6
MORE KETCHUP THAN YOU CAN IMAGINE
JAY BENNETT ATE a lot of ketchup. Like way more ketchup than you could imagine. Arguably more ketchup than food. This is not comic hyperbole. You have not witnessed the dozens and dozens of empty ketchup packets lying on his bed in a hotel room, a room in which you’re also sleeping, and you have to tell him, “This is too many empty ketchup packets. It’s making me uncomfortable.” Jay Bennett would laugh at my protests like he thought I was joking, but I was sincerely concerned. Who uses that much ketchup? Jay Bennett would put almost an entire packet on each bite of fries. That is a crazy disproportionate condiment-to-food ratio.
I loved Jay Bennett, he was smart and funny and earnest and weird and a great collaborator. He was my friend. I loved him, but he was also a pain in the ass sometimes. I think most people who were friends with Jay will tell you that. That never stopped anyone from loving the guy, though, including me. Only at the very end of his time in the band did his difficulties start to outweigh his virtues. Jay was burdened with the kind of issues that show no regard for intelligence or kindness or social status. Maladies that destroy without taking into account what one has to offer the world, like all diseases. I wish I could have done more to help him in the same way I wished I could have saved my brothers from suffering and my dad from living a life less than to its fullest.
When Jay Bennett joined the band, I only knew he was a great guitar player. That’s all I thought we were getting when I asked him to join Wilco, and that would’ve been enough. But it turned out he had a lot more to offer.
During a trip to West Virginia during the A.M. tour, we did a radio show called Mountain Stage. We were going to play a few acoustic songs, just Jay Bennett and me and Max Johnston, our fiddle player (and Michelle Shocked’s younger brother). I met Max when Uncle Tupelo was one of the opening acts, along with the Band and Taj Mahal, on his sister’s Arkansas Traveler tour in 1992. We left the tour early—the scene got a little nutso for us—and we took him with us. I don’t think Shocked was too happy about that. Sorry. That day, the four of us arrived at the theater for soundcheck and tried to figure out how to arrange our songs for the environment. Mountain Stage, then and now, is a weekly live radio show that gears itself toward the country/folk and acoustic end of the musical spectrum. The idea was to play acoustic, but we didn’t want it to just mean “Today we’re playing our loud songs soft. You’re welcome.”
Jay Bennett noticed that the studio had a baby grand piano, and he sat down and plunked out the chords to “Passenger Side.”
“You play piano?” I asked him.
“Not really,” he said. “I can fake it pretty good.”
It sounded great to me.
This might sound ridiculous, but I don’t like too much confidence from a musician. Sometimes, I think overconfidence allows simple musical choices to be replaced with technical choices that require thinking, and when you’re thinking, it’s hard to be listening, too. Jay was a very confident guitar player and I appreciated it most of the time, but on the piano he didn’t have that certainty anymore. For some reason I felt it more when he was struggling a little bit. I didn’t watch him and feel like everything was going to be okay.
“You should play piano instead of guitar,” I told him.
“No. Really? Are you sure? All right, what the hell.” He laughed and shook his head.
That was always a great thing about Jay Bennett. He was game for just about anything. I’d love to say I had a master plan from the very beginning, but it wouldn’t be true. Plus, I didn’t even know he played piano. The guitar was still the main appeal of bringing him on board and really upped the overall musicianship of the band, but having an inspired amateur (maybe even drunk) piano player sure made a lot of my songs make more sense. The sad songs sounded sadder, the wobbly rock songs sounded wobblier, and the pretty songs got roughed up a bit. It sounded right to me. It made me like my voice more, which we’ve established is flawed and sounds jarring when surrounded by too much virtuosity, clarity, or precision.
