4
HOW IT ENDS
THIS IS HOW it ends.
I’m waiting in our apartment for Jay to come home. A few days earlier, he’d called Tony and told him he was quitting the band. It wasn’t fun anymore, he said, and he didn’t like me. To me, his timing couldn’t have been more bizarre. We were coming off an incredible year, better than I could have ever dreamed. We had just released our fourth album, our switch to a major label hadn’t been nearly as compromising as we had feared, we made our first TV appearance, and our record was well received. We were touring the country and splitting hotel rooms, a huge step up from sleeping on the couches or hardwood floors of strangers who took pity on us after the shows. The night Jay called Tony and complained about the unacceptable amount of fun he was having, we had just played a sold-out show at Tramps in New York City, and The New York Times had published a review of our latest record, Anodyne, comparing us to Hank Williams, the Flying Burrito Brothers, and Exile-era Stones.
There had been some changes along the way. Mike had made the disappointing but understandable decision of opting out of the touring lifestyle in favor of a well-paying job at the local daily newspaper and living closer to his girlfriend. After that we tried out a drummer for a few months whom Jay struggled to connect with before moving on to Ken Coomer from Nashville, Tennessee. Ken was big and confident and hit his drums twice as hard as anyone we’d ever played with. Lord, he was loud. Mike was self-taught and had learned how to play right alongside us, so all of his inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies were baked into the band and belonged to us all. Ken, on the other hand, felt like a real professional rock drummer, which was exciting and a little overwhelming at first.
For Anodyne, our first record on a major label, we had decided that the way to guarantee maximum control of how the record sounded would be to record it live in the studio without any overdubs. I’m not sure what we were afraid they would want to change about our sound or why we even thought they would care enough to try and mold us into a more commercial act. Our minds just worked that way back then, I guess. To make it easier to get a full band sound without resorting to overdubs, we rounded out the lineup with a couple of friends we’d made traveling around the country, including John Stirratt, who we’d met and become fast friends with in Oxford, Mississippi, after Uncle Tupelo played a show with his band the Hilltops. John was the first person we’d ever met outside the St. Louis area who had a copy of our demo tape. He’d taken it from his college radio station and had invited us to share a bill shortly thereafter. And then there was Max Johnston, who we met . . . Well, it’s a long story I’ll get to later.
Tony called me with the bad news about Jay leaving when we returned from New York. I was hurt, but mostly furious. This wasn’t one of Jay’s bands with his brothers I’d talked my way into. This was Uncle Tupelo, which I had helped create. I felt at least some ownership of it. To just say, “Nah, I’m over it,” and close it down, after all those years of touring and building something together, felt unfair, and to do it without even letting me know something was wrong, I took as betrayal.
I really wanted to talk to Jay about it—maybe even yell at him—but he’d disappeared. Several days went by, and there was no sign of him. He could’ve been at his parents’ house, or possibly working at his mom’s used bookstore. I could have called, but instead I sat and waited in our second-floor apartment on Eleventh Street, right off Main Street in Belleville, that we were still sharing with Mike Heidorn. The place had seemed like a sanctuary when we found it: a sprawling flat above a dance studio that used to be a train depot now run by an inattentive landlord. Oh, and the rent was $80 a month! When we moved in, there were four of us living there. That meant we each paid $20 per month. I could pay my portion of the rent by looking for change in the couch a few times a month. My parents lived less than a mile away, so regular meals and laundry were still free. It was adulthood with training wheels.
That still didn’t make it easy enough, though, and after several years of neglect and treating the place with roughly the same love as a highway rest stop, it no longer seemed like home sweet home. The furniture, which was already second- (or third-) hand by the time we’d dragged it in, looked and smelled like we kept raccoons as pets. There were pizza boxes stacked to the ceiling and garbage bags filled with dirty dishes that deserved a decent burial. There were more blankets hanging over doorways than actual doors and a fridge that contained little more than beer and ketchup.
I sat there for days and stewed. When you’ve committed yourself to stewing and watching the front door, you have a lot of extra time for taking an inventory of your life. I started to put the pieces together, thinking back over the last year, and with hindsight, it all seemed so obvious. Some of the clues were right there in the songs. I thought “Chickamauga” was about a Civil War battlefield, and maybe it mostly was, but there was another layer that was clearly foreshadowing. “Solitude is where I’m bound.” Ugh. How did I miss that? If the record was a conversation between us, I was all “We’ll get there eventually,” and he was “The time is right for getting out while we still can.”
