Jeff Tweedy at Lounge Ax, June 14 & 15
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Then Tweedy took a crucial step in Wilco’s evolution: he hired Jay Bennett as the band’s permanent guitarist. Bennett’s prior work in the Champaign-based Titanic Love Affair didn’t presage the impact he would have on Wilco, but over time he has become Jiminy Cricket to Tweedy’s Pinocchio: as a constant advocate of the limitless possibilities of the studio and as an adventurous arranger, he seems to have given Tweedy the confidence to explore his own talent in the broader realm of rock ‘n’ roll. In Bennett’s absence, as in the roots-rock stuporgroup Golden Smog, Tweedy has been prone to the predictable (“Lost Love,” from the Smog’s 1998 disc Weird Tales) and the pedestrian (“Please Tell My Brother”).
From the start Wilco and Tweedy tried to distance themselves from the burgeoning alt-country scene. “In the back of my mind, I was still wanting Uncle Tupelo fans to like me [circa A.M.],” he told No Depression on the eve of Being There’s release. “[But] that’s not really me.” And before Being There came out, Tweedy met with employees of the band’s label, Reprise, to request that they not use Uncle Tupelo or Farrar’s band, Son Volt, to market the record. By the time the band hit the road, he was openly hostile about it: one oft-repeated anecdote on Postcard, an E-mail discussion list devoted to Uncle Tupelo and its ilk, takes place at an east-coast club during the Being There tour. Wilco is onstage. Fan shouts: “Where’s the banjo?” Tweedy barks: “The banjo’s up your ass!”
Summerteeth is unquestionably a pop album. It features about as many keyboards as it does guitars; the banjo’s in there, but so are the tambourine, the toy harp, the sleigh bells, and the timpani. It’s unified even in its diversity: three-chord ballads like “Via Chicago” make nice with the likes of the title track, which hops from one key to another midsong, and pop-rock radio nuggets like “ELT” cohabit comfortably with the meticulously scored “Pieholden Suite.” Tweedy’s lyrics are arrestingly imagistic (“I wrote my name on the back of a leaf and watched it float away / The hope I had in a notebook full of white dry pages was all I had to say”) and rendered in indelible turns of phrase (“How to fight loneliness? Smile all the time / Shine your teeth ’til meaningless / And sharpen them with lies”).