It also introduced sonic textures I’d never had any access to. I appreciated the usefulness of Jay’s knowledge of classic pop architecture and his studio literacy, but I loved his willingness to try anything, to fuck things up with me. A lot of the bands I grew up listening to and admiring were weirder than what Uncle Tupelo was. Jay Farrar and I listened to plenty of off-the-beaten-path records, but we were focused on concocting some reduction of our musical influences into a disciplined and cohesive sound. We were narrowing it down for ourselves the way people try to narrow down the world into more manageable points of view and simpler sets of rules. Almost like refining a religion into some splinter sect. Wilco’s philosophy was forming as a reaction to those constraining impulses. Now it seemed more exciting to contemplate how much one band could embrace.
Jay Bennett was a great match for me and the rest of the guys. Like everyone else in Wilco, Jay had absorbed a lot of music and could slip in and out of styles pretty effortlessly. He was also happy and willing to dig in with me to find ways to subvert classic song structures. We complemented each other well in this regard; he approached songs like an architect and I approached them like a wrecking ball.
It’s easy to write songs in shapes you’ve heard before, and there really isn’t anything wrong with using prefab song shapes to pour your ideas into. If it works, it works, but it didn’t always satisfy me, especially when I was trying to communicate something more damaged about myself. For a lot of the lyrics I was writing, it made more sense to me to undermine their stability and familiarity. Not to be weird just to be weird, but because I felt the lyrics more when they sat atop shifting sands. Luckily, I enjoyed moving my fingers around the fretboard however long it would take to find the chords that would skew a song just enough to excite my ear, and Jay seemed to relish the math problem that the wrong chords I had come up with would represent. Sometimes he would put pen to paper to show me why a chord change shouldn’t work, but only in service of showing me how cool it was to be so wrong. Other times, when I’d get frustrated by my lack of theoretical training, I’d ask him to present me with chord substitutions until one would shake something loose melodically.
There was something about his personality; he needed to know how all the pieces fit together. Not just with music, with pretty much anything. When I reached out to him about joining Wilco, he was working for an electronics repair shop in Champaign, which was the perfect job for him. He could take apart anything and put it back together again. He would go to garage sales and estate sales and pick through people’s garbage, pulling out the bits and pieces that looked interesting to him, and he’d bring them home and see how they fit together, and if they didn’t fit, he’d find something else to do with them.
Working with Jay created possibility. He wasn’t just a kindred spirit and talented guitarist. He had a wildly different skill set, a mathematical approach to music completely foreign to me. It was a symbiotic and rewarding collaboration. I couldn’t stop making up songs and presenting them as problems, and Jay never got tired of solving them.
It was similar, I suppose, to some of the dynamics Jay Farrar and I had going on. They both had enviable attributes (both unlike mine and each other’s) that anyone would benefit from being around, but there were key differences in the way we interacted. Jay Bennett and I had way more of an ability to be open with each other about our musical aspirations. I was still young and insecure . . . but not as young and insecure. Neither of us were ashamed of wanting to make something great. Plus, Jay Bennett actually made an effort to be in Wilco. Let me tell you, in 1994 that was just slightly more lucrative than working at a VCR repair place and way less certain. So if he wasn’t into it, I told my self-esteem, why would he even bother?
BEFORE JAY BENNETT joined the band, when we recorded A.M., Uncle Tupelo had only been defunct for a little over a month. I can hear something missing when I listen to that record now, and it’s understandable to me in a way that it never would have been then. Since we were in high school together, every song I had written was meant to sit next to Jay Farrar’s songs. Now Jay’s songs were missing, but I could still hear them. They were still in my head, to be honest. I was still in the mode of writing songs as if they were one side of a conversation. Which explains why A.M. can be as annoying to me as the guy loudly sharing his end of a phone call in a quiet restaurant. One of the things that happens when you’re in a band with two songwriters, or two singers, is that it’s inevitable that, after the show, at the bar, somewhere, someone comes up to you and says, “I like your songs more than the other guy’s.” And still to this day, people argue about Son Volt versus Wilco.
But back then, there were enough people in my ear saying things like that that it was hard not for me to think, “If I made a record of stuff that was just like the music I made for Uncle Tupelo records, it’s going to be amazing.” It’s really curious—I really did look at myself as being a part of Jay’s musical world as opposed to being a part of my own. It was certainly rewarding, and I channeled my energy and creativity through that perspective and that lens, but it wasn’t fully formed in terms of me having a voice that was independent.
