8
GR-OOD
IN THE YEARS before Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, I felt good about how my songwriting had grown. For years I’d been gauging the quality of my songs based on how easy it was to picture someone else singing them. Now it meant more to me to write songs that only made sense if I sang them. Almost everything I’d written up to that point, even the stuff I was proud of, had an emotional core that I maintained some distance from. Keeping other people’s voices in mind when writing had been a self-imposed guideline because I had aspired to write songs that were universal. I think working that way had helped me grow as a songwriter, but these were my songs. Finding my voice and feeling more confident about who we were as a band made it that much more disheartening when the people charged with helping us find an audience didn’t have any clue what we were working toward.
It especially hurt coming from Joe McEwen. He’d been my guy for years. Back when Uncle Tupelo was starting to get some notice from the major labels, and there was a brigade of dark-haired A&R women with bright red lipstick following us around, McEwen stood out for being so socially awkward, which to us was an asset. He didn’t seem capable of being too much of a bullshitter because he was even more uncomfortable than we were having conversations with strangers. We were being inundated after shows with peppy and insincere label reps, practically shouting at us, “You guys were great!” But with McEwen, he was more like, “Yeah, so yeah . . . What I think, a major label . . . You know what I’m saying? . . . I think it could be good for you guys. It’s just, you know . . . Putting that out there.”
McEwen was the master (and maybe the inventor) of the A&R guy dance. When he was watching a band, he’d close his eyes and slowly shake his head no. It was impossible to tell what that meant. Was he loving it, or saying, “No, this isn’t good at all”? I never had any idea. I’ve seen him do this same move to countless bands, and I’ve learned to love it over the years. It’s so perfectly ambiguous. It’s also much easier to find it hilarious now that I’m free of worrying too much about what Joe McEwen thinks.
One time, he came backstage after a Wilco show and said, “That was really gr-ood.” He changed his mind mid-word and decided he couldn’t commit to “great.” Which made me like him, because he was so awkward and trying to be real. He didn’t want to lie and say he thought something was great if it wasn’t actually great. So he made a mid-word reassessment. McEwen was also Dinosaur Jr.’s A&R guy, and J Mascis and I have shared some notes about him. He once came into the Dinosaur Jr. dressing room before a show, five minutes before they were supposed to be onstage, and said, “Hey, J, what’s happening? Wow, you put on a lot of weight.”
As much as I had a love-hate relationship with record labels and the business side of things, I also wasn’t completely against playing by the rules. I was never the self-sabotaging contrarian brat our public interactions with the music business have led some to believe. I thought it was an industry set up to work for you in some ways, but against you in other ways. I was unwilling, and maybe even incapable, of compromising the music we were making, but I could certainly see good reasons to take their advice on other decisions. Like whether to attend an awards show. Getting a Grammy nomination wasn’t something I had ever dreamed of or even thought about. I’m not saying that because I think it’s cool not to care about awards. It just hadn’t occurred to me. Sure, it’s an honor just to be nominated, but some of my favorite musicians have had decades-long careers and are yet to be acknowledged. And yes, it’s true countless artists I love have indeed won Grammys, but the prestige has also kind of been ruined by giving Grammys to some of the worst crap anyone has ever sold as music. It’s like if you were an athlete and you made it to the Olympics and found out they award medals to the best athletes in the world but also to people who have really awesome fake Chinese symbol tattoos. Why in the world would I covet something like that, other than that winning a Grammy would make my parents happy? My dad was especially proud when we got Grammy nominations, and used it as a form of currency. Several people in Belleville have told me that my dad offered them Grammy tickets over the years. I’ve heard stories like “I’ll never forget when your dad found out that the bartender at Fletcher’s was a huge Wilco fan and he promised VIP Grammy tickets for her and all her friends.” First of all, you only get two, and you have to pay for them, and they’re nontransferable. I don’t think I’ve ever invited my dad to the Grammys, much less given him tickets that he could dole out however he wanted. But he loved being a beneficent big shot, even if his generosity was all smoke and mirrors.