I was also starting to take stock of our shared space. Both Jay and I were twenty-six, deep enough into what could fairly be described as adulthood. We had a major label record deal; shouldn’t our living conditions not be best described as camping? Things that I’d never noticed before suddenly came front and center. “Why is there a garbage bag filled with dirty dishes?” I thought. “Whose idea was that? That is the worst idea in the history of bad ideas. Seriously, a plastic dish rack costs maybe a buck.”
Too much reality can be depressing and I was up to my eyes in it. Especially since, up to this point, I’d convinced myself that we lived in an indie rock version of the Monkees’ house.
The Monkees’ living arrangement was such a formative memory for me that I’ve chased the fantasy my whole life. I truly believed that a band was supposed to live together and have antics and adventures. To be fair, though, it was the Beatles who technically came up with the utopian ideal of a cohabitating band in Help! Ever since the moment I watched all four Beatles walk through separate doors and all end up in the same sprawling shared living space, I’ve pictured all bands in communal homes. I loved every detail: Ringo’s vending machines, John’s revolving bookcase and relaxation pit, Paul’s giant church organ rising out of the floor. That, I thought, is the only way it makes sense to call a band a band.
The Monkees just upped the ante. Their house was a little more practical, but it still had a spiral staircase and bunk beds. During the first season, Davy and Peter slept in the downstairs bunk beds, and Mike and Micky slept upstairs, but they had all moved into the same bedroom by season 2. Which, again, made complete sense to me. Of course you all sleep in the same room. What if somebody gets a musical idea in the middle of the night? You need your bandmates nearby for emergency jamming. The Monkees had no parental authority figures or real governing body other than a mannequin named Mr. Schneider, who gave advice when you pulled a cord. In my prepubescent brain, this wasn’t just a fantasy in a sitcom universe. It was aspirational. For me, The Monkees might as well have been a documentary.
I grew out of those childish ideas, and then grew right back into them when I got older. The Loft, my recording studio in Chicago, is pretty much built on that template. It’s got bunk beds, enough for every member of Wilco and the Wilco crew that lives outside of Chicago. We’ve had a few sleepovers over the years, while in the midst of making records, preparing for tours, et cetera. The Loft has a kitchen, a desk for each band member where their personal mail piles up when we’re out of town, a pinball machine, and enough nooks and crannies to get lost in.
But as I sat in our ramshackle excuse for an apartment in Belleville and waited for Jay to come back, it was so glaringly not a Monkees house. Not just because there was no spiral staircase or advice-dispensing mannequins. It wasn’t a true Monkees house because it was empty. There was never an episode of The Monkees where Micky Dolenz said, “This isn’t fucking fun anymore, I quit,” and then disappeared. That wasn’t even a remote possibility. As bad as things could get, they were in this thing for life. Maybe Micky wouldn’t sleep in the communal bunk bedroom for a few nights, just to let his temper cool off, but he’d always come back. Then one of the guys would find a magical monkey’s paw, and they’d be distracted by the next madcap adventure.
A LOT OF WHAT has been covered in the press over the years regarding my relationship with Jay Farrar has made it sound like we were always at odds, but we weren’t. We had good times. Lots of them.
Like the time we were recording our second album, Still Feel Gone, at Long View Farm in western Massachusetts, a few hours outside of Boston. That album title, by the way, is about being on the road too long, which we’d only recently started to experience. When you’ve been traveling for so many weeks and months that it all starts to blur together, and you close your eyes and get the sensation that you’re in the rear seat of a van speeding down the interstate even when you’re back home in your own bed, that’s when you still feel gone.
Long View Farm was an actual farm, with horses and rolling fields and a big barn that was built in the nineteenth century and had a state-of-the-art recording facility. The Rolling Stones used it in the eighties when they were rehearsing for their Tattoo You tour. They converted the hayloft into a stage so Jagger could practice his . . . Jaggering? I don’t remember why we ended up there. We had a slightly bigger budget this time, and Sean and Paul, who had produced our first record, were pushing for us to go there.
