Making Up With Wilco

I had been all week contemplating going on Craigslist to see if I could pick up a Wilco ticket for last night's show at the baseball park in Coney Island. I'd been digging the new album much more than the last two and it has been about four years since I last saw them. Anyone who knows me knows that they have been my favorite band for a long time and I've seen Wilco, or Jeff Tweedy solo, over 40 times. But the last show I saw, at the Agganis Arena in Boston in June 2005, was just a horrible piece of crap show. That was following a few mediocre shows toward the end of 2004 and a few months before they would put out a snooze-fest of a live album.

So I had been a little turned off by the current lineup a while back, and thus hadn't been to a show for a while.

I decided not to drop the 45 bucks on the show. But yesterday at about 4:40pm I got a phone call from my buddy Phil, who I met a few years ago at a Robyn Hitchcock show, asking me if I wanted to go to a show that night because he got a couple of free tickets. And it was Wilco. So a quick call to the wife to see if it was OK that I leave her alone with the baby for the night and I was good to go.

It felt weird to heading to my first Wilco show in a few years. They've picked up a lot of newer fans since the last time I saw them. It was like I was going to an ex-girlfriend's house for a party and she would be there with her new boyfriend who didn't know her nearly as well as I do.

My adoration of this band used to know no bounds. Their name is in the url for this blog and its name comes from a line from one of their songs. But they have been less magical for me since Tweedy kicked Jay Bennett out of the band and Leroy Bach quit. And after the last shows I saw and the last couple of albums, my expectations were somewhat low.

Well they needn't have been. Wilco was on fire last night. The band is so tight right now and they sound so damn good. Tweedy is the most relaxed and happy I've seen him on stage in a long time. They are a group of just really great musicians and the live versions of a lot of my favorite songs sound so good with this lineup. Not that they played a ton of my favorite songs, with the focus being on a lot of newer stuff. But songs from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot were well represented by sometimes brilliant interpretations.

Feist joined them for the first encore for You and I, hich she also sings on the new album. It was a nice moment, Tweedy and Feist both having their hair blowing in the breeze off the water in Coney Island, singing one of Tweedy's prettiest recent songs. Opening act Yo La Tengo, who we missed due to subway issues, came out and joined for a spectacular version of "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" that rocked the park for twelve minutes.

Highlights for me included a version of "Can't Stand It" that really blows the album version out of the water, being one of the weakest songs on Summerteeth. Also, the version of "Jesus, etc" with Nels Cline on a lap steel guitar (I think that's what it is) that, for my money, is the best thing he does. The subtle Nels Cline for me is so much better than the show-off guitar solo Nels Cline. He is an amazing guitarist, but the whole masturbating with the guitar on stage thing is why I can't stand Led Zeppelin. So that can get a little tiring.

I was disappointed that they only played one song from Being There and none from A.M., their second and first albums, respectively. I wasn't sure we were going to even get anything from Being There, because it as pretty late in the first encore before they finally played "Misunderstood," one of the most perfectly crafted songs ever. And it was a great version, with one exception. There is a part toward the end of the song where the band plays one riff over and over while Tweedy screams "nothing" over and over. Like a lot. According to the Via Chicago message board, because one of the über-nerds always counts it, last night he screamed it 44 times.

Problem is he's been doing this for a decade, and it is really old and tired. Not that it was ever that cool to begin with, pretty boring, really. Like, drum solo boring. He really should retire it.

And on a night when they were playing right around the corner from the actual Mermaid Avenue, you would have thought there would have been a few more songs from those two albums. All we got was "California Stars" and the show-ending "Hoodoo Voodoo," which were nice, but you would have thought on such a night in the place where a lot of those lyrics were written we could have gotten a little more love for the Woody Guthrie material. It would have been a perfect setting for "Remember The Mountain Bed" at the end of the night.

But it was a great concert nonetheless. It wasn't the 1996-2002 era of Wilco that gave me so many perfect nights of music, but this is a much better band than the 2003-2007 version, even though it is the same lineup.

I was pretty jazzed and flying high after the show, somewhat similar to what I felt like when I hooked back up with my old girlfriend back in 1998, who is now the awesome wife that let me bolt out on her and the baby at the last minute to hit this show. If you had asked me just the year before if we would have ever gotten back together I would have said no way. Just like that, I really didn't think I'd ever be this geeked-out about Wilco again, even though I really hoped I could.

I don't know if Wilco and me will ever be as serious as we once were. But at least we're dating again. And that makes me happy.