But I went to the ceremony anyway, at least the first time, when we were nominated for Mermaid Avenue in 1998. The record company wanted us there. Maybe they had marketing algorithms that indicated how many more units ship when a scruffy musician appears for a few seconds on a TV screen before a Grammy they’re up for goes to Lucinda Williams’s amazing record instead. It seemed silly to me, but I wasn’t going to argue with Warner Bros. They’d been gracious enough to put out our album, and they thought this was important, and them thinking this was important was okay by me. So I flew out to L.A. with Susie and the Wilco guys and their significant others, put on an ill-fitting suit that made me itch and squirm like a little kid at a funeral, and sat through a production that at times resembled a fever dream. Except for Ricky Martin. His performance was the good kind of fever dream. He had women on stilts with streamers, and drummers who looked like they were hitting the peak of an ecstasy trip marching through the audience, and Ricky was gyrating within an inch of his life in these ridiculously tight leather pants. It was like a Hieronymus Bosch painting come to life.
Later, we all went to the bathroom together, like a gaggle of teenage girls, and Susie and the rest of Wilco went to pee while I waited outside and held everybody’s programs. That’s when Sean “Puffy” Combs—or P. Diddy, or Colonel Combs, or whatever he was calling himself at the time—and his entourage wandered over. They didn’t make eye contact with me, but somebody in the group reached out with a bejeweled cane and tapped the thick stack of programs I was holding. It was jarring. I wasn’t sure what was happening. But then I realized, “Oh, I get it, they think I’m handing these out. Of course they do!” Why would Sean Combs or anybody who works for Sean Combs have any clue who I was? All they saw was a pale white dude standing in the middle of foot traffic and holding a bunch of programs. Obviously, I’m an usher. It didn’t offend me; it would’ve been way more surprising if one of them had said, “Hey, it’s Jeff Tweedy! Thank you for ‘Passenger Side,’ man!”
Here’s a fun fact that you absolutely don’t need to know but I’m going to tell you anyway. The guy who runs Sean Combs’s clothing brand, the president and CEO, is named Jeff Tweedy. He got the job in 1998, ironically the very same year that Combs and his posse mistook the other Jeff Tweedy, me, for an usher.
A BAND IN THE nineties wanting to get any attention at all also had to make videos. I wasn’t interested in being a visual artist or selling music that way, but I also wasn’t a puritan who was adamant about not selling music that way. The way I looked at it, Bob Dylan and other songwriters far more talented than me had done promotional videos. So who did I think I was, a fucking artist? My line in the sand over what I will and won’t do has always been really instinctual, and I’ve tried to keep it separate from ideology. My goal was to not put any unnecessary impediments in the way of being heard. By refusing to do a video, you’re basically telling the people trying to help your band be heard that they don’t know what they’re doing. From early on, we erred on the side of letting them do their job. As long as their job wasn’t interfering with the music, we tried to trust them. We signed a contract to make records and deliver them, that was our job. And their end of the bargain was to sell them, that was theirs. If they were staying out of our way, why would we stand in theirs?
Even when they wanted to change the music, there were times where, to me, it didn’t feel worth it to push back. Like when they asked if they could have a mix of “Monday” with no horns so they could release it as a single, that didn’t bother me. If they thought a horn arrangement was what was going to keep Top 40 pop radio from being interested in Wilco, they weren’t evil, they were stupid.
Still, we weren’t looking for anyone’s input when we delivered Summerteeth. It wasn’t a work in progress. It was done, as far as we were concerned. But they were concerned. David Kahne, the head of A&R at Reprise, told us they needed one more song, something more obviously pop that they could release as a single. That made no sense to me. I was sure Summerteeth was full of pop music. That was the point of it. We made a record that was wall-to-wall our idea of bubblegum pop music. But they were convinced they needed one more song, and what that really meant was that their egos weren’t invested enough in our “project” for them to wholeheartedly “work the record” without being able to point to something they had done to make it huge on the off chance it did get huge. Kind of like “Hey, nice little record you got here, it’d be a shame if something didn’t happen to it.” Even then we felt they’d been mostly good to us up to that point, so we said, sure, we’ll make another song. We love being in the studio and I love writing songs, so it wasn’t the worst thing that could happen to us.