Long View is famously haunted, but I never saw any ghosts. Mike swears he did, though. We were staying at a little cabin on the property, and one night Mike was doing the dishes, and he turned around and noticed a woman standing behind him, dressed in nineteenth-century garb and just staring at him. His first reaction was “Oh, that’s cool,” and he waved at her and then turned back and continued washing dishes. When he turned around again, a few seconds later, she was gone. Which is . . . weird, I guess? I don’t know. I thought it was probably a cleaning woman.
Either way, the talk of paranormal activity had put us all on edge. While Mike and I argued about the maid ghost, debating whether she existed or whether he was high enough to hallucinate, Jay stayed quiet, which we read as on edge. Stoicism can act as a sort of emotional Rorschach test, and it’s easy to project your mood onto the silent one in the room. Later that night, Jay snuck into the barn when the rest of us were out and found an old pipe organ. He cranked that thing up, and when Mike and I showed up for a late-night rehearsal, we were still fumbling for the lights when he burst into a deafening rendition of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, the piece always used as a cartoonish shorthand for spookiness.
It was a beautifully executed and effective fright. My heart raced and the hair stood up on the back of my neck. Then we saw Jay bent over the organ. He was nonchalant, but there was no mistaking the intent. He was pranking us. His underselling of his conscious ploy was almost funnier than the prank itself. Jay Farrar scared us out of our wits by playing scary organ music in a dark barn without ever even acknowledging us. I mean, come on, that’s the kind of hijinks never associated with Jay and Uncle Tupelo.
There were plenty of other moments like that, when Jay would surprise us by being spontaneously silly, but the hard feelings that went with our demise somehow made it easier to relate the ones filled with dread. It makes sense you would reinforce the narrative that things needed to end than the equally valid point of view that we were buddies and it all ended with an unfulfilled promise. It really was a struggle at times, though. Like when we realized good news had to be gingerly broken to Jay. “Oh crap, we were offered the opening slot for the Yo La Tengo show in St. Louis. How are we going to tell Jay?” “Oh no, Rolling Stone wants to interview us. Who gets to tell Jay?” Nobody wanted that thorny task. It was always difficult to present good news to him because I think he was suspicious of good news. He’d find the negative side of anything. “Oh great, Rolling Stone, is Madonna going to be on the cover?”
Another great/bad piece of news we had to break to Jay was the opportunity to make an album with Peter Buck, the R.E.M. cofounder and lead guitarist. We first met when he came to see Uncle Tupelo in 1990, before we’d even put out our first record, at the 40 Watt in Athens, Georgia. I think he only went on the recommendation of Debbie Southwood-Smith, the Rockville A&R woman who signed Uncle Tupelo. There were maybe twenty people in the audience for our first show at the 40 Watt, and four of them were R.E.M., which was a pretty crazy ratio for a band without a record out, but I assume it happened quite often in those days when R.E.M. was pioneering a new kind of rock star persona. A homespun, accessible, weird, and overall friendlier sort.
Peter asked us to meet him after the show at a place called the Grit, a nearby vegetarian restaurant. When we walked in, there was no sign of him, but I saw Michael Stipe sitting alone at the bar, so I tapped him on the shoulder. “Excuse me, Mr. Stipe, do you know if Peter is here?” He turned to me and replied, with no facial expression or emotion, “I’m not Peter’s keeper.” Ah, okay, noted. We eventually found Peter, and we hung out deep into the night, bonding over records and books and southern diner food. At some point he offered to help us make a record. We’d only made one record, so we weren’t quite aware how generous and sweet an offer that was.
EVENTUALLY WE FIGURED it out and spent five days in March of 1992 making . . . well, March 16–20, 1992 with Peter Buck producing us at John Keane Studios in Athens, Georgia, and John Keane, himself, engineering and lending a hand with some banjo and pedal steel overdubs. We stayed at Peter’s house, a big old Victorian mansion, which saved us enough money to stay under budget. I remember wandering around the house, looking for a bathroom, and opening a door to what turned out to be a closet filled with gold and platinum records. Every day he’d get his mail, there would be more. He’d say, “Oh, wow. Gold in Israel,” and then he’d go put it in the closet with all the others. He was a bona fide rock star at a time when that meant something, but he didn’t really act like one. Having known him now for a couple of decades, I can safely say any idiosyncratic behavior he’s ever exhibited would’ve pronounced itself at some point even if he never was in one of the world’s biggest bands.
