Blue Sky kind of got finished with that in mind. On this record, I was about as healthy as I've ever been from beginning to end.
Were you and your mom close?
Yeah, I was definitely very, very close to my mom. I was 10 years younger than my youngest brother. I was the baby of the family and almost, practically, an only child. By the time I was really an aware being, my brothers and my sister had left. So there was a lot of maternal influence in my life, my dad being a railroad guy from another generation of emotional availability for a dad.
Chicago seems to be a city a lot of people leave. Yet you've stayed.
Chicago's a pretty comfortable place to have marginal celebrity. If you're humble and respectful, people seem to be pretty respectful back. Leaving is not something even worth contemplating. I've never lived anywhere other than Illinois. My wife has lived in the same five-mile radius her entire life, and she's not gonna leave Chicago. And our kids are happy there. So I'm not going to leave.
Your music seems to be tied into an indie-rock mythology. A lot of your stuff recalls that pre-Internet time when alternative music was something you really had to work to find.
I would go to St. Louis once a month, and my mom and dad would be like, "There's a record store at the mall, why do you have to go to St. Louis to buy records?" "Because they don't have those records at the mall." For my parents, it was like going to Mars.
The commercial breakthrough never seems like it's been your interest. Have you ever tried to write a big, radio-friendly hit single?
Every single song I've ever written [laughs]. Obviously I don't know how to write a hit. When we made Summerteeth, Reprise asked us to go back and make a single. I said, "Do you realize that we just delivered a record that's full of what we thought were singles? But we love going into the studio, so we're happy to do it again if you'll pay for it." We made one more song, and it was the same as everything else on the record.
The band these days seems to operate so smoothly. How is it different from the one that made Summerteeth?
Well, that band was very strained; it wasn't a cohesive unit. Summerteeth had been a really fracturing kind of environment. Jay Bennett in particular was emerging as a divisive force within the band. He kind of positioned himself as my right-hand guy when he was with me, and positioned himself kind of as "Who does that guy fucking think he is?" when he was with the other guys. And not to speak ill of the guy, obviously, but that caused a lot of friction. Then, as we made Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, that situation got worse and worse, to the point where it alienated everybody, not just myself.
Is it easier now that you are the clear leader of the band?
I don't think it ever wasn't clear. It was maybe less clear to me, so that's easier. At the same time, Wilco has always aspired to be a collective experience. And there's more camaraderie now than ever. It probably has more to do with being a band full of grown-ups. Bands full of babies don't last very long. They just can't.
You alluded to your struggles with depression and panic attacks and how those problems led to dependence on painkillers. How did you confront those issues?
Well, to be honest, I got really good professional help for the first time in my life. I can't pretend that I would have been able to do that on my own. All of my best attempts at fixing that situation had not worked. And I certainly have had a willingness to feel better. As bad as it gets, I've been able to put it back together each time. Even at my worst, I have a body of references to look at and go, "That was an awful, awful time."
What was your worst moment?
During A Ghost Is Born, I was really, really debilitated, in a lot of pain. I was taking painkillers for legitimate, or semi-legitimate, migraines. Who knows what comes first? When you have an addiction to painkillers, your body wants you to have pain.
Have you had these attacks your whole life?
I don't remember ever not having them. But it took a long time to identify it as what it is.
It must have been embarrassing as a kid to have those attacks.
No, but I didn't really know what it was. I mean, sometimes I would cry in front of people at school, which was kind of embarrassing, to not be in control. Especially because everybody else appears to be.
Then you find out no one's in control.
That's an uplifting thing to learn. Not many people are in control of what they think they are in control of. That's probably a cliché of recovery. It's in the "Serenity Prayer", for crying out loud. It's funny it takes so long to figure that out. Those simple guiding principles are not hard-wired into our DNA. You're hard-wired to eat and fuck and kill, to be something completely different than what we pretend we are.
Did you know you were addicted at the time?
Oh, yeah, there was no doubt in my mind that it was something very, very uncomfortable to live without. I've had a lot of doctors tell me, "But you're in pain, you need these pills." You can always find a lot of ways to rationalize what you think you need. And one of the ways I rationalized it was that "I'm not even fucking high. I'm not partying. All I'm doing is trying to get out of fucking bed." I was mostly trying to stay functional as opposed to pursuing some kind of oblivion. Eventually, I had to come to the conclusion that that's not much different from pursuing oblivion.
And all along, everybody thought you were just some garden-variety tortured artist.
The tortured-artist myth, especially when drugs are involved, you know, grows out of an unwillingness to suffer, out of completely running terror-stricken away from the real dark side. A lot of people love that myth, and I seem to be some kind of spokesman for it.
Did you ever buy into that?
No, I hated it. But some part of me must have believed the myth. And the damage is still there, in your record collection.
Your music has a density and sophistication that seem almost literary. Who are some of your favorite writers?
I really like Henry Miller a lot. I like William H. Gass a lot. Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, Kurt Vonnegut.
Those are not the first writers one gravitates to.
I used to walk into bookstores when I was a kid and get the stuff that looked the craziest and the most free, or the people that looked to me to have the strongest personalities.
Those are some difficult writers....
I was drawn to kind of a pretentious pseudo-intellectualism, because it was a place where I could think about those things. I was comforted by stuff that was hard. Growing up in a small town, if you showed any side of that to other people, you would be accused of thinking that you are better than them. So it was something that I learned to conceal. A solitary pursuit of records and books was a lot safer place to indulge in than conversation.
That side you kept concealed certainly comes out in your music. But at the show in Coney Island the other night, I was also hearing riffs that wouldn't be out of place in a Lynyrd Skynyrd song.
That guy shredding on the guitar? I don't know why you would want to throw that out the window. I don't see why those things can't exist together. I've always felt like people start to draw lines in the sand when they become uncomfortable with something someone else is doing, especially if they aren't so good at it themselves. It's always looked like, "Well, I'm going to go out of my way to develop a theory that discredits these other things, because I can't do them." Wouldn't it be more fun to see, even if you can't do it, like, wouldn't it be more fun to try? That's pretty cool shit, man.
It's pretty hard to let go of that fear of failing.
Right. I guess. I may have even been invigorated by the fear of failing. But I've also always had an innate sense of well-being in spite of panic disorder and migraines. Maybe that's come from being such an exalted mama's boy. It's got to be there. Otherwise, why would I have gotten better?
What is the prognosis for Wilco? Is there another 15 years in it for you?
I guess the easiest way to answer that is, I can't foresee a time where Wilco's going to be something I don't want to do. And that's because it's gotten more gratifying over the years. I feel like I'm better at what I do; I feel like the band has grown to be a dignified kind of family. I don't wanna be too self-congratulatory, but we've been able to do something that isn't very easy to do, and none of us take it for granted. So if that can continue, why would you want to stop doing that?
COPYRIGHT NOTICE