We told them, “You want one more song? Fine, but you pay for it. We don’t want to pay for it. It shouldn’t come out of our budget, because we delivered on our contract. We delivered the record that we wanted to make. If we hate it when it’s finished we’re not putting it on the record. That’s the deal.” Surprisingly, they agreed and coughed up some money and I wrote “Can’t Stand It” on the flight out to the session they’d booked in California. They said they liked it when it was done, but they wanted to “tweak” it. Fine, we said, do whatever you want to it. David Kahne volunteered to remix it. He’d mixed a lot of hit records, like “Walk Like an Egyptian” for the Bangles, and worked with people and bands like Paul McCartney, Sublime, and Sugar Ray. You don’t get more pop than David Kahne. I flew back to L.A. and sat with him at his studio and listened to a mix he’d already started on. He had cut it up digitally and put it on a metronomic grid and added some samples and backward effects. I smiled and said, “Sounds great.” I really did like it. I wasn’t sure if I agreed with all of the changes, but he didn’t try to cut the line about prayers never being answered again, so I was happy about it being on the record.
As long as they left the rest of the album alone, I was okay. We’d just plop the new song on the front end of the album, like a sonic aperitif. If an overly edited “single” made by too many cooks would get the label more excited about helping people find our record, it’d be worth it. “Can’t Stand It” fit in lyrically with the rest of the album. It matched the mood, so it didn’t stick out like a loud drunk at a wake. The way we’d sequenced it, the first track was initially going to be “She’s a Jar,” and in retrospect that may’ve been too much. That’s a rough way to ease somebody into an album. “Hey, here’s some domestic violence set to a sad melody. And that’s just to get us started!”
The process made me more cynical. Not because it didn’t make a difference. Although it didn’t. “Can’t Stand It” never became a radio song, and Summerteeth ended up selling about as many records as it would have without them weighing in. What they told us: “If you jump through this hoop and this hoop and this hoop, it’ll translate to x number of plays on x number of radio stations.” Didn’t happen. It wasn’t because they were just wrong and the formula that worked for one band wasn’t going to work for us. What made me cynical was the realization that they weren’t really concerned with keeping their promises. On tour in Atlanta right after Summerteeth had been released, I was picked up by a Warner Bros. rep tasked with driving me to a radio interview, and when he opened the trunk of his rental car, it was completely filled with boxes and boxes of Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill. He had two copies of Summerteeth. So obviously the big push wasn’t happening. I got it. I could see with my own eyes what it really looked like to be a priority. We were not a priority. Now I knew.
A few years later, we turned in Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. David Kahne, the same guy who insisted that Summerteeth needed a single, had recently taken over as (interim) president at Reprise after Howie Klein resigned or got pushed out. He listened to Yankee and decided he didn’t like it. Neither did our new A&R guy, Mio Vukovic, who had taken over for Joe McEwen. They thought it was all wrong. It wasn’t radio friendly, there were no hits, we’d have to scrap everything and start over or, if we insisted on going with what we’d recorded, be dropped from the label. That last idea seemed pretty good to me.
If that sounds brave, let me tell you, it wasn’t brave. I was fed up. The music industry depends on artists being insecure and needy, willing to crawl across cut glass to be famous. Historically it’s given them incredible leverage when it comes to negotiating contracts. If you’re not willing to walk away from a deal, and the other side knows it, you are screwed. For some reason I’ve always been stupid or arrogant enough to walk away from negotiations when they start to feel gross or insulting. It looks like it’d take a lot of confidence to do that, but I don’t feel like an exceedingly confident person. I think I’m just content and stubborn. Content in that I’ve never really felt like it takes a lot to meet my needs. I hate wanting things and I hate feeling greedy. “No record deal? Okay, welp, it’s back to phone book toilet paper for me.” And I’m stubborn because there’s only so much I’m willing to compromise artistically. Allowing something you’ve created to be undermined to a point where you can no longer believe in it or stand behind it feels suicidal to me. I don’t think I would have survived it. What would be the point if you stopped feeling good about the main thing that makes you feel good?