When we lived with him, he wore his pajamas most of the time. Even when he left the house—we’d stay behind to work on songs, and he’d say, “I’ll be back in a few hours to see how it’s going”—he’d walk out in pajamas. I’m not sure if he even bothered to put on shoes. While we were staying with him, he brought in cases of beer—I guess our reputation preceded us—and when I told him I didn’t drink anymore, he brought in cases of pop, too. Peter was a very hands-off producer, not in an aloof way, but in a laid-back “It’ll all work out somehow” way. There were times when I noticed him reading a newspaper while we were in the middle of recording a song. But it never felt like we were being ignored. He had a calming presence; it simultaneously lifted our anxiety and made us want to try harder.
There’s a great story that Roger Hawkins tells. He’s the drummer on some of Aretha Franklin’s most iconic songs, like “Respect” and “Chain of Fools.” As part of a group of studio musicians in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, he was drumming on hugely important R&B songs when he was just a teenager, far too young to have any sense of, or ego about, his talent. So one day Hawkins was playing on a session that Jerry Wexler from Atlantic Records was producing. Out of the blue, Hawkins claims, Wexler walked down from the control room and into the studio and told him, “Roger, you are a great drummer.” Wexler wasn’t involved in some larger conversation with Hawkins. He just wanted to tell him. Hawkins’s reaction to it, in his own words: “So I became one.”
That story always made sense to me. I’ve had that same moment of feeling like everything’s changed because of one compliment, one tiny bit of encouragement. That, in a nutshell, is what Peter Buck did for me. Not that he ever walked into the studio just to tell me how great I was. No, but he made me feel like an equal.
Just a few years ago, I was on tour with Tweedy, the band my son Spencer and I formed to take the songs we’d been recording in the studio on the road, and Peter was playing with the Minus 5, who opened for us on a few dates on the West Coast. We asked them to join us for a song, and I introduced Peter as the guy who believed in me way before I believed in myself. He walked out and gave me a hug, and then whispered to me, away from the microphone, “You’ve always made it easy to believe in you, Jeff.” It brought a tear to my eye, for real.
Still, my best memories of Jay are playing music with him—the only time I feel like we were truly present with each other—and the odd moments offstage when something distracted him from being the grim protector of music’s sanctity. Like when he broke both of his ankles in a car accident in 1987, rolling his Toyota Celica into a ditch, and I had to carry him upstairs for band rehearsals. The awkwardness of our friendship and our discomfort with even necessary physical contact inhibited my attempts at being his Sherpa and always worked to turn my efforts into a comic spectacle.
Or when we went on our first European tour in ’92 and spent a few days in Copenhagen enjoying the pleasures of legal hash. It was the first time in my life I’d gotten high and not experienced any paranoia whatsoever. Jay was into hacky sack at the time, believe it or not, so we spent a lot of that trip just hacky sackin’ in the sun. Those are the days with Jay that I have the warmest memories of, when there was no tension or anxiety or neurotic thoughts: “What is he thinking? Does he hate me? He probably hates me.” Jay and I were just two stoned twentysomethings kicking around the sack with our band on the road.
Not forever, just for now.
JAY FINALLY CAME home to our Belleville apartment, acting as if nothing had happened. I confronted him, demanding explanations, but he offered none. He agreed to finish the tour if only to help pay back Tony a little of the money he’d invested in the band. After that, he was done. The reasons why weren’t worth discussing anymore, he said, because I already knew why.
“I really don’t,” I insisted. “Would you mind giving me a hint?”
He ignored me, and we sat in opposite corners of the room, avoiding eye contact.
“Why do you hate me so much?” I asked.
I sincerely had no idea what I had done to fill him with so much disdain. The image I had of myself was that of a person 100 percent devoted to Jay, his songs, and our band.
Almost twenty years later, I was shocked to learn from a magazine interview with Jay that there was an “incident” that he saw as the last straw. Something that I’d completely forgotten about. An “incident” that, because it had happened well before we had released any records, I had forgotten before the band even ended. Apparently still an “incident” he’d never forgiven me for.
We had just finished a show in St. Louis, and this was back when I was still drinking—I quit drinking cold turkey at twenty-three in an effort to sidestep my genetic destiny—so it was before our first record deal. I never made another record with alcohol in my bloodstream after No Depression. I’ve ingested plenty of other things while making records, but never booze. But on the evening in question I was quite drunk, as I often tended to be in the band’s early days. Jay’s girlfriend, Monica, had also gotten tipsy during the show, and she fell asleep in the back of our van, waiting for us to load out. Jay was our designated driver for the night, so he was (mostly) sober.
