Wilco: Sunken Treasure

By Tim Grierson

In this comprehensive and probing biography, Tim Grierson examines Wilco’s history, discussing each of their albums in detail and exploring their often divisive 20-year output.

With an eclectic blend of country, alternative rock and classic pop, Wilco was born out of the influential alt-country group Uncle Tupelo in 1994. Led by Jeff Tweedy, Wilco then made a series of albums that won varying levels of acceptance. From the relatively unsuccessful A.M. through the praised but contentious Mermaid Avenue collaboration with Billy Bragg and the troubled Yankee Hotel Foxtrot that eventually became their best-selling album, Wilco and Tweedy have kept the show on the road for two decades, winning Grammys, inspiring countless other bands and taking the flak on the way. This is their extraordinary story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Omnibus Press
• Release date: Jan 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9780857128614

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Author

Introduction

Almost 20 years into their career, Wilco are now recognised as one of America’s most accomplished and respected bands. To their fans, it’s a simple fact.

As for the group’s detractors, they too would acknowledge the validity of that statement – but likely only as supposed proof of the sad state of rock music in the 21st century, American or otherwise. For every music festival happy to include Wilco in its lineup, aware of the band’s drawing power and critical cachet, there’s some cultural commentator taking shots at the group’s perceived hipness deficiency.

For example, in an episode of the sitcom 30 Rock, a congresswoman played by Queen Latifah disparages NBC’s lack of minority characters in its programming, complaining that the network’s lineup is as diverse as a Wilco concert. Indeed, even the band’s fans are somewhat self-conscious about this: at a recent show at the Hollywood Bowl, a popular tweet topic among concertgoers was just how white the audience was.

Despite all the acclaim, Wilco have never been fashionable save for a few hectic months in 2001 and 2002, when their long-delayed album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot became a media sensation thanks to a high-profile clash with a record label reluctant to release it. In that moment the band, in particular singer-songwriter Jeff Tweedy, emerged as a symbol of something bigger than themselves: the integrity of artists trying to express themselves in a world dominated by corporations that treat their art as just another commodity. The fracas, which was further highlighted by the 2002 documentary I Am Trying To Break Your Heart, cemented Wilco’s critical bona fides and gave the group a permanent badge of honour, conferring on them the status of independent-minded craftsmen.

For too long, however, that’s been seen as the whole Wilco narrative. While it may be accurate in its broad strokes, this simplistic overview of the group has arguably done as much harm as good for Tweedy and his bandmates. Though they continue to enjoy wide critical support, the overblown media circus surrounding Yankee Hotel Foxtrot has distorted that album’s merits while unfairly diminishing every record that Wilco have released since.

Because Tweedy has never been seen as a dynamic or mysterious public figure like Jack White, Thom Yorke or other such peers, his modest band’s enduring appeal tends to be dismissed by those who simply don’t understand what the big deal is. But the secret is that, really, there is no big deal here. Album after album, Wilco has simply produced tuneful, thoughtful, heartfelt songs. The trick isn’t that any of this is particularly groundbreaking – but it’s consistent, in a way that so few other bands have been in modern times.

At this point, I should probably identify myself as one such former detractor. Fond of Uncle Tupelo, Tweedy’s former band, but far more enraptured by Uncle Tupelo’s principal songwriter, Jay Farrar, I found myself rooting for Farrar’s subsequent band, Son Volt, over Wilco. Underlining this was the fact that Son Volt’s debut, Trace, blows Wilco’s first album, A.M., out of the water.

In ensuing years, as Son Volt faded out of view and Wilco continued to grow in popularity, I remained firmly in the Farrar camp, angry that the world had ignored his genius and genuflected at Tweedy’s comparatively lightweight material. By the time of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’s critical and commercial success, I was badmouthing Wilco at every opportunity. This led to a memorable comment from a friend: "How can you not like Wilco? You’re a music critic." The implication was clear, if also something of a tautology: music critics ought to like Wilco, as Wilco play the sort of music that music critics like.