The songs on A.M. were generally perceived to be lighter than Jay’s songs. There was less of a contrast and less shading. That’s what people kind of expected, and that’s the way it was received critically. “This is the lightweight version of Uncle Tupelo—that’s what I thought it would be.” But half of that record are songs that we still get asked to play all the time. I don’t have any embarrassment about anything. That was the reality of what it was at the time. And I think the songs are quality songs, for the most part.
Being There, which we recorded next and the first album we recorded with Jay Bennett, is the light going off in my head of “I don’t have to limit myself to the musical interests that Jay Farrar and I had in common.” It was a real epiphany. “I don’t have to worry about being thought of as pretentious or inauthentic by acknowledging that I like Devo.” Not that there’s any Devo influence evident on Being There, but the palette, from that point on, could draw from just about anything I’d ever listened to, and every recording could move toward incorporating some further reach of my musical interests. Growing toward a point where I felt free to incorporate noise, or found sound, or even things that I’d only read about.
Two out of the four Uncle Tupelo records had been recorded virtually live, and overall the approach we had taken toward the studio had been to use it as a means to document rather than embellish. So allowing performances to be layered with overdubs and songs to be set against atmospheric backdrops felt like yet another magical discovery of something others had long accepted as common practice. Maybe being deprived for so long added to the excitement. What had started out as tentative and traditional—piano, organs, doubled-backing vocals—quickly escalated to experiments with tape manipulation and atonality.
The song “The Lonely 1 (White Hen Version)” is an example of the loosening reins. We had taken the finished mix and set it against a heavily chopped-up, rearranged, and purposefully mangled recording of Jay Bennett and I walking to the store to buy cigarettes in an attempt to create a deeper sense of isolation by placing the vocals inside a city landscape. The idea was that nothing can quite make you feel alone like being around a lot of people. I thought it really worked. But on the album we opted for an ad hoc string arrangement, which in itself was uncharted waters for us.
Some of our excursions into the unknown did make it onto the record, though. “Misunderstood” is a collage of whole band performances layered on top of one another with the added dimension that for each take we had been passing our instruments to the bandmate on our right. I’m not sure what the idea was with that particular exercise but it ended up adding some unpredictability to a fairly repetitive, barely two-chord song. It also helped keep the whole proceeding from coming off as overly dramatic. It’s hard to take yourself too seriously when you have no idea what you’re doing.
Being There was also the first record I made as a dad. On “Dreamer in My Dreams,” at the end when you hear me say, “I’m leaving,” that’s me really walking out the door to go pick up Spencer at Lounge Ax.
UNCLE TUPELO HAD opened for Billy Bragg in St. Louis in 1991. It was at a chapel on the Washington University campus, and he invited us to play soccer with him in the parking lot before the show. Other than that, I don’t remember much about the evening. I ran into him again years later, in London, when Jay Bennett and I were on a mini–European promo tour for Being There. He came to our show—or said he did, but he actually slipped in at the end—and told us about a project he was working on, writing music for unpublished Woody Guthrie lyrics. He was looking for a backing band, he said; “a band who could play country and folk with a rock sensibility.” “We know a band sort of like that,” I joked. I later found out that Billy had approached Jay Farrar first and he’d said no.
I wasn’t originally into the idea, either. We were already planning to head off to Willie Nelson’s studio in Texas to start our third album, which would become Summerteeth, when we got back to the States. Also, I couldn’t imagine any circumstance where I would want Wilco to be a backing band for anyone not named Neil Young or Bob Dylan. Not that I didn’t admire Billy, but our musical styles were starkly different to me; it just seemed like an odd match. I later learned Bragg claimed he picked us because we were “the ultimate Midwest Americana red-dirt band.” I’m glad I didn’t hear that at the time because that would have convinced me to stay away. I really didn’t want people to think of us with a label attached—roots music or Americana or whatever brand they were peddling that week.