After we loaded out, I stumbled into the van and sat next to Monica. She woke up, and we started talking, not in the way two sober, rational humans have a conversation, but the incoherent babbling of two individuals who’d been overserved. We were leaning in to each other, and I was earnestly slurring, “I love you, Monica. I’ve always loved you.” Monica was sweetly slurring right back, not without pity, “Aw, I love you, too, Jeff.” Innocent stuff. Obnoxious, yes, but not anything with sinister motives. I was just a drunk having a bad case of loving everyone. Over the past hour, I’d told numerous people—some of whom I knew, some of whom I didn’t—that I loved them. I may’ve also professed my love to our van, Old Blue. If there’s one thing that’s 100 percent true about every intoxicated person in world history, it’s that you shouldn’t believe them when they say they love you. The only difference between you and that slice of cold pizza back at their apartment is that they haven’t met the pizza yet.
Jay heard it all and watched our inebriated snuggling unfold from the van’s rearview mirror. He was upset, which he had every right to be. If some drunk started weepingly confessing his love for my girlfriend, I’d be pissed, too. Jay confronted me about it when we got back home, and it was apparent he had a very different version of events. He thought I was hitting on her, or trying to seduce her. Even in my drunken stupor, that hadn’t been my intention. I was trying to tell a friend how much she meant to me, and because of the alcohol, I was doing it stupidly. There wasn’t any pawing at her, no attempts at kissing, nothing even remotely sexual. It was just two drunks telling each other, “I love you, man.” As drunks do.
That was still too much for Jay to bear. When we got back to Belleville, we unloaded our equipment and then Jay laid into me. I apologized, he quit the band, and I’m pretty sure I cried. It was a big deal. I took him seriously. I knew I’d fucked up, and it inspired me to quit drinking, which I somehow managed to do. I was losing control more and more often and waking up in strange places with people mad at me and I was starting to get scared.
Jay came back to the band—I thought he had forgiven me, but it was really just that he wasn’t ready to give up on Uncle Tupelo yet—and we survived for another four years and three more records before he quit again, this time for good. He never mentioned Monica among his reasons at that time. Years later, when he was interviewed, he talked about that night in the van like it was the ultimate betrayal, the moment that killed Uncle Tupelo. His telling added details that were villainous, like that I’d been stroking Monica’s hair (doesn’t sound like me), and when he confronted me, I called him a pussy (really not in my repertoire, being one myself). He claimed that I was crying to garner sympathy. Um . . . Okay, that’s probably partly true. I did cry a lot, and quite often it would result in being tended to in maternal ways by our female friends and our male friends most in touch with their feminine energy, but it was never a calculation I was conscious of. I know that because I can remember how desperately I wanted to not be crying. Even without alcohol I still have an impulse from time to time to mope and feel sorry for myself and want to be taken care of. The cure? My badass wife. She simply won’t have that shit. Not even a tiny bit.
“Why do you hate me?” I asked Jay again in our Belleville apartment. I was going to keep asking until I got an answer out of him.
He didn’t deny it. If anything, he looked surprised that I didn’t already know the answer. “You have no idea what it’s like to stand onstage with somebody every night who loves himself as much as you do,” he said.
“You’re right,” I said. “I don’t have any idea.”
That wasn’t my attempt at a zinger. I meant it honestly. I had. No. Idea.
Every time I played with Uncle Tupelo, I would feel stupid after a show. Early on, it was because I got drunk and acted like a buffoon onstage. Later, when I stopped drinking, I would still get wrapped up in the music, but for every brief moment I spent uninhibited, losing myself in the moment, I could stop somewhere just shy of feeling truly liberated and retreat back into my overthinking mind, inside my stupid head where I would remain, awkward and painfully self-aware. I was certain my self-consciousness was visible from outer space. Immediately afterward, when the show was over and we were off to the next town, I would be remorseful. I’d feel real shame. I’d replay the show in my memory and be tormented by mental images of me taking myself way too seriously. The self-loathing was constant. In my head, it was a nonstop ticker tape of “Why did I . . . ? Uggghhh!” “Who do I think I am?” Jay didn’t appear to be burdened in this way at all. In fact, what I was learning was that he was just as suspicious of me as I was.