Happily, as time went on, I got over my bias against Tweedy and Wilco. (It’s a wonder what maturity can do for you.) But I’m grateful for my years of opposition to the band, because I think it shielded me from accepting the received wisdom about the group’s creative evolution. Rather than seeing Yankee Hotel Foxtrot as an undisputed masterpiece – and, by extension, a later album like Sky Blue Sky as a watered-down disappointment – I’ve spent the last several years reevaluating the band’s catalogue, treating each album as seriously as every other. Having only belatedly seen the light about Wilco, I was free to construct my own narrative about this band – their strengths, their weaknesses, their misunderstood moments.

All of which has led to Wilco: Sunken Treasure. I’m quite fond of that title – not just because of the obvious reference to the song from Being There, but because of what it suggests about this book’s ‘mission’. If you want to read a solid overview of the band’s early years and its triumph with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, I highly recommend Chicago Tribune critic Greg Kot’s Wilco: Learning How To Die. Written with the participation and blessing of the band, Kot’s 2004 book offers a smart guide to how Wilco emerged from the ashes of Uncle Tupelo. Although he spoke with everyone in the band, including former members and other figures in their world, he doesn’t come off as sycophantic in his praise of the group and their albums. It’s a good read.

But with that said, my hope with Sunken Treasure is that you’ll gain a deeper, richer impression of a group’s artistic development. In part, this is because it’s been almost a decade since Learning How To Die and much has happened in that time. But also, since I spoke with neither the members of Wilco nor their close associates – Sam Jones, the maker of I Am Trying To Break Your Heart, is one such exclusion – I was free to reach out to others who have come into the band’s orbit in other ways: the engineers, mixers and producers of their albums. They provided me with a sense of how these records evolved in the studio and, in turn, how Tweedy grew as a songwriter. I also hope that I’ve provided more of a spotlight for the contribution that Jay Bennett brought to Wilco during his time in the band, and speaking with people close to him has helped immensely in that respect.

Ultimately, Sunken Treasure is a deep dive into Wilco’s musical legacy. I don’t put forth any radical or ridiculous counter-theories about the highpoints of their canon, but I did approach this book with a fresh perspective, hoping in the process to rediscover a band whose public image has ossified to such a degree that, more than a decade after Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, they remain a symbol of a type of music and artistic expression rather than a unit to be judged in their own right. This doesn’t mean I shy away from criticism when the situation calls for it, but my sincere hope is that, no matter when you came onboard with this band, Sunken Treasure will offer new perspectives on the music that means so much to you. I know that writing this book did that for me.

Before we can talk about Wilco though, or even Uncle Tupelo, we need to make a visit to the place where Jeff Tweedy grew up. He may not possess the dark, thrilling back story of some other rock luminaries, but the seeds of his development were planted in a quiet small town in Southern Illinois, not far from St. Louis …

CHAPTER 1

The Beginning

I really liked records when I was a little kid, as early as I can remember. According to my mother, I would just stand and point at the record player until she put a record on.

It was late January 2012 and Jeff Tweedy was hanging out at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles, giving an interview to promote his band’s latest album, The Whole Love. Later that night Wilco would perform at the venue, celebrating the onset of their 18th year as a group.

But at this moment Tweedy was thinking about his childhood. He had grown up in Belleville, Illinois, about 30 minutes east of St. Louis, as the fourth of four children. Born on August 25, 1967, he arrived on the planet just a few months after Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – although as a young child his musical interests ran toward its creators’ supposed rivals. I love The Monkees, he admitted as an adult. "I think there was a period in my life where I preferred The Monkees to The Beatles. I had all of six records, and The Monkees Greatest Hits was one of them. I’m talking about when I was seven or eight or something."

Belleville has a rich history. Its first settlers were veterans of the Revolutionary War of 1775-83; in 1814, the city was founded by a group that included Frenchman George Blair, who named the town Belleville (‘beautiful city’ in French). Over time, German immigrants arrived in Belleville and across the state of Illinois. In the book Germany & The Americas: Culture, Politics, & History, edited by Thomas Adam, it’s noted by writer James M. Bergquist: Although some Germans arrived in the United States as early as the War of 1812 – a later military conflict between the fledgling nation and the British – they first began to come in large numbers during the 1830s. Arriving by water, they settled in rural areas near the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. One of the heaviest areas of German settlement in Illinois was the region east of the Mississippi opposite St. Louis, Missouri. A colony of educated and professional Germans, known as the ‘Latin farmers’, came in the 1830s and settled near Belleville.