At the same time, I really don’t subscribe to the notion of selling out. Or at least not in the same way I did as a kid. I’m sure there are many out there eager to point out, “Of course you’ve revised your idea of selling out, you did those commercials!” To which I say, “You’re right. That, to me, is not selling out.” Licensing my songs to be used in car commercials used to be a big decision. Now it’s a check in the bank. The music isn’t altered, the lyrics aren’t altered, the meaning isn’t altered; unless you think the image of people listening to “The Thanks I Get” on a car stereo corrupts the song’s integrity in some way, in which case I think you need to calm down. To me there is a huge difference between saying no to a record label that wants to change your song and saying yes to a car company that wants to pay to use your song, as is, in a commercial. Plus, if I had told my dad, “We turned down two hundred and fifty thousand dollars from a car company because we have integrity and would prefer to avoid selling out,” he would have said, “You’re a fucking idiot! It took me four years to make two hundred and fifty thousand dollars!”
Parting ways with Reprise seemed like a very straightforward decision. There wasn’t a lot of second-guessing. At that point we just weren’t meant to work together. It’s art, it’s subjective. What I think makes a great record and what the business people think makes a great record doesn’t always line up, and it doesn’t have to. To their credit, Reprise made it easy for us. They offered to let us buy back the master tapes for $50,000, and then after some negotiating they changed their minds and let us have them for free. It made sense why they wanted to be rid of us. Their objective was to sell as many records as they could and move away from catalog artists. They weren’t interested in the slow-build model anymore. They wanted huge paydays right away, and we weren’t worth the trouble even if we were technically showing a small profit. To be honest, if it was just about paydays, it was hardly worth the trouble even for us. What we were making from record sales wasn’t even close to what we could make by tacking a few extra dates onto a tour. Record sales weren’t paying our bills. So for us, it was a choice of making a record we didn’t like and not making any money, or making a record that we loved and not making any money. That’s no contest. There was no bravery involved.
So now with an unreleased record that we owned and no record label to put it out, we were ready to get back on the road, which was really the only way we’d ever been able to make a living—playing music. Touring was what kept us alive. Every year we made a little more money playing live and every year record revenue stayed about the same, no matter what we did. At that point in history, the Internet was just starting to be a realistic place for people to hear music. So we thought: Let’s put Yankee Hotel Foxtrot online, let people hear it for free. We were proud of the record and wanted it out there. It was never a strategy to “build a buzz” or leverage a bidding war with other labels. We weren’t scheming to blow the lid off the record business by reinventing the economic model of how artists distribute content to their fans. We just wanted to play our songs on tour and not have audiences go, “What the fuck is this? Play something we know, goddammit!”
THE MOST REVEALING scene in the Sam Jones documentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart is one nobody talks about, and maybe nobody but me thought was all that important. The entire thing takes less than a few seconds of screen time.
The band is in the studio, trying to figure out the transition from “Ashes of American Flags” into “Heavy Metal Drummer.” Jay Bennett and I argue about it, I get annoyed with him, then he gets annoyed with me, then I go vomit in a bathroom stall, then I come out and try to give him an apologetic hug, but he’s still pissed. None of that is the revelatory moment. It happens right in the middle of that scene when Bennett is coming unraveled and he asks me, “Can I explain myself, please?” I shoot a look at the camera, a pained expression you might give a stranger at the next table in a restaurant if you’ve been fighting with your wife and you realize that they’ve been listening to everything and you want to tell them, “We probably both look insane to you, don’t we?”