What Jay could have said, if he was paying attention at all, was “You have no idea what it’s like to stand onstage with somebody every night who struggles with and sometimes overcompensates for debilitating self-doubt, a guy sadly aware he’s disappointing a bandmate he’s spent his entire adult life trying to please.”
He quit the band and walked out of our filthy apartment. I sat on a stained couch watching him go and wondering what the fuck I was going to do now.
“WE’VE BEEN PRACTICING in Belleville all week. So this is our first show ever.”
That’s how I introduced Wilco to the world, on November 17, 1994, at Cicero’s in St. Louis. Actually, we were performing under the name Black Shampoo, which might seem a curious choice. Was it really necessary for a band that had yet to release an album to use a fake name for their live debut? Wilco was about as recognizable to the world as, well, Black Shampoo. I don’t recall the exact logic for why we did it, other than that we were performing at Cicero’s, where Uncle Tupelo had played so often over the years that we practically had a key. There were fans in town interested in what I was going to do next, but that was maybe three hundred people at most, not enough to necessitate a fake name to throw off their scent. We didn’t have a good reason, other than that Ken Coomer was an avid collector of cult films, and he’d introduced us to Black Shampoo, a terrible blaxploitation movie from 1976 about an L.A. hairdresser who makes love to a staggering number of women before killing some white mafia guys with a chain saw. It’s a truly horrible yet hypnotically entertaining movie, and calling ourselves Black Shampoo seemed like a funny, self-effacing way to begin our musical second chapter.
Wilco was new, but not new. It was me, John Stirratt on bass, Max Johnston on banjo and fiddle, and Ken Coomer on drums. The only new guy onstage with us was Jay Bennett, on guitar. It was basically Uncle Tupelo minus Jay Farrar.
Only ten months ago, Uncle Tupelo, with Jay Farrar, had headed out on the final three-month tour that we’d agreed to do to pay back some of the money we owed Tony. The mood was pretty grim. The only thing we were looking forward to was that it was going to be our first tour in an actual tour bus. Someone—Tony or Warner Bros.?—had decided that the grueling schedule and the added tension in the band might be alleviated somewhat by the relative comfort of bus touring versus Old Blue.
It was a nice idea. It might have even been a gambit to see if the camaraderie of sharing a luxurious living situation might heal the band’s broken bonds. So we loaded all of our gear into the parking lot behind our apartment and waited for our new accommodations to arrive. Everyone, I think even Jay, was excited about the prospect of spending at least some small part of our lives seeing what it was like to tour in style. That was until he laid eyes on the Ghost Rider. What we were picturing was sleek and non-ostentatious like the buses we had seen parked in front of theaters at sold-out shows by the likes of R.E.M. or the Replacements. Instead, what we got was one of Kiss’s old touring coaches—a seventies-era Silver Eagle decked out with an airbrushed mural in a style I can only describe as “black-light poster–esque,” depicting a pirate ship buffeted by a stormy sea with a screaming skeleton standing in the crow’s nest holding a Gibson Les Paul aloft and being struck by lightning.
The look on Jay’s face was tragic. I felt bad for him. This was not a serious vehicle. I’m not sure how we talked him into climbing aboard, and once we did, I have no idea how we got him to stay, because the interior was even worse. White leather, mirrored ceilings, and a purple neon sign in the back lounge informing everyone, in cursive, that they were aboard the “Ghost Rider” lest they forget. So we embarked upon Uncle Tupelo’s last tour learning how to sleep while being shot at eighty miles per hour down the highway inside a metal box that looked like the VIP room at a strip club and made us all feel like we were living inside a cocaine straw. Ghost Rider indeed.
The tour did not go well. In February, at Cat’s Cradle in North Carolina, I almost punched Jay in the face. Not onstage, of course. The near fisticuffs happened after the show, in the club’s parking lot. I’m the one who lost my temper first. I was pissed off because Jay wouldn’t sing harmonies on my songs. It was the thing that finally pushed me over the edge. I knew he was leaving, I knew this tour was primarily to tie up loose financial ends, but what the fuck, at least pretend you want to be there. You don’t have to like me or enjoy my company, but for the hour and change we’re onstage, could you at least do your job?
