Wilco and the Mid-western, Middle-aged work ethic...

Still having some issues with the concept of 'social distancing'.

Jeff Tweedy doesn’t really need a guitar-shaped swimming pool, let alone a TV to throw in it. The Wilco frontman is a grown-up, working musician – although he’s not against the band getting “a bit more fucked-up…” occasionally, if only musically.
Chicago is nominally Wilco's home, although the band's seemingly punishing touring calendar means they might not see it all that much. Having wrapped up his solo touring schedule  last year, the band's centre has been 'having a break'. That term might be relative – Tweedy  certainly doesn't sit on the porch in a rocking chair all that much. In between Wilco albums and roadtrips, among other things he's produced Low's comeback record, and the musical return of the near-legendary Mavis Staples, “…and just doing some more recording...” like the family-monikered Tweedy project with son Spencer, and the solo album so many have wanted from him since the Uncle Tupelo days. And even a book: Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back) – the title even having a bit of his very dry wit about it.
But he's happily dismissive if you congratulate his productivity: “Some people think you're ‘hard working’ if you go and play music every day? This is not working compared to what most people have to do…” That honest Mid-Western pragmatism is another reason to like Wilco. That, and a collective talent that has made some of the most inventive albums of this century, and makes other musicians – plus the likes of usually cynical critics and other jaded industry souls – babble like One Directioners.

Tweedy apparently is slightly taken aback by the sometimes unstinting praise. “I really don't know how to respond to that sometimes. How about 'I'm sorry?'” he suggests. “Or maybe there's enough ambiguity in what we do that can people pour themselves into it a little bit – or a lot.

“I generally get more discomfort from reading something that's very flattering about us. A lot of people don't write very well when they're saying nice things - I've found people tend to be really really good when they're taking the piss out of something.” And here, I'm oddly pleased he actually knows the term '…taking the piss'.

If unaware, it actually took some time for the now-seemingly definitive Wilco lineup to come together. Members came and went – most notably the messy departure, and later death, of the band's co-founder Jay Bennett. Again, Tweedy is quiet, patient in his explanation: “It is just the right collection of people now. It kinda shifted and changed a little bit – or significantly – with each record, but it was never meant to be a revolving door. Now it hopefully just gets deeper and broadens as it ages. That's what I always wanted this band to be.”

However, there is still some mystery and magic in the dynamic, even the guy who writes the songs not quite sure where the band will go next. “I have a kinda sneaky suspicion that the next record is gonna be a little more fucked up than the last few – that's an itch we haven't scratched in a while.”

But just what does 'fucked up' mean, Jeff? “You know, I don't really know,” he smiles, and trails off, then thinks aloud. “Not necessarily noisy, maybe just some less conventional song shapes, and in the sonics of it.” With a couple of over 12-minute songs on the last one, you wonder how much less conventional can Wilco get?

“That's a good question, I don't know – maybe I have taken in some of that critical shorthand that 'Wilco have played it safe…' lately – and maybe even those twelve-minute songs are the safe way for us. It relates to that enthusiasm and passion for Wilco – maybe it fostered a certain amount of expectation, and when it just sounds like Wilco, that's somehow a disappointment,” he shrugs.

“But it's never been completely weird, really,” he goes on to defend. “Wilco's always been a pop band, in the spirit of rock'n'roll in some way. And some of the other shit that some people put on us – good and bad – I sometimes don't recognise myself in that at all.”

Again it comes back to the practicalities of Wilco being a road-hardened touring band. As the machine gears up to work their way around the world again, Tweedy reveals the band can dive into a repertoire of “…around a hundred or so songs at any given time”. And then he adds the kicker that will delight or irritate most musicians: “Wilco doesn't really rehearse. A soundcheck is generally enough to get the muscle memory back.

“No, it really is like riding a bike - it's all there, if you remember three songs you've got the way into fifty of them. I don't know the neurological conditioning or whatever it is, but it really does work like that. It’s got to the point where we have our language.
“We can play just about anything of ours, pretty much. There are certainly things we feel we might not play as well as others, and some we're pretty good at. And there is a few we'd mostly like to leave as just being album tracks,” he chuckles conspiratorially. “Practically, when we're playing, we try to write a setlist early in the day, so if we think of something that's out of that ‘main rotation' we have a chance to run through it at soundcheck – or more likely in the dressing room, twenty minutes before we go on.”

There's no boast, or false modesty, in the description. Tweedy and band know they are fortunate, and know the effort they've put into it. In the era of instant (and often short) X-Factor or Idol success, Wilco love what they do, do what they love. “I know some people in other bands don't enjoy having to ‘perform’. That's tragic to me. Not that people should be Pollyanna-ish about it. It can be a struggle, but equally you don't need a guitar-shaped swimming pool – that's of a different time, a different era of excess.
“We've learnt to live within our means – just operate in a responsible way. That's another extension of the creativity of the band. To how you present yourself – and to not be beholden to that monetary aspect.”

There is an honesty, a sincerity, in Jeff Tweedy: “I feel very fortunate to be a working musician making a living from it. I'm a grown-up, is what I am. Rock'n'roll is itself too old to be a youth sport anymore. Rock'n'roll's been around for a long time, and I don't see any real intelligence for just rebelling against '…whatever you've got.'

“Absolutely I had my punk rock phase – I still see plenty of things to rebel against. But at this point of my life, personally, I'm rebelling against being an arrested development adolescent – that's worth rebelling against.”

So, are Wilco still a bar band at heart?