Belleville became a fertile area for farming. German immigrants from the predominately agricultural regions of their homeland settled in southern Illinois because of the favourable farming conditions there, explains writer Marc Dluger in Germany & The Americas. Farmers who did not have the ability to purchase land in a German province found that elusive opportunity in Belleville. But after the American Civil War, in which many German immigrants from Belleville fought for the Union, industrialisation began to take hold in the area. The discovery of rich coal deposits encouraged the development of rail lines and, as a 1910 book by James Allan Reid, entitled The Greater Belleville, Saint Clair County, Illinois, boasted, with the increasing development of the coal fields and the attendant railroad facilities, came a renewed impetus to manufacturing. The city soon gained recognition as a field especially adapted to successful manufacturing of all kinds … For Belleville is very fortunately situated so far as railroad facilities are concerned. Three great trunk lines, the Southern, Illinois Central, and the Louisville and Nashville furnish unto Belleville an outlet to the outer world.

This is the environment in which the Alton & Southern Railroad Company was born. Formed in 1910, the company operated out of East St. Louis. In 1949, they hired a young man named Bob Tweedy who, three years later, would marry his girlfriend, Jo Ann Werkmeister; the couple gave birth to their first child, Debra Ann, before Bob was 20. Their first son, Steven Kent, was born in 1955, with Robert Gregory arriving two years later.

By the time that Jeffrey Scott Tweedy was born a decade later, Belleville’s population had stabilised at around 41,000. (In 2011, it hovered around 44,500.) Its German roots still very much in evidence, Belleville boasted several breweries. The candy company Jelly Belly, once a favourite of President Ronald Reagan, was founded in the town in 1869 by German immigrants Gustav and Albert Goelitz, who had come to the US just two years earlier.

In short, Belleville was the sort of stable economic environment where mid-20th century Americans could start families. By all accounts, Jeff Tweedy’s home life was a happy one. He and his siblings had two loving parents; the Tweedys were by no means rich but they were comfortable. Their father was a railroad supervisor; their mother designed kitchens and bathrooms for a local shop called Schifferdecker that opened in the fifties.

My dad worked on the railroad for 46 years, Tweedy told Spinner in a 2012 interview. I could never really picture where he was or what he was doing when he was at work. I went to the railroad maybe once or twice, and I saw trains and stuff.

But though Bob worked long hours, including weekends, Tweedy would only have good things to say about his old man. My father was a ham-radio operator, he said. He was a self-taught electronics expert – he dropped out of high school. He had a radio workshop in the basement. One time our neighbours, who we really didn’t like, got some walkie-talkies for their birthday or something. They were really bullies. And my dad hacked into their frequency and told them that he was in an airplane and that he could see them. And that they should come back out at midnight because he was going to be flying back over – and if they stand out in their backyard with flashlights, he’ll swoop down and they can see him. So we just sat out in the backyard and watched them in their backyard with flashlights.

Tweedy’s musical education began, as it does for most kids, with his siblings. I grew up listening to my older brothers’ and my sister’s records, which were all classic sixties Beatles, Stones, Bob Dylan, Monkees, Hollies, Herman’s Hermits, he told Acoustic Guitar in 2012. So I think that’s a pretty good fire to light under a kid. But they also had some weirder tastes. One of his brothers had an album by Aphrodite’s Child, which was fronted by Greek electronic composer Vangelis, called 666: The Apocalypse Of John. They made this concept album about the Book of Revelation, recalled Tweedy. I remember being terrified by it, but totally drawn to it. It’s so over-the-top and dramatic, it’s fantastic.

His father contributed to his musical upbringing in another way. My dad had a very early karaoke machine, which used eight-track tapes, Tweedy said in a 2004 interview with The Wire. You could record yourself and then transfer the recording on to a cassette. I would use this machine to make my own eight-track tapes and just dub back and forth on it – like the most primitive two-track system in the world – making sound installations in my room. I would record these long, droning bowed bass things, or rattle glass and trashcans for hours on end. That’s all I would do in my spare time. It was totally nuts.

From an early age, the boy was dabbling in experimental music – and starting to think about how the creative process works. I had a lot of misconceptions about experimental music and noise, even though it was something I was extremely passionate about, he later said. What I adhered to early on was this idea that if you were going to be an artist, you had to learn how to draw really well before you could start subverting the forms. I now think that’s a really damaging way to look at creativity.