If you’re an armchair critic who’s watched the movie countless times, looking for clues for how it all went wrong between Bennett and me, you’ve probably been dissecting all the wrong things. It’s not something he did or I did or he said or I said. It’s never as obvious as you think it should be. The only moment that matters is that tiny blip of acknowledgment, when I remember that we’re being watched, and I remember to think about not just what I’m seeing, but what other people are seeing, and whether what they’re seeing is a better reflection of what’s really happening than what I think I’m seeing from my vantage point.
I never understood critics who called it a “fly on the wall” documentary. I don’t know how any documentary could ever pull that off, but it sure as hell wasn’t the case here. A fly on the wall is unnoticed, but we were acutely aware that there were cameras following us around. I’m self-conscious enough as it is. There was no way to forget. The camera becomes an observing ego in the room. It’s always in your periphery, and it makes every conversation feel like an out-of-body experience, where you’re floating over yourself and diagramming how you interact with the world. Maybe it is like a fly on the wall. But it’s a type of fly that you always know is there, and you can’t stop thinking about it, and it makes you more self-conscious and inhibited, and you start seeing your world through the fly’s eyes and thinking, “I wonder who the fly thinks is the asshole in this situation. Holy shit, it’s me! No, now the fly is shaking his head!”
I’m not actually sure if Jay Bennett’s behavior changed when there was a camera around, or if maybe he’d always been that way and I was only aware enough to notice. One night we were working late at the Loft, the camera crew had left for the night, and we were struggling with how to end “Poor Places.” I suggested we try something a little ridiculous: Let’s see if we can create sounds without any human interaction. We each set up a station with an instrument playing itself. Like an organ with some keys taped down, or a tape echo feeding back on itself, or an electric fan strumming a guitar. It was just about making some noise in the room that didn’t involve us; it was just the objects making their own music. The plan was to come back the next morning, turn all of our self-playing instruments back on, and hit record. But when I got to the Loft, Jay Bennett was already there, walking the camera crew through all of the different stations, and talking about how he’d put it all together. He had all of the instruments going, the whole room was buzzing, and he was fielding questions from Sam Jones about his sonic experiments. I didn’t say anything—I knew it was petty and I didn’t want to get into another fight in front of the cameras—but I was furious. That was a group idea; I’d suggested it, everyone added to it, and we had all worked on it together.
Jay Bennett liked to see himself as a bit of a mad scientist in the studio. And he was adventurous, and he did apply some unorthodoxy to how he approached recording, so it wasn’t completely unfounded for him to believe that about himself. It was a myth, but like all myths, it was built on something true. I was starting to worry about him. The cameras seemed to be pushing him toward that idea of himself to the exclusion of all other aspects of his personality, like an actor pouring himself into a role. He was becoming more and more focused on and protective of that particular piece of who he was. It was confusing and sad because we all wanted the cameras to see him the way we all saw him: sweet and funny and talented; one of us; a “Wilco”!
Reality TV wasn’t much of a thing then, but now it would be easy to see what was happening as a fairly common type of psyche that emerges on shows like Survivor. He started pitting people against one another, whispering rumors and stoking paranoia. If you weren’t in the room, there was a good chance he was talking behind your back or diminishing your contributions. I heard about all the nasty things he’d been saying about me when I wasn’t around—I guess it never occurred to him that the rest of the guys in Wilco would compare notes—and when it was just Jay Bennett and me alone in the studio, it was the rest of Wilco that wasn’t pulling their weight. “Let’s just finish the record without them,” he’d tell me. “We could be done already if those guys weren’t slowing us down.”
When Jones was putting together the edit for his movie, I’m sure a lot of less-than-flattering footage ended up on the cutting room floor. He came into the project as a fan of the band, so he wasn’t looking to do a hatchet job or intuit what reality TV would become. So the movie is an interesting snapshot of our process, but not really all that complete or accurate. Even the music that’s featured in it is mostly takes of songs off of the album that I was never really satisfied with. Those versions are what the record company liked and were encouraged by. Each new round of mixes we would subsequently send Reprise after Sam Jones stopped filming studio footage elicited this direct quote from our A&R guy: “It keeps getting worse!” So I always feel like the movie skips the most important part of making Yankee, the exciting surgery we started when Jim O’Rourke came on board and we stripped everything down to its skeletal remains and built new bodies using tape edits—splicing old recycled parts with whole new appendages matched and fitted like bionic limbs.
