On a bitterly cold evening in February 2002, Jeff Tweedy gave a concert in the small dance hall in St. Pauli. With only his guitar and harmonica, he stood there and played songs from an album that hadn’t been released yet and almost never was released because the record company that paid for it didn’t want it.
They had kicked out Tweedy’s band Wilco for lack of commercial potential, and they came back in through the back door and resold their album to a sub-division of the same company. Wilco had outwitted the system, and Jeff Tweedy was the ultimate outlaw. It wasn’t written “This guitar kills capitalists” on his guitar, but that was taken into account that evening.
I wrote in my review at the time that he looked “straight out of the Dust Bowl” and that he was “the legitimate successor to Woody Guthrie”. And indeed, the songs of the “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot”, which was finally released in April 2002, belonged to this tradition, because after 9/11 singing about America was more than a chic retro gesture in memory of Gram Parsons and The Band, it was about the non-violent one Defending a dream and a utopia that had nothing in common with George W. Bush’s “war on terror”.
Tweedy sang “Ashes Of American Flags,” the song that sounded like it was written after American Doom Day, but was written long before that. So the great prophetic songs were not only found on old records and in the books of Greil Marcus, they were still being written and sung.
“Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” was a revelation a little later. Tweedy’s folk songs about the nocturnal aura of the metropolis, trembling skyscrapers, alienation, loneliness and violence, ATMs, calorie-free soft drinks and a heavy metal youth suddenly sounded urban through Jim O’Rourke’s staging, combining tradition and the present.
This was not uncontroversial in the editorial office at the time, they clung to the drinkable Wilco-Americana of “Being There” and the opulent pop of “Summerteeth”. For me, Wilco only became a favorite band with “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot”.
Jeff Tweedy, a tough guy?
I didn’t really want to meet Tweedy, though. He was a difficult guy, people said back then, rather taciturn and clumsy in conversation, so I was happy to leave the interviews to my colleagues and stuck to the everything-saying records. The dark, torn “A Ghost Is Born” suggested that its creator was not necessarily a bubbling fountain of joie de vivre.
A year later I bumped into Tweedy at a concert in Munich, he seemed a bit restless, we talked about the past and about my Buffalo Springfield T-shirt, but we didn’t have much to say to each other. The next interview – about “Sky Blue Sky”, a transcendent mourning album – was then welcome to Birgit, who reported in her impressive report of Tweedy’s “less eloquent, rather brusque way of speaking”.
However, when Arne asked two years later on the occasion of the filigree exhibition “Wilco (The Album)” if anyone wanted to travel to Chicago to visit the band in the studio, I had to get on the plane anyway, because the place where they were magical songs emerged, I wanted to see. With “In The Heart Of The Heart Of The Country” by William H. Gass and a piece of paper with 50 questions in my backpack, I set off.
Jeff Tweety kindly resolved
I finally found the sign “Foxtrot” on the doorbell of a nondescript warehouse in north Chicago. Behind it was “The Loft”, Wilco’s rehearsal room and studio. “A kind of student living room,” I wrote at the time, with posters on the walls, shelves full of records, books and DVDs, a PlayStation and an expansive landscape of guitars.
Tweedy, “Jean jacket, T-shirt, baseball cap, stubble on his face,” opened a huge refrigerator filled to the brim with Diet Coke bottles and offered me one. He seemed friendly and relaxed, and the mention of my airplane reading even made the otherwise grumpy man laugh: I had read that ‘GQ’ magazine had declared him the ‘perfect modern rock star’. “We are very, very stylish, urbane and sophisticated,” he said with a grin and turned like a “GNTM” candidate.
Tweedy told me very openly about his overcome painkiller addiction and his fear of losing control over his life. But he’s doing better now, he said.
The suffering artist
“People still make a big deal out of the fact that songwriters have to go through inner struggles and always suffer to create great things. I think that’s a pretty shabby myth. Now that I’m doing better, I’m suffering much more intensely than before, because now I can let bad things get to me. When one has made peace with suffering and allows oneself to suffer instead of resorting to any means, the art also becomes better.”
Two years later, on the occasion of “The Whole Love”, the next trip to Chicago was planned. I checked into the Hard Rock Hotel downtown and got the Eurythmics room. Then I made my way to the loft. It was like coming home.
The archive text comes from the series “ROLLING STONE turns 20. Our Heroes”, which was published for the 20th anniversary of ROLLING STONE.