That Kingston show truly was unlike any other, the audience and artist displaying a strange tension that I never expected. Oh, and that line Tweedy quoted from Danko is still priceless. "Always stay desperate."
*******
After hours of fretting over
whether I should stay home or go – intense internal debate given my tight
finances and unfamiliarity with the region’s byways, especially at night – I
finally decided Friday evening that I would be a fool to pass up the chance to
see Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy solo and acoustic at the Broadway Theater about
a half hour away and across the river, in Kingston, N.Y.
My
decision was sealed when I called the theater to see if they even had any
tickets left. They did. And with a few extra bills collecting dust in my bank
account, it seemed right to burn through 25 of them to see Tweedy, who is one
of the most original personalities on the mainstream music scene today. I still
think “Summer Teeth” has been his greatest accomplishment, that album coming in
1999 when Tweedy’s ying still benefited from the yang of fellow songwriter Jay
Bennett. More recently, “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” and “a ghost is born,” while
both musically more advanced than “Summer Teeth,” still seemed half-formed and
lyrically searching, like Tweedy was in an experimental phase that was yielding
interesting music in the interim before the next truly great album. (Not to
digress too far, for this was to be a piece on the show I saw, but I had the
same impression of Radiohead’s post-“OK Computer” albums: Overly experimental
and not quite as satisfying, until they finally begat “Hail to the Thief.”)
So
an acoustic Tweedy concert promised a look at the artist in a different light.
I caught Wilco at Milwaukee’s Summerfest in 2003, after “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot,”
and thought it was mediocre. The crowd had grown since I first saw them at
Summerfest, two years earlier, and Tweedy seemed to have lost energy, possibly
a side effect of the drugs, which he now says are behind him. I went to the
Kingston show looking for a sign that Tweedy would endure, not become just
another disappointing casualty of rock ’n’ roll.
I
rolled into Kingston at about 7 p.m., bought my ticket, caught dinner at a
coffee shop across the street and then wasted time at Dunkin’ Donuts so I could
get into the theater right at showtime, 8 p.m. My seat was up in the balcony
and the room was half empty. Not surprising, given that the first hour was
taken up by the opening act, Glenn Kotche, Wilco’s latest drummer, who put on a
mesmerizing percussion performance with crickets, metallic grating sounds and
plenty of loops.
When
Tweedy came out at 9 p.m., the spotlights were off and the only thing
illuminating him was a stark, white light beaming from right in front of him at
the edge of the stage. The crowd had grown and it cheered his arrival as he
opened with “Sunken Treasure.”
The
songs were all stripped down to their essence, which left Tweedy’s songwriting
open for appraisal, his Dylan/Young influences laid bare. Most of the newer
songs seemed to take on new meanings, though not quite as effective without all
the noises and studio tricks. They still sounded good, partly because the
theater’s intimate setting (it’s barely larger than the Grand in Wausau) conveyed
a directness that is lost (or not attempted) on the recent albums. Of course he
also dipped into the back catalogue, and after about a half hour of passive
listening, my heart leapt upon hearing Tweedy’s first song from “Summer Teeth,”
the title track, which, though a song about loneliness and suicide, tempers
those somber themes with such a lovely, melancholy melody. The whole album is
like that: beautiful songs that tackle heavy subjects with lyrical nuance. The
album seemed all the more enduring as Tweedy stripped some of its songs down
and placed them next to the rest in his catalog. The early tunes are distinctly
alt-country. (One of my favorites, “Far Far Away,” he played in the first
encore with Kotche.) The more recent tunes are more avant-garde. Meanwhile,
“Summer Teeth” and “Mermaid Avenue,” the latter a collaboration with socialist
Brit folkie Billy Bragg that set unearthed Woody Guthrie poems to fresh music,
seem the high water mark so far for the band and for Tweedy.
One
of the most tender moments of the evening was when Tweedy asked the audience
what song would get people singing along. Being up in the balcony, it was hard
to catch the variety of responses, but the song Tweedy finally played was
“California Stars” from “Mermaid Avenue,” one of the prettiest songs he has
written, again with nods to Guthrie, who wrote the words. Tweedy barely had to
sing the song at all. He let the crowd, myself included, supply the vocals,
hushed but sincere.
“I’d
like to rest my heavy head tonight
“On
a bed of California stars
“I’d
like to lay my weary bones tonight
“On
a bed of California stars.”
The
show confirmed for me that Tweedy still is one to watch. This was the final
American show on a two-week solo tour (with Kotche) that started in Madison,
Wis., and will wrap up Nov. 22 in London. The Kingston audience was lively,
some might say raucous, others might say obnoxious. Any show in a venue of that
size is bound to produce its share of pleading fans desperate for the star to
perform their favorites and willing to shout those requests to the stage. This
crowd was a little more persistent, and some audience members even seemed a bit
rude, though it was hard to tell if they were being disrespectful to Jeff or
merely following a Kingston tradition of active audience participation.
Tweedy
did his share by taking time out after every few songs to offer humble
interludes, one that described the audience as an abyss because he could not
see us all behind the light in front of him. Better than the abyss in his head,
he joked. This led to numerous abyss references, my favorite being the one in
response to someone on the left side of the house telling someone on the right
side of the house to “shut the fuck up.”
Tweedy
didn’t miss a beat.
“After
a while, the abyss starts to police itself,” he said, either amused or
uncertain.
He
also told the story about how his old band Uncle Tupelo, an alt-country
originator, performed at the Broadway Theater about 20 years ago, and while the
band was rehearsing for the show, in walked Rick Danko, bassist for The Band,
which is famous in these parts. Danko is an idol of Tweedy’s, and Jeff told
Danko he couldn’t concentrate with him in the room. Danko laughed and said
don’t worry about it and offered Tweedy this advice: “Always stay desperate.”
By
the end of the show, the crowd had gotten somewhat out of hand. Some woman
begged and pleaded for Tweedy to play “Misunderstood,” which he finally did,
seemingly more to appease the woman and the crowd than out of any real interest
in the song. I cringed upon hearing the song’s first line – “Back in your old
neighborhood…” – knowing that by the end of the song he would be belting out
one of his most haunting phrases, “I’d like to thank you all … for nothing!” I
worried that he would end with this song, and that last line would linger as a
defiant statement to an ungrateful audience.
To
my relief, he didn’t end with that one. I’m not even sure what he closed with,
possibly “Someday, Some Morning Sometime.” Did he feel slighted on the last
American date on his tour? He even asked at some point – after someone in the
balcony to my left either said “You’re petulant” or “We’re petulant” – whether
he was the one being disrespectful, from the stage. The crowd, myself include,
dismissed that notion with a roar of approval and Tweedy finished out what was
one of the most memorable musical experiences of my life.
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