I had become a Jim O’Rourke fan in 1997 when a CD of his album Bad Timing became a constant traveling companion. It’s such a beautiful album; four songs, no words, just Jim playing acoustic guitar, and then out of nowhere herds of interloping horns or strings charge through. It made a bigger impact on me than anything I’d heard in years. The songs were so simple and unhurried. I was mesmerized by the patience and discipline it took to arrange long meditative songs into performances with the immediacy of a pop song.
In 2000, the Noise Pop Festival in San Francisco was looking to expand to Chicago, and they asked me to participate. The original idea was to pair me with Jon Langford of the Mekons and the Waco Brothers. Langford is great, but it felt kind of obvious to me. The Mekons had pioneered a lot of what Uncle Tupelo was known for, so maybe I felt self-conscious about that. And in any case, it didn’t feel that surprising for us to work together. So I asked them, “Do you think Jim O’Rourke would be interested?” They got in touch with him, and it turned out he was a fan of Summerteeth. I didn’t know him at all—Susie knew him, but she knew everybody—so our first rehearsal together was the first time I met him in person. I was immediately enamored with him. He was open and exuberant, hilarious and brilliant. He also had bona fide roots in experimental music, which I loved but had never had many opportunities to bond over. Everyone had always been so super serious about it.
But when I met Jim, I found somebody with the same passion and excitement for listening to two violins play the same note for a half hour as he did for Supertramp. He wasn’t an academic elitist who appreciated it primarily as an intellectual exercise. That felt like an affirmation to me. I took it to mean that I wasn’t crazy, that this kind of music could be visceral and warm and cathartic and inviting. It was okay to enjoy it. It was even okay for people to see you outwardly enjoying it.
Jim and I spent a lot of time together listening to records. Mostly Jim’s, because his apartment was more conducive to loud listening and long sessions. It was almost entirely empty except for about ten thousand records, a record player, and some chairs in front of a pair of electrostatic speakers and a pair of McIntosh monoblock power amps. He was the opposite of so many people I’d known in my life with great record collections. He wanted to share it. I was more accustomed to the pathological, possessive, and secretive world of record store clerks and their inclination to hoard musical discoveries like stock tips. They don’t want you to hear it; they don’t even want you to be aware it exists, because on some unhealthy level it becomes their whole identity, not to mention some sick sense of job security. But Jim has a generosity of spirit where he can’t wait to play you something, and he’s pulling out record after record, and you lose track of time until you realize it’s 4:00 a.m. and you’ve smoked a pack of cigarettes and now you’re lying on the dirty wooden floor of a tiny apartment listening to Arnold Dreyblatt and the Orchestra of Excited Strings, and you think, “I should probably tell my wife where I am.”
For the Noise Pop show, we decided it made more sense to come up with our own material rather than just do covers of each other’s songs. So Jim would come over after Spencer went to bed and we’d hang out in our family room and improvise on guitars until we found something that we liked. Jim eventually brought over the drummer he’d been playing with, Glenn Kotche, who joined in seamlessly. Glenn was great, intuitive and patient, and he played at a reasonable volume, which was not something I was accustomed to. He’d show up with a floor tom and a snare and nothing else, and still fill out every corner of a song without ever running out of ideas.