Music played a part in his extended family as well. In a profile of Tweedy in Rolling Stone from 1997, writer David Fricke mentioned that he attended family gatherings in Belleville where his uncles and cousins picked up guitars and played old chestnuts such as ‘Will The Circle Be Unbroken’.

He was also related to Herbert Lester Henson, a Fifties country musician and TV host who went by ‘Cousin Herb’. Henson had moved from East St. Louis to Bakersfield, California, in the process becoming the star of Cousin Herb’s Trading Post, which spotlighted country artists as diverse as Gene Autry and Johnny Cash. Johnny Cash remembered him when we met, Tweedy told Fricke. I think Cousin Herb was friends with Roy Clark, and my grandmother, through him, knew Flatt and Scruggs.

With his siblings so much older than him, Tweedy had to find ways to entertain himself. I learned how to play solitaire when I was a little kid, he told The New York Times, and it always struck me that my mom would teach me how to play as opposed to telling me to go call somebody and get out of the house and hang out with my friends. I was very comfortable with being alone. I also think that my mother maybe just didn’t want me to be too far away.

If there were any grey clouds in his childhood they came from within, not without. I honestly do not remember a time in my life when I did not have headaches, and know what they were and know they were called migraines, Tweedy wrote in an article in The New York Times about his health woes, in the spring of 2008. My mother was a migraine sufferer, and my sister is as well. Now, if I was having legitimate migraines or I just called every headache a migraine because my mother had them, I don’t know for sure, but, like I said, I don’t remember a time in my life when I wasn’t having them.

They got so bad that he missed school with great frequency. I would periodically dehydrate myself – I would vomit a lot with each migraine and it would be really hard to stop, he wrote. It would often continue that way for hours and hours – 12 hours sometimes. Going to doctors did nothing. I remember long periods sitting around in doctors’ offices waiting to get shots. At one point they determined my migraines were the result of allergies, so I got numerous allergy tests and it turned out I was allergic to everything. I don’t think they ever tested me for an allergy that didn’t come up positive. As a result I got allergy shots twice a week after school for years. I got really good at getting shots as a young kid when a lot of other kids were deathly afraid of them. But it never helped the migraines.

In retrospect, Tweedy believes that a mood disorder complicated his condition – something that his parents couldn’t quite understand. When I was growing up I lived in a household with caring people – my parents were definitely nurturing and wanted me to be happy and healthy, he wrote. But it was a different time. If a kid was suffering from a mood disorder in my parents’ generation, the typical response was likely to be, ‘What are you crying about? I’ll give you something to cry about.’ That sounds really harsh but [it’s] a reality of my childhood. It was much more difficult for me to explain, ‘I just feel sad for no reason,’ than for them to see I was in literal pain … In other words, the psychological suffering of the mood disorder may have manifested itself in a very real pain of the migraine that was much easier to express. It’s obvious your kid is hurting when he can’t stop vomiting and he can hardly open his eyes.

Nonetheless, music remained a fixture in the boy’s life. His mom bought him an acoustic guitar when he was six. He tried to fool his classmates into thinking that his taped cassette copy of Bruce Springsteen’s Born To Run, which came out at the time he turned eight, was actually an album he had made. The first LP he ever bought for himself was Blondie’s Parallel Lines. He told Spin, "I was visiting my sister in Arizona. We drove down to a border town and went into Mexico. My mom bought some Kahlua and I bought Parallel Lines. I think we also might have bought a poncho. I had probably seen their picture in magazines. Before I bought records, I bought rock magazines and would read stuff and daydream."

An interest in music eventually evolved into an interest in learning how to make music. I started playing guitar when I was around 13, he later recalled to Acoustic Guitar, and I never really learned how to play the guitar except to write songs – that was the first thing that occurred to me when I figured out a new chord. It was a lot easier for me to write songs than to learn other people’s songs, even though I was inspired by other people’s songs. I feel like the whole time I’ve been playing guitar, any progress I’ve made has been to facilitate something I hear in my head as being a part of a song. And along the way I’ve gotten better to the point where I can learn other people’s songs, obviously, but still the guitar for me is very much a tool of my imagination, for making stuff up. I was isolated and deluded enough, I guess, to think that when I came up with a I-IV-V chord progression, I invented it – which is, I think, the nature of songwriting. It’s got to feel like the joy of discovery. Even in adulthood, the acoustic guitar would remain his primary instrument for songwriting.

