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Wilco: Learning How to Die - Softcover

Kot, Greg

 
9780767915588: Wilco: Learning How to Die
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0767915585 ISBN 13: 9780767915588
Verlag: Crown, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

The intimate story of one of the great American bands of our time, creators of the controversial masterpiece Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

When alt-country heroes-turned-rock-iconoclasts Wilco handed in their fourth album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, to the band’s label, Reprise, a division of Warner Brothers, fans looked forward to the release of another challenging, genre-bending departure from their previous work. The band aimed to build on previous sales and critical acclaim with its boldest and most ambitious album yet, but was instead urged by skittish Reprise execs to make the record more “radio friendly.” When Wilco wouldn’t give, they found themselves without a label. Instead, they used the Internet to introduce the album to their fans, and eventually sold the record to Nonesuch, another division of Warner. Wilco was vindicated when the album debuted at No. 13 on the Billboard charts and posted the band’s strongest sales to date.

Wilco: Learning How to Die traces the band’s story to its deepest origins in Southern Illinois, where Jeff Tweedy began growing into one of the best songwriters of his generation. As we witness how his music grew from its punk and alt-country origins, some of the key issues and questions in our culture are addressed: How is music of substance created while the gulf between art and commerce widens in the corporate consolidation era? How does the music industry make or break a hit? How do working musicians reconcile the rewards of artistic risk with the toll it exacts on their personal life?

This book was written with the cooperation of Wilco band members past and present.  It is also fully up to date, covering the latest changes in personnel and the imminent release of the band’s fifth album, A Ghost Is Born, sure to be one of the most talked-about albums of 2004.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

An award-winning music critic for the Chicago Tribune, GREG KOT contributes to a wide array of national magazines, including Rolling Stone, and co-hosts the rock ’n’ roll talk show Sound Opinions on radio and television, and at www.soundopinions.net.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

The intimate story of one of the great American bands of our time, creators of the controversial masterpiece "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
When alt-country heroes-turned-rock-iconoclasts Wilco handed in their fourth album, "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, to the band's label, Reprise, a division of Warner Brothers, fans looked forward to the release of another challenging, genre-bending departure from their previous work. The band aimed to build on previous sales and critical acclaim with its boldest and most ambitious album yet, but was instead urged by skittish Reprise execs to make the record more "radio friendly." When Wilco wouldn't give, they found themselves without a label. Instead, they used the Internet to introduce the album to their fans, and eventually sold the record to Nonesuch, another division of Warner. Wilco was vindicated when the album debuted at No. 13 on the "Billboard charts and posted the band's strongest sales to date.
"Wilco: Learning How to Die traces the band's story to its deepest origins in Southern Illinois, where Jeff Tweedy began growing into one of the best songwriters of his generation. As we witness how his music grew from its punk and alt-country origins, some of the key issues and questions in our culture are addressed: How is music of substance created while the gulf between art and commerce widens in the corporate consolidation era? How does the music industry make or break a hit? How do working musicians reconcile the rewards of artistic risk with the toll it exacts on their personal life?
This book was written with the cooperation of Wilco band members past and present. It is also fully up to date, covering the latest changes in personnel andthe imminent release of the band's fifth album, "A Ghost Is Born, sure to be one of the most talked-about albums of 2004.

Aus dem Klappentext

The intimate story of one of the great American bands of our time, creators of the controversial masterpiece Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

When alt-country heroes-turned-rock-iconoclasts Wilco handed in their fourth album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, to the band s label, Reprise, a division of Warner Brothers, fans looked forward to the release of another challenging, genre-bending departure from their previous work. The band aimed to build on previous sales and critical acclaim with its boldest and most ambitious album yet, but was instead urged by skittish Reprise execs to make the record more radio friendly. When Wilco wouldn t give, they found themselves without a label. Instead, they used the Internet to introduce the album to their fans, and eventually sold the record to Nonesuch, another division of Warner. Wilco was vindicated when the album debuted at No. 13 on the Billboard charts and posted the band s strongest sales to date.

Wilco: Learning How to Die traces the band s story to its deepest origins in Southern Illinois, where Jeff Tweedy began growing into one of the best songwriters of his generation. As we witness how his music grew from its punk and alt-country origins, some of the key issues and questions in our culture are addressed: How is music of substance created while the gulf between art and commerce widens in the corporate consolidation era? How does the music industry make or break a hit? How do working musicians reconcile the rewards of artistic risk with the toll it exacts on their personal life?

This book was written with the cooperation of Wilco band members past and present. It is also fully up to date, covering the latest changes in personnel and the imminent release of the band s fifth album, A Ghost Is Born, sure to be one of the most talked-about albums of 2004.

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Chapter 1

“You Have To Learn How To Die”

Jeff Tweedy was sobbing as he sang. He and his bandmates in Wilco were coming off a grueling tour that had seen them play too many shows too far from home for far too long, and now they had just finished up four days of recording sessions in an Austin, Texas, studio. Listening to the playback, Tweedy could measure the toll. He could hear the depression and exhaustion in his voice, the misgivings about the life he had made for himself. Music was both the best thing that had ever happened to him and the worst. It kept him away from his wife and family for long stretches, and now he was beginning to doubt everything: his music, his marriage, the sound of his own voice. The songs held no answers; they simply channeled what was in his heart and mind. Both, frankly, had seen better, brighter days. “I dreamed about killing you again last night, and it felt alright to me.” He heard himself sing the words as they marched past him; rather than cushioning or muffling the lyrics, the music seemed to highlight them, making them even more difficult to bear. All Jeff Tweedy could think was, “I’ve failed. I’ve let the band down. I sound like the most depressed person in the world.”