The three of us came up with a bunch of droney, acoustic, vaguely English folk–sounding songs, and gave them stupid names like “Laminated Cat” and “Liquidation Totale.” After we played them at Noise Pop it seemed like a drag to never hear those songs again, so we booked some studio time and recorded the first Loose Fur record in four days. That should’ve been the end of that. But I kept finding reasons to work with them again. Glenn showed up to see me do a solo acoustic show at the Abbey Pub in Chicago, and I convinced him to grab a drum kit and join me. He played half the show without ever having heard the songs before, and it felt more comfortable and rehearsed and natural than with any drummer I’d ever played with. Then I asked Glenn to come to New York with me to help write and record a soundtrack for Ethan Hawke’s film Chelsea Walls. A few weeks later, he came to the Loft for a friendly visit and I talked him into doing percussion overdubs on a few Yankee Hotel tracks. Every time, it was easy. I didn’t have to explain things to him. And that’s not a criticism of Ken Coomer. Talking about music is hard; the more you can avoid it, the better. Drums in particular are almost impossible to talk about at length without someone losing their mind. “Nooo! Four blap blap kashunks and then a shrap shrap caflump.” I’d program drum machines just to try to show Ken what I wanted without talking. But with Glenn, I didn’t have to say anything. It’s like he would either know what I was thinking or blow my mind with a part I could have never dreamed of. I was in love.
I asked Tony to call Ken and tell him he was being replaced. I wish I had done it differently. I thought I could call him later and explain myself and repair the relationship, but I should have called him first. It was stupid of me. It shut down any opportunity I might’ve had to talk to him for too many years. I still don’t think he likes me very much, and I don’t blame him.
After letting Ken down like that, I was determined to do things right with Bennett. He and I sat down in the Loft and I told him it was over. I laid out my case for why it wasn’t working and wasn’t going to work. I don’t think he saw it coming. He wasn’t happy about it. He argued with me, told me I was wrong, and explained at length exactly how wrong I was. But the band had unanimously backed the decision and my mind was made up.
There were many reasons I didn’t want to make music with Jay Bennett anymore. For one thing, it wasn’t a healthy situation for either of us. There were lots of prescription medications being consumed at the Loft. Not by me, at least not in that particular moment. I knew I didn’t have the tools I needed to be around them and resist, so I stopped going to the Loft when Jay was there, and he was always there. Like most addicts, I went through periods where I was clean. “Oh, I’ve figured out a way to do this. I don’t need to go to rehab. I’m not taking anything.” It works for a while, but like they say, quitting isn’t the problem, not starting again is the part that’s hard.
But Jay Bennett wasn’t there. He wasn’t close to even being ready to admit there was a problem. I was scared for him, but I was even more terrified for myself because I was just learning how much danger I was in and how hard it was going to be to stay healthy. So it was a selfish move. It was about self-preservation. I fired Bennett from Wilco because I knew if I didn’t, I would probably die. That sounds like hyperbole, but it’s really not. I told him I knew what was going on. That’s one of the first things I said to him. “You’ve been getting FedEx packages full of pills.”
“What?” he said, laughing. “No, come on. Who told you that?”
“You’re here at six in the morning,” I said. “There’s no reason to be here at six in the morning unless you’re waiting for a FedEx package.”
“You sound paranoid. None of that happened.”
It had. The guy who was running the Loft for us would see him there in the mornings, counting his pills on a desk in the back. I told Bennett we would help him. If he wanted to find somebody to talk to about addiction and maybe get into a program, we would pay for everything. But he was incredulous. “If I had a problem I would admit it.”
Jay Bennett had been out of the band for almost eight years when John and Glenn knocked on my hotel room door in the middle of the night to share the tragic news of Jay’s overdose. It was hard to be surprised, but that didn’t make it any less heartbreaking. I wish he were alive. I wasn’t in touch with him after he left, but I kept waiting to hear through friends that he’d landed on his feet somewhere. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see him onstage with Jackson Browne or Elton John or even Paul McCartney. He would have made almost any band better if he’d been able to get help.
I get it when Wilco fans are still angry at me about Jay Bennett. I don’t like it, but I understand. They don’t think Wilco is as good now as it was when Jay Bennett was still in the band, because he’s on all of the Wilco albums that mean the most to them.
I understand wanting to cling to the idea of a band. I grew up believing that a rock band was a merry band of ne’er-do-wells that took care of one another and managed to get their act together to provide the rest of us with some beautiful art. But that’s obviously fiction.