It just didn’t feel right when we were working so hard to fight those preconceptions. But Jay Bennett was pushing hard for the collaboration to happen. He was a huge Bragg fan; he’d even named his last band, Titanic Love Affair, after a Bragg lyric. (“Our titanic love affair sails on the morning tide.”) We kept in touch with Billy, and when we found out that Woody’s daughter Nora had agreed that we’d also be allowed to write music for Woody’s unpublished lyrics and visit the archives in New York to search for them ourselves, how could I say no.
Nora and the Guthrie family and Woody’s old manager had collected and archived thousands of pages of Woody’s writing, written longhand, covering just about every possible genre. There were love songs, political songs, children’s songs, holiday songs (both Christmas and Hanukkah), unbelievably filthy songs about fucking, songs about Roosevelt (pro) and Hitler (anti). A lot of it was brilliant, and a lot of it was the kind of stuff writers fear people will find when they die and undo their legacies. It was like reading the unedited transcripts of an artist’s creative process, and it was wildly liberating. It didn’t seem like Guthrie agonized over every word; he just wrote down whatever came into his head, unfiltered and uncensored, and maybe never looked at it again.
There were also lists mixed in with the lyrics, lists of things he intended to do or wanted to do or worried he might forget. One list was of personal goals for the year, with suggestions like “drink less,” “smoke less,” and “womanize less.” There in the midst of all the vices he wanted to overcome, he included this: “Write a song every day.” That’s the best advice I’ve ever gotten as a songwriter, and it wasn’t directed at me. It was written by a man who died two months after I was born, as a reminder to himself.
Nora made authenticated copies of the lyrics we’d chosen and we made a plan with Billy and arranged to meet in Chicago in December to start demoing our songs. On tour that fall, while I was carrying around Woody’s words and getting excited about how they were starting to speak to me, I became convinced I needed a guitar that I didn’t have. A guitar that felt like those lyrics to me. My main acoustic was a 1957 Gibson J-45 at that point. It’s the one I’m holding on the back cover of A.M.
It was the first decent acoustic guitar I ever owned, but for some reason I just didn’t think it was going to work for the Woody Guthrie record. At a shop in San Francisco, I found a 1930s Martin 0–18 that I couldn’t put down. Seriously, I wouldn’t even let them put it in the case for me. It’s been mine since the moment I touched it. I’d never really played an old Martin before that day, but I have a lot since, and I’ve yet to find one that makes me feel like that guitar does. I don’t remember the exact dollar amount, but as a musician with a mortgage, a new baby, and zero hit albums, it was more than I could reasonably justify paying for a guitar at the time. I bought it anyway.
By the time we got back to Chicago for the initial Mermaid Avenue demo sessions, I’d written music for almost every set of lyrics I’d taken from the archives. It was supposed to be an informal get-together to start working out arrangements and to record our rehearsals and run-throughs as we taught each other the tunes we had each come up with for Woody’s words. We’d play a song for Billy, and he’d play one for us. When the session was over, it turned out that we had recorded the final-album versions of most of what we had written for the album. In Dublin, where the album was finished, we spent most of our studio time working on full band arrangements of Billy’s contributions. So if you hear me singing on Mermaid Avenue, it’s most likely a recording that was intended to be a demo.
I THINK THERE WAS a real suspicion of roots music and nostalgia in the band at the time we made Mermaid Avenue that helped us to be a bit more irreverent and unburdened by Woody’s legacy and the weight of the historical context than we had any right to be. The way some bands at the time were working so hard to come across as authentic by adapting their image to some backwoods chic was really making us skeptical about taking inspiration from looking back musically. Our heads were pointed much more in the direction of pushing ourselves into some sort of new sonic pop territory, anything that felt unexplored by us. We had already made some studio breakthroughs, so when we took a break to work on Mermaid Avenue, it felt like we were vacationing from the future. Or at least our future.