He pauses for a moment, then chooses to take the question literally: “Um, you know, maybe not. Bars can be tough. And, for starters, there's six of us now. Wilco tends to have a pretty large footprint – a small stage can get a bit crowded. Even a thing like Glen's drumkit has grown over time – it's now a bit like a large piece of farm machinery to lug around. It could be so much easier if he could just drive it straight onto the stage.”

 

Eels Ongoing: For E’s A Jolly Good Fellow.

If you’ve followed the life and music of Mark Oliver Everett – more commonly known by his abbreviated identifier E, and/or as the one constant in the band known as Eels – you believe him when he declares that “Rock and roll is not for the faint-hearted…”.
Documented through the band’s records and his Vonnegut-esque kind-of-autobiography, Things The Grandchildren Should Know, there’s an often fraught personal history: a fearsomely dysfunctional relationship with his scientist father, the death of just about all his immediate family within a year, a passing morbid fascination with that most American of criminals – the serial killer, and his own experience of electro-shock psychological treatment. And then almost as an aside, releasing a trilogy of albums over the space of a year charting the rise, fracturing, and fall of his marriage, and the recovery after in almost forensic detail – including a fair chunk of self-examination and self-laceration in the songs. Even he now thinks that might have been a little too much.

So, there was really little surprise at some of the turns our conversation took. He was just back from one of his regular lengthy tours. First through Europe – where the English and Germans in particularly had taken to his sometimes bleak/sometimes cynically observed/sometimes revelled in worldview. Then on through the increasing collective madness of his American homeland. His voice was hoarse, just about shot from the incessant schedule, but he still happily chatted across a range of subjects from quantum physics to the karmic balance of koalas.
But it all comes back to the rock eventually. Even allowing lately he’s on another of the seemingly necessary breaks he takes from it – you may have even spotted him as a not-entirely-likeable recurring character in Judd Apatow’s Love series. “There are worse thing to do than still act like an irresponsible adolescent,” he dryly observed of his music career. “But I don’t really have a much of a choice, I do love it. Sex and drugs and rock and roll. Well, one out of the three isn’t bad. I actually would have started earlier if I’d known how much fun it could be.”

As there’s likely to be over such an amount of time, there’s occasional creative blockages – which tend to clear in a rush. Again there’s apparently albums’ worth of ideas and material squirreled away at his home and studio. “Umm, yeah – there’s stuff like that around here somewhere,” he mock puzzled. “But I’m more just cannibalising the best bits and pieces to put in newer songs.”
Then there’s a bit of artistic anxiety and superstition: “I always worry about talking about the ‘next thing’. But that’s probably just because I don’t know myself until it actually happens. Saying nothing stops me from looking foolish later.”

He then throws in the mixed feelings of being onstage and watching people “making out” to his sometimes despairing tunes: “Yeah - ‘I look in the mirror all I see is age, fear, and agony’,” he quotes one of his own lyrics. “And some guy’s telling his girl ‘Yes darling, that’ll always be our song…’. Ha! Are they really listening? I don’t really know. But it kinda gives me hope. I always worried out fans were the lonely guys at home who couldn’t get a date, but apparently they can – and they’re even kissing them…” There seemed a small note of triumph.

One of Eels other defining points is they never really seem to have one. Every tour a different mood, a different style. There’s been an Eels Orchestra, piled with a string section. Then a lean little power trio. A bigger bombastic check-shirted rock band variant. Or just E on piano, and a drummer. Or an almost Tom Waits-ian junkyard combo, complete with musical saw. It could cause problems: the sometimes ominous racket of the Souljacker album had them as almost threatening rock band – all mean-looking beardy guys coming at you. Having this gang touring just after 9/11 caused a few issues. “Yeah, we sometimes had some trouble at airports,” E ruefully admitted.

“We were always happier little travellers underneath,” he joked. “A kinder, gentler kind of rock band – who can still do misery when we needed to. Throw in a couple of Beatles and Elvis covers, or some Missy Elliott, or a singalong of Tennessee Ernie Ford’s Sixteen Tons. We got variety – it’s as much about keeping it interesting for myself as anything.”

The man known as E tends to be very honest, even when he brings up the delicate subject of his father – given that on one tour, the ‘support act’ was a documentary of his search for him – trying to work out the man he was. Hugh Everett III was a world-respected quantum physicist, a leading developer of the ‘multiple worlds’ theory, so beloved by Star Trek scriptwriters among others. Dr Everett was also a regular correspondent with no less than Albert Einstein – letters apparently full of arguments over unified field theory, and discussions of the weather. Father and son were fairly much estranged from Mark’s youth, the elder never quite approving of the younger’s career choice. But are there similarities in their approach to their very different areas of interest?

“Well, he certainly liked his own way too,” E ponders, and understates. “And there probably is some mathematics in making music – but I think I really owe more of that to my mother, who was an extraordinary poet. And sadly – typically - overlooked. Maybe it’s a mix of all those genes. Although I  don’t think quantum theory is often a big subject in pop songs.”

It was there I got to slightly trump the son of a Ph.D, pointing out that Something For Kate actually had a song named for Max Planck – German theoretical physicist and Nobel Prize winner in the field. E was perfectly, perversely, pleased: “And that was on like a top ten record? And it’s called Max Planck? I do love your country! Well, it’s one of the reasons I love your country,” he whooped.

He then went on to explain he’d never really done the Aussie tourist things, despite repeated touring visits: “Boomerang throwing? Nope. Happy snaps at the Opera House? Sorry, again.”
“I haven’t even cuddled a koala. And they are cute, really. Although someone told me they stink, is that right?” Umm, yeah – and then there’s the chlamydia, and a couple of other diseases. “Oh, is that right? That must be some sort of karma – there has to be a price to pay for being attractive to Japanese tourists.” There’s another dark chuckle.