But he hadn’t failed. He had taken the first blind leap into an album that would prove to be one of the defining moments of his and Wilco’s career. Summerteeth would expose his inner world to an almost unbearable degree but, with the help of his bandmates, somehow turn it into life-affirming music.

A couple of years later, Tweedy would write a song called “War on War,” in which he would sing, “You have to learn how to die, if you wanna wanna be alive.”

In that Austin recording studio, Tweedy died a little. It was a feeling he already knew intimately. There was the moment Jay Farrar took the band they had built together, Uncle Tupelo, and tore it apart by telling Jeff Tweedy he couldn’t stand working with him anymore. The moment Tweedy turned an alternative-country concert for a club full of Johnny Cash fans into a punk-rock kamikaze mission. The night Tweedy baited a British audience until they wanted to tear his fool Yankee head off. And still to come would be the moment when he found his record label didn’t want the best record he’d ever made.

Beneath the facade of the small-town newspaper-delivery boy that he once was, the kid who wouldn’t speak unless he was spoken to, Jeff Tweedy brings a self-confidence that cannot be ignored or denied. It can be willful and sometimes almost cruel, but it is not indiscriminate or random. The personality can best be glimpsed and assessed through the music, because Tweedy is a songwriter of knee-buckling honesty. The emotions in his songs examine the heart of darkness that, to some degree, lurks in all of us. His great subject is intimacy—with a lover, with a friend, with music itself—and its price. His songs teeter between bliss and oblivion: “There is something wrong with me”; “I’ve got reservations about so many things, but not about you”; “I am trying to break your heart”; “Playing Kiss covers, beautiful and stoned.”

He can ice the listener’s blood with a scream; there are nights when “Misunderstood” sounds like a back-alley mugging, when his howl “I want to thank you all for nothin’, nothin’ at all” repeats until the veins rise like blue fault lines down his neck. Or he can cut our hearts out with a whisper. “She’s a Jar” climaxes with a line that lands with a sickening thud, a corpse being dropped from a third-floor window, but it’s sung with the understatement of an undertaker: “She begs me not to hit her.” Left unanswered is precisely what kind of holocaust the character in this song had to live through to deliver that line with such matter-of-factness. Not knowing is almost a relief.

In the way they marry the everyday with the surreal, the opaque with the anthemic, the acerbic with the melodic, Tweedy’s songs evoke the work of the great songwriters, not so much the usual suspects (Neil Young, Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan) as the lost punks, iconoclasts, and misfits who put the color in Tweedy’s life between the headphones. Tweedy learned to be a great listener before he became a great songwriter and musician, and he developed a connoisseur’s taste: Pere Ubu’s Peter Laughner, the Minutemen’s D. Boon, the English folkies Nick Drake and Bill Fay. With these rock outsiders Tweedy shares a certain daring, a way of looking at the world that demands more of it and more of himself, sometimes at a steep cost. Tweedy’s cry “Maybe all I need is a shot in the arm” on Summerteeth echoes the desperation of Nick Drake as he sang in the darkness of a British recording studio just weeks before entering a psychiatric rest home, murmuring about the world’s fading beauty, even though unable to lift his face off the studio floor.

With each Wilco album—including two Mermaid Avenue collaborations with Billy Bragg on the lyrics of Woody Guthrie—Tweedy and his band have pushed their music to measure up against those lost giants. They’ve done what few bands in the post-Nirvana rock ’n’ roll world have managed: to better themselves with each album. It’s not a stretch to imagine Dylan and the Band bashing out a Tweedy song such as “Dreamer in My Dreams” in the basement of Big Pink. And it’s possible to get so lost in the closing moments of Wilco’s ensemble performances in “Reservations” or “One by One” that time melts away.

“Jeff is one of the few people I am envious of as a writer,” says Gary Louris, whose band the Jayhawks helped restore the art of songwriting to 1990s rock. “I don’t mean to be a curmudgeon, but there’s very little that impresses me when I listen to new stuff. Whether it’s the White Stripes or whoever the band of the moment is supposed to be, I think, ‘That’s kinda cool, but compare it to the greatest stuff in rock and it pales.’ I try to look at things like that in perspective, stacked against the best of all time, and I think Jeff ranks up there. You can put his stuff against anyone’s, and as a songwriter he doesn’t have to back down to anyone. He lives the music, more than anyone I know. He’s immersed in music, and it shows.”

R.E.M.’s Peter Buck simply calls Tweedy “one of the best songwriters of his generation.”

It took time. For a shy small-town kid from the Midwest, to risk failure in the name of artistic expression is to contradict a lifetime’s worth of social schooling. But the thirty-four-year-old man who wrote “War on War” isn’t that far removed from the fourth grader who brandished a cassette copy of Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run one day at school and informed his classmates that it was his creation. It was as if the kid weren’t challenging his classmates to believe so much as himself.

With his high-school friend Jay Farrar in Uncle Tupelo, Tweedy forged a style of music that both embodied and repudiated the small-town life he had known in Belleville, Illinois, a blue-collar town surrounded by farms and strip mines thirty miles southeast of St. Louis. Together they steered the band with a tight-lipped refusal to pander, a deft songwriting touch, and voices that sounded like they could’ve fit comfortably alongside the plainspoken misfits on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. But whereas Farrar was already a fully formed musical talent at...

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Verlag
Crown
Erscheinungsdatum
2004
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0767915585
ISBN 13 
9780767915588
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
264
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
preigu
mail@preigu.de

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