I had my feelings hurt when Jay Farrar told me that Uncle Tupelo was over. I couldn’t believe it. How could he do this to our band? After everything we’d built together? But he was right to end it. I didn’t realize this until years later, when I found myself in the awkward position of being that guy in another band. If he wasn’t getting the same joy from playing with me anymore, then why would I want him to keep doing it? A band isn’t a sacred bond. I can still remember the sting of that moment. It hurts to have the rug pulled out from under you. But there’s something valuable to surviving rejection, to realizing your hurt feelings aren’t the end of the world.
I might still be in Uncle Tupelo if Jay Farrar hadn’t ended it. When I had to start over again with Wilco, I had that same fearful protectiveness. Keep the band together! It doesn’t matter if it feels miserable sometimes, or if trying to make music in this environment fills me with self-loathing, or if drugs keep making things chaotic. You stick with it because the band must persevere. The band must survive! The band! The band!
It was an amazing relief to realize, “No, fuck this, it doesn’t have to, it’s just a band. I don’t have to keep these relationships alive at any cost. It doesn’t matter.” That kind of devotion, to something entirely made up like a “band,” is silly and can even be dangerous. I’ll always have the comfort and consolation of making music, even if it’s just me and a guitar. If it stops feeling okay, I can end it. I need to end it.
There are only three people I’ve committed myself to completely for the rest of my life: Susie, Spencer, and Sammy. My actual family. Everybody else, we’ll take it day to day. If we still want to be around one another and play music with one another, let’s keep doing it. If not, we can take a break. Life is short and you should wake up in the morning feeling excited about what you do. And if you don’t and you can afford to stop, you should stop. Even if it makes some people angry.
THE WAY YANKEE HOTEL FOXTROT ended up being heard initially as an almost clandestine Internet-only release really ended up being a stroke of luck. 0Without being dropped by our label, we would have presumably kept our original release date of 9/11/01. Who knows what impact that would have had on how the music was received, especially with the album art featuring two towers? I have a feeling it might have been pulled off of shelves.
Instead, by the time we played Town Hall in New York City a little over two weeks later, our fans had already been listening to the album online for weeks. The common wisdom at the time was that records leaking and being heard well before they were released was just about the worst, stupidest thing you could ever allow to happen. Bands and labels were going to great lengths to prevent the exact same scenario we had just orchestrated and embraced. In some cases they were forcing journalists to listen to advance copies superglued inside CD Discmans to prevent them from being “ripped” and shared online. The Internet was causing hysteria. In hindsight the music industry’s growing fear seems warranted, but for our band at that time, it felt like it was our best shot at reaching people without having to be a part of the larger machinery.
AND AFTER THAT, we continued, and continue, to do things with as little input from outside the band as we can manage. We don’t make videos anymore unless we want to make them. We might go to the Grammys, but only if we really feel like it. If we do show up and we’re walking down the red carpet and somebody tries to get us to pose for the Glam Cam 360, there’s a pretty good chance we’re going to say, “Fuck no.” But if Kermit the Frog and Pepé the King Prawn want to interview us and coax us into singing “Rainbow Connection,” we’re probably going to sing along, because not singing “Rainbow Connection” with Kermit means you’re garbage. We’re getting better at recognizing when to say yes and when to say no.
The only Grammy we ever won, for A Ghost Is Born, happened in 2005 when we were in Birmingham, Alabama. We got the news, made a little toast, and then we played our show. We opened with “The Late Greats,” which expressed our feelings about the Grammys better than anything we could’ve said in an acceptance speech. We won for Best Alternative Music Album, and then lost in 2008 and 2012 when we were nominated for best “rock” album, because obviously we’d gotten too big for our britches, thinking we weren’t alternative anymore and could join the big boys at the “rock” table. Interestingly, both times we lost a Grammy in this category, the award went to the Foo Fighters. Which leads me to only one conclusion. If Wilco is ever going to get the mainstream attention and adoration it deserves, I need to kill, and eat the heart of, Dave Grohl.