But Belleville, a town that had proved so appealing to immigrants a century previously, was beginning to decay; its industries were starting to collapse. By the end of the eighties, the breweries were all gone. Factories were being shut down. There are no jobs here, Bob Tweedy would tell Greg Kot in Learning How To Die. The city is dying.

And in that environment, Jeff Tweedy would begin to find his creative voice. But not with Wilco – that was still some years down the road. First he had to meet a classmate with similar musical passions; they had to form a band and see the US together, and also, somewhat by accident, help give birth to a new musical genre.

CHAPTER 2

Uncle Tupelo

The alchemy of a great band can be difficult to quantify, but oftentimes its creative drive derives from a combination of two entities – or even three. The Rolling Stones are the hybrid product of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards; The Beatles, for most of their run, were powered by John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s songs, but then George Harrison made his voice heard too. The result can be a dynamic diversity of material, or even a friction between individuals that spurs each writer to greater heights. It also inevitably creates arguments between fans about which member of the band is the true genius. (It’s pointless, yet we can’t help ourselves.)

In the early nineties, no band better illustrated this principle than Uncle Tupelo. They were blessed with two creatively fertile songwriters, but it’s fair to say that most observers considered one of them more of an artist than the other. And that person wasn’t Jeff Tweedy.

Jay Farrar had been born in December 1966 to parents Jim and Darlene, who were both musically inclined. Between Darlene and I, we’ve managed to play just about every instrument there is – except violin, Jim would tell a reporter when Jay was 24 and making his name with Uncle Tupelo. Jay was one of four siblings and his parents would bribe the kids 15 cents a day to practise their instruments. The Farrar children learned by watching instructional shows on television. It was the sixties then and Channel 9 had a folk guitar course, Darlene said. You see, with four kids, you don’t pay for music lessons. And membership to Channel 9 was pretty cheap.

I grew up in an environment where there was a lot of country and folk music around, Jay later recalled for writer Ronnie Dannelley. More or less The Beatles and The Rolling Stones and the Seventies rock music on the radio was inspirational as well. My parents were from Springfield, Missouri, which is in the southern part of the state. Both my parents played guitar and sang. My dad would play Hank Williams songs, or Jimmie Rodgers songs. And my mom had a pretty good record collection, so I was exposed to Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly and stuff like that at an early age.

Jay caught the performing bug aged five. Decked out in a suit and tie, he performed a five-minute set for the local PTA in his grade school auditorium. He was looking around like he was scared to death, Jim said. But when he took that harmonica out and played ‘Dixie’, they just couldn’t believe it.

Less than 10 years later, Jeff Tweedy had a similar experience watching Farrar and his brothers bash through a collection of punk and new wave covers in high school. Their group was called The Plebes. Immediately impressed with the Farrars’ talent, Jeff quickly ingratiated himself with Jay and insinuated his way into the group, eventually taking over bass duties – a job previously held down by Jay’s older brother, Dade.

The lineup changes didn’t end there, setting a precedent that would hound Tweedy for much of the next two decades of his career. In 1984, Mike Heidorn joined The Plebes as their drummer. It was a no-brainer since they all ran together in the same circle at high school, which wasn’t with the popular kids. Whenever we’d go to parties, Tweedy told a St. Louis journalist in the early Nineties, we’d usually end up in a room by ourselves, preferably with the stereo.

Heidorn’s interest in drums was sparked at age 16, when his parents had a garage sale and the neighbours brought a three-piece kit. If the drums didn’t sell, the deal was that they would be Mike’s. So the young man got inventive.

We had them out on the car port, his mother, Eileen, recalled. And he kept taking them out back, so that no one would know they were for sale.