No fists were thrown. Just a lot of voices raised to aggressive registers. We went back to the hotel room and had a band meeting, and Jay made sure everybody knew that the problem was me. So fine, there it was. I didn’t have the energy to disagree. Maybe I was the problem. I didn’t think of myself as just the “bass player” anymore. I was starting to write songs I really believed in, and I was feeling more and more confident that my songs were worthy enough to sit alongside Jay’s.
This might have been the biggest problem. The year previous, before Jay announced he wanted to leave, we found out we’d been booked on Conan O’Brien in a few weeks. It had already been decided that we’d play “The Long Cut.” Not by me. The record company and the show’s producers had requested it. Jay didn’t say anything, but it was painfully obvious he thought the fix was in. It confounded me. I would have rather played one of Jay’s songs for a lot of reasons, but coming at this head-on and asking Jay if he wanted to talk through the problem would have been a disaster. That just wasn’t a viable tactic, given our poor communication. Plus, the pressure was already suffocating and we were going on national TV for the first time. Wasn’t that the good news? People are going to hear about our band? Who cares if it was “my” song or “his” song? Weren’t they all Uncle Tupelo songs? When did we stop being a band and start a competition? Every success for Uncle Tupelo was a success for Uncle Tupelo. To think otherwise was nuts. Warner Bros. wasn’t paying us per notes sung on TV. “Well, Tweedy got slightly more singing time on national platforms, so it’s clearly his band. Let’s give him a larger chunk of the residuals.” That’s not how it works.
Our very last show with Jay—the one where we played our songs together in a public setting for the last time—was in May at Mississippi Nights in St. Louis. But that was more like a raucous wake. I was ready for it to be over. There were some nice reunions—it was heartwarming to get to play with Mike again—and we managed to pull off a cathartic and truly monolithic “Gimme Three Steps” with the Bottle Rockets. That was fun. Overall though, it felt like something that needed to end.
AT THE CICERO’S show that next November, Wilco’s first song of the night was “I Must Be High,” which was also the first song on A.M., our first album as Wilco, which wouldn’t be out for months. It was also the first song we recorded in the studio as a new band, and we liked the first take well enough that we put it on the album. The song is about regretting the sad ending of a relationship and thinking you must’ve been nuts (or chemically altered) to walk away from it. It wasn’t a song about Jay or the end of Uncle Tupelo. I’d already written one of those—a raw, caustic ballad about what happens when a musical partnership falls apart. We never recorded it, because even back then I realized it was a colossal mistake. I didn’t want to sing about Jay Farrar.
We recorded A.M. in Memphis, Tennessee, at a place John Stirratt recommended called Easley Studios. He’d recorded there with his band the Hilltops, and I’d been curious about it since learning that Jon Spencer recorded Extra Width there. It was another one of those glorious indie studios in a bad part of town. We recorded some demos in June, and Reprise liked them enough to commit, so we finished the record in August. I ended up with the same Reprise/Warner Bros. deal that I’d had before. They basically reset Uncle Tupelo’s contract with each of us individually.
Everything was happening at breakneck speed, which wasn’t by design. There was no reason to be in a hurry. Outside of St. Louis, the world wasn’t exactly clamoring for more of our music. The urgency was all in our heads; it felt like we had to figure this out before our momentum died down or common sense caught up with us.
In Uncle Tupelo, I wrote songs to go alongside Jay’s songs. That was always at the forefront of my mind. But now there was nothing in my songs to counterbalance. They existed on their own.
Nothing I had written for A.M. felt like it broke any new ground, but I felt like I had a solid batch of quality songs to work with. I’m not sure I was even trying to break any ground. Just refining the types of songs that I could say with confidence I knew how to write felt like enough of an achievement. In my semi-deluded mind I might have even thought that the more accessible nature of my songs in the context of Uncle Tupelo would make a whole album of my little gems feel like a greatest hits collection.
“Passenger Side,” in particular, felt like a song that I had tried to write a few times already. It might not be obvious to anyone listening, but I relate the narrator of that lyric with the same sort of hyper-me character that I picture singing “New Madrid” or “Screen Door.” A fictionalized version of me as someone who gets in more trouble and has more friends. To me, at the time, “Passenger Side” along with “Casino Queen,” “Box Full of Letters,” and “I Must Be High” felt like progress—not so much in terms of content, but in my ability to craft sturdy, memorable country-tinged pop songs.
