He is trying to break our hearts

With a new album out and an intriguing new biography spinning the tale of his tormented career, Wilco's Jeff Tweedy looks like the leading American rocker of his generation. Which may tell you something about the state of American rock.

By Eric Boehlert

Jun 29, 2004 | Breaking up is never easy, especially onstage at Irving Plaza in New York.

It was September 1996, during the College Music Journal's annual conference, and Jeff Tweedy and his band Wilco were headlining. Wilco had not yet been dubbed one of the few American rock bands that matter; that label was cemented when Reprise Records rejected its minimalist masterpiece, "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" as unworthy of release -- it found a new home and was quickly dubbed a classic. In '96, Tweedy and his Chicago-based band were better known as the torchbearers for the burgeoning alt-country scene built around American bands like the Bottle Rockets, Son Volt, the Silos, Vulgar Boatmen, the Jayhawks, Old 97's and Whiskeytown, who shouted their barroom choruses while also exploring the softer side of life.

Unapologetically rural in sensibility, they sang about floods (the Bottle Rockets' "Get Down River"), the road (Son Volt's "Windfall"), the big city (Old 97's' "Broadway"), small towns (Whiskeytown's "My Hometown"), getting high (Whiskeytown's "To Be Young"), being bored (the Vulgar Boatmen's "Drive Somewhere"), and the working poor (the Bottle Rockets' "Welfare Music"). And they did it with some of the finest, most economical rock songwriting of the last decade. Try to top the Vulgar Boatmen's "You and Your Sister" or Whiskeytown's "16 Days."

Tweedy's previous band, Uncle Tupelo -- formed with childhood pal Jay Farrar -- was the spiritual godfather of the alt-country sound; the name of its 1990 debut "No Depression" even morphed into a sort of shorthand for the movement as a whole. ("No Depression" itself is a 1936 Carter Family song, an ode to better times in the afterlife.) By 1996, though, Tweedy found the categorization claustrophobic. At sold-out Irving Plaza that September night, the crowd waited for a roots-rock punctuation to the triumphant night; a "good-time barn-dance vibe," as Greg Kot puts it in his new rock biography, "Wilco: Learning How to Die." But Tweedy, as has become his musical custom, had other ideas.

Instead of lassoing the crowd in, Tweedy, anxious to move forward musically with the new, more sophisticated sound that was playing in his head, turned them away with a string of unknown songs from the band's yet-to-be-released album, "Being There." The songs, heavy on piano and often hushed with introspection, bore little resemblance to the pop-rock sound fans had grown accustomed to. "About one-third of the way into the set, when it became clearer that this wasn't going to be Wilco as usual, the fans' discomfort became palpable," writes Kot. "What the hell was going on? Tweedy did nothing to dispel the bad vibes." If anything, Tweedy seemed to take perverse pride in disappointing his loyal fans.

Bounding offstage, Wilco bassist John Stirratt bumped into Joe McEwen, one of the industry's most respected A&R men, who had signed Uncle Tupelo to its major label contract and represented Wilco at Reprise Records, a subsidiary of Warner Bros. Asked what he thought of the Irving Plaza show, McEwen spat back, "I fuckin' hated it," and then charged into the cramped dressing room to confront Tweedy: "It was horrible! It was fucking horrible! The last time I saw you, you guys were on your way to being as good a band as the Heartbreakers!" referring to Tom Petty's legendary band.

Tweedy seemed dumbfounded. Tom-fucking-Petty, that's what you think this band is about? In a matter of months, with the release of the ambitious and mostly melancholy "Being There," it would become obvious to everyone that Wilco was never going to become a feel-good American jukebox the way Petty and his Heartbreakers were in the '80s and '90s.

But McEwen's frustration no doubt echoed the sentiments of lots of Wilco fans, and not just his colleagues at Warner Bros. who, according to Kot's account, became convinced that if Tweedy thought he'd written a pop hit, he'd find a way to sabotage it the studio.

Next Page: The Wilco that powered "A.M." and "Mermaid Avenue" is gone. But is Wilco II a better band?

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