Jay’s brother, Wade, was the singer for this new band, which went by the name of The Primitives. (Sometimes it was The ‘Primatives’ – they screwed up the name on their business cards.) They made a ton of noise. In the liner notes for the reissue of Uncle Tupelo’s first album, No Depression, Heidorn reminisced about The Primitives’ early days:

We would meet at the Farrars’ basement … We’d stomp out songs like ‘Dirty Water’, ‘Midnight To Six’, ‘Primitive’, ‘Hang On Sloopy’, ‘Brand New Cadillac’, ‘For Your Love’, ‘Make Love To You’, ‘Psycho’, but we played them all twice as fast as we could or should. So we learned a bunch more songs by The Who, Remains, Sir Douglas Quintet, The Byrds, Rolling Stones, until we had enough songs to call it a set. We started playing gigs at our high school, at parties, and at local bars and halls opening for the popular local band Joe Camel & The Caucasians … We’d practise during the week at our parents’ basement, starting first at Jay’s folks, then moving to Jeff’s basement and attic, before finally shuffling over to my folks’ house. Our parents were real patient and we switched houses when we felt like we’d worn out our parents’ ears and welcome.

You never had to wonder where the kids were, Bob Tweedy once said. You could hear them.

The Primitives started attracting an audience, winning a battle-of-the-bands contest in their high school. We got to the point where, during our senior year, we’d rent a local hall, the Liederkranz, on a Saturday night for a hundred dollars and cram about 500 high school students in there at two or three bucks a pop, Heidorn wrote.

Indeed, there’s two minutes of footage available online of The Primitives slamming through a cover of ‘Psycho’ by sixties garage rockers The Sonics. Wade’s short blond hair and wild punk movements make a noticeable contrast to brother Jay’s conventionally Midwestern long hair and more reservedly focused guitar attack. (In the background, you can hear Tweedy’s wailing vocals during the chorus.)

Man, everybody would go see The Primitives play at the Liederkranz, a local bartender told writer Jason Fine in 1993. We’d get all drunk in the parking lot before the show, like wasted, and sometimes Jeff Tweedy’s mom would be taking tickets at the door.

It’s not unusual for high-school bands to focus on covers while they’re trying to develop their songwriting skill. But The Primitives didn’t do the normal type of set for a mid-Eighties group. Enough bands in our high school or around were playing classic rock cover songs and Top 40 cover songs, Heidorn said in 2002, and we just never really migrated toward that on our radio dial. The albums that Jeff, Jay, myself were buying never really did cross over too much with the Top 40 or Top 100 or Top 1000, for that matter. We kind of migrated toward the older section – or at least I did – of the record store. I think there was an energy on those recordings; the energy pounding off those records was just amazing compared to the Supertramps, the songs we heard on the radio.

It created a desire to pursue music that possessed intensity. When Wade began to become more interested in pursuing an engineering degree, the rest of the trio started focusing on a new group – with a new name.

We decided to write down a bunch of names on a tablet, Heidorn said. I can’t remember very many names that were on there, but there were, really, just one-word names. It filled up two columns, and we decided to pick a word from the left column and a word from the right column. I know ‘uncle’ was on the left; of course, ‘Tupelo’ was on the right. ‘Tupelo’ was put on there because … Elvis Presley was born in Tupelo.

(Farrar would do something somewhat similar when he came up with the name for his follow-up band, Son Volt, randomly throwing two words together that he thought sounded good.)

Inspired by the new name, a friend of the band drew a cartoon of the fictional Uncle Tupelo character. It was Elvis Presley if he’d never made it, Tweedy explained to the Chicago Sun-Times in 1991. He was an old guy with a D.A. haircut wearing fuzzy slippers and sitting in a La-Z-Boy recliner. When Carl Perkins came on the TV, Uncle Tupelo would yell that he was better. We like that image.

The formation of a new group also dictated a new approach, which meant that the sixties covers had to go. We had grown bored doing the same old thing, Farrar told an interviewer in 1988, two years before Uncle Tupelo’s first record.

It could be that we don’t like them as much, Tweedy added. Whatever the reason, we made a conscious decision to abandon the sixties image. By now they were trying to write their own material, but it came slowly.

Lyrics are definitely the hardest thing for us to come up with, Jeff said in the same ‘88 interview.

Jay chimed in: We don’t write music and then just slap lyrics on. In fact, a lot of times we start with the lyrics. Truthfully, however, it is hard for us to pull everything together.

And so they turned to their record collections for inspiration: Bob Dylan, Hank Williams, Black Flag. Neil Young’s Tonight’s The Night was a favourite of both Farrar and Tweedy. But the songs they started developing weren’t necessarily beholden to any particular influence. ‘Before I Break’, sung by