It was an exciting feeling to finally play the songs we’d recorded together. Wilco could be whatever we wanted. That was freeing, and also terrifying. What the fuck was Wilco going to be? At least for A.M., we settled on the answer “Just like Uncle Tupelo, but with a different name and without one of the voices that had given us our musical identity.”
“I really would like to thank you for, up to this point, not hearing anyone yell, ‘Whiskey Bottle,’” I told the crowd at Cicero’s. “I appreciate that. Nothing against the song, mind you.”
I was making a joke, but not entirely. The ghost of Uncle Tupelo was very much haunting the basement that night. Nobody shouted for Farrar songs, but there were more than a few people wearing Uncle Tupelo T-shirts and baseball caps. We played some Tupelo songs—six, if anybody was counting—but tried to focus on the new stuff. We wanted people to hear A.M., to like these songs as much as the old ones. We had something to prove. I was still stinging from a conversation with our A&R guy, Joe McEwen, who was Jay’s A&R guy, as well. After he listened to A.M., his first comment to me was “This is going to be a great way to set up Jay’s record.” Way to read the room, Joe! How could he think I’d be into the idea of making a record just to set the stage for Son Volt? It was profoundly confusing to me that he thought Jay and I were still operating as a team. I didn’t mean Jay any ill will, but I sure as hell didn’t make A.M. as a marketing tool for Trace.
We weren’t just trying out new songs at Cicero’s. We were breaking in a new guitarist, Jay Bennett. For all my fears about that night, that we’d lost our momentum and the audience wouldn’t care anymore and everything we’d built would crash and burn, Jay Bennett’s presence put me at ease. He had none of the emotional baggage from Uncle Tupelo. He didn’t give a shit if people were hoping to hear more Still Feel Gone songs. Everything we played was new to him—he’d learned it all just a week or so earlier—and he was happy just to be there.
Jay Bennett was from Champaign-Urbana, about three hours northeast of St. Louis. I didn’t really know him, but I’d known about him for years. I saw his band Titanic Love Affair open for Soul Asylum at Mississippi Nights in 1988, and I remember being impressed.
Years later, he was the guitar player for Steve Pride and His Blood Kin, and they opened for Uncle Tupelo a few times, at Lounge Ax in Chicago and, I think, in Champaign. That band couldn’t have been more different from Titanic Love Affair. He was playing pedal steel guitar licks on guitar and nailing it. I remember saying to Farrar, “That guy’s really good, huh?” Farrar just shrugged in a noncommittal way and said, “Kind of notey.” I guess because he played a lot of notes, which was . . . bad? I wasn’t aware that there was a correct number of notes, and if you exceeded that limit you were just a show-off. I laughed at Jay’s put-down so he thought I agreed with him, but in my head I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Jay Bennett could do two things really well that were foundational pillars for me: punk rock and country. At that time those styles of playing weren’t often seen in the same package.
Brian Henneman had played lead guitar when we recorded A.M., and he had done such an incredible job that we asked him to join the band, which he declined, rightfully so. He was getting the Bottle Rockets off the ground; he needed an outlet for his classic pop-perfect country tunes. So I knew we needed to find a real guitar player. I was never going to get close to playing Brian’s precisely crafted parts, much less while trying to sing. Brian Paulson, who had produced Anodyne and A.M., recommended Jay Bennett, so I gave him a call, we talked for a bit, and I sent him an advance tape of our record. He called back days later with an excitement that caught me off guard. “You got such an incredible vocal sound on the record,” he told me. I remember that line specifically. I’d made five records already, and nobody had ever said to me, “Your vocals sound incredible.” I don’t know if I was more disoriented by the compliment or that his unguarded enthusiasm was so unfamiliar that it threw me for a loop.
Looking around that night at Cicero’s, I was proud of what we’d built. I don’t know where the strength or the grit and determination to rebuild came from at all. But when Jay Farrar quit the band, I went really quickly from being despondent to some place of excitement and curiosity. It really was the cliché of one door closing and another one opening. It transitioned, almost instantaneously appeared. It went from commiserating with Tony about Jay to Jay quitting to realizing, “This is going to be great. This is going to be amazing. Because I work really, really hard at this, and if I have the reins, and I can work really hard at my own pace and toward my own ends and goals, that would be fun. I wonder what will happen?”
And it was happening, right around me and right in front of me.