There was a sense of—not being above the Mermaid Avenue material—but feeling like where we were was beyond that style of recording at the moment. But at the same time, we were very much invested in it and happy to be a part of it.
Summerteeth was partly a reaction to how defined the band had become by the alt-country tag, or roots rock, or No Depression—whatever they were calling it that month. People assumed we had this sort of identifiable, philistine range of influences, and we, in our heads, knew that wasn’t the case. That there were things we’d been recording that no one had heard yet that weren’t that at all.
“Via Chicago” and other songs on Summerteeth were treated almost like collage. They were fragmented, or mosaic, almost. We were trying our best to find ways to undermine songs that are really, at their core, simple two- or three-chord folk songs. This was the time that I began to write songs in the way that became my standard practice for many years, definitely up until Sky Blue Sky. When I write in this mode, I write for myself first, pretending that the audience isn’t even there, and will never be there. I can get things off of my chest, I can invent versions of myself that are better than I believe I am . . . or worse, are even downright awful and murderous. I can expose shadow selves that I believe I should keep my eye on. I can admit things about myself without really having to take ownership of anything. Having it all feel private and insular creates a sense of authenticity I’m not sure I’m able to explain in an understandable way. It’s a trick I play to coax myself into being okay with exposing things that feel powerful and intimate because they’re the types of things people often hide about themselves, or even from themselves. This style of writing felt new and exciting, and even more so when it came to perfecting the songs and recording them.
Jay Bennett and I were probably at our most compatible in terms of our creative relationship during the making of Summerteeth. In hindsight, it was a pretty unhealthy environment. I was probably as unhappy as I’d ever been. I was insecure, homesick, and drug-addled. The insecurity fueled some paranoia, but as they say, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you. And in reality, there was a side of Jay that was kind of maneuvering to be my right-hand man, my main collaborator, yet at the same time fomenting some resentment toward me with the other guys when I wasn’t around.
When it would just be Jay and me, Jay would say, “You and I could play everything.” Jay really did like playing the drums, and he played the drums on some songs on that record. I play bass, so he’d say, “We can make this whole record ourselves.” And when I wasn’t in the room, and the other guys were there, he’d say, “Elvis thinks he’s going to make this whole record by himself.” So, clearly immature, typical band stuff. But there was still a lot of creative progress being made. It wasn’t dysfunctional to the point of grinding everything to a halt. Music was still by and large a conflict-free zone.
On one hand, I felt insecure, paranoid, and unhappy, and on the other hand, I was still fully capable and engaged. I’ve had a lot of different periods like that. The part of me that could cope and had developed some healthy adaptations to all of those problems was ultimately in charge. The contrast and confusion comes from the idea that you can’t be two things at once. And I definitely disagree with that. I think you can be completely confident and comfortable with your talents, and in an undiluted way, pushing forward with your best abilities, and also debilitated by and maladapted to issues that never really go away. But that you only notice when you aren’t being distracted by something you’re good at.
I think it’s bad for people to believe they’re only supposed to have one emotion at one time. Are you ever really only happy? Or sad? Or angry? I’m ambivalent more than anything, and a lot of the time I’m totally unsure how I feel. It’s ambiguous. That’s the part I think people really can’t tolerate. We humans hate ambiguity more than almost anything else in the world. So we pick an emotion and stick with it.
That’s what Summerteeth was like for me. And all of that is just a roundabout way to say, it was a difficult time—that’s the record that’s hardest for my wife to listen to. I still hadn’t grown up in any significant way emotionally, and like a lot of men, I relied upon my spouse for an unconditional motherly type of love that isn’t particularly healthy. When a child was introduced into that dynamic, I became a fucking jealous baby. I made really stupid choices because I wasn’t getting enough attention. How pathetic is that? One of the reasons that painkillers were such an attractive drug to me was because they feel maternal, there’s a warm sense of well-being that comes with opioid use. It’s nauseating to me in hindsight, but I had no idea what was going on at the time. I had more love in my life than I’d ever had, and I was still lonely.