Scot and Jeff talk to Kevin Madden about Wilco.
Introducing the Band
Your hosts Scot Bertram (@ScotBertram) and Jeff Blehar (@EsotericCD) with guest Kevin Madden, Republican strategist, CNN Commentator and former advisor to President George W. Bush, Gov. Mitt Romney, Republican House Leaders John Boehner and Tom DeLay.” Follow Kevin on Twitter at @KevinMaddenDC.
Kevin’s Music Pick: Wilco
This week the gang gets a shot in the arm as they celebrate Wilco, one of the great genre-transcending American groups of the past quarter century. This is a band that had a cult and critical following long before they emerged into wider prominence in the 21st century, and co-host Scot was there from the start: Wilco is one of the bands nearest and dearest to him in his entire life. Kevin tells the story of sitting in Yonkers city hall during his years as an aide to the city council president and having his head turned around by hearing a song on the radio: “California Stars,” which set him on the path to lifelong fandom. Jeff tells a more familiar story for many, one of finding Wilco due to the hype surrounding Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and being mildly perplexed at first until the eventual discovery of Summerteeth clicked everything into place for him.
Too Far Apart: Uncle Tupelo and the origins of Wilco
As much as the gang would have loved to, there just wasn’t any time to seriously discuss Uncle Tupelo, the groundbreaking band from southern Illinois led by Jay Farrar that formed in 1989 and ended up defining the entire subgenre of alt-country. Instead, Scot gives a brief rundown of their career and points out that by far the more important thing, as far as the present episode is concerned, is that Uncle Tupelo also happened to contain a second key member in the quiet, retiring bassist Jeff Tweedy, who began writing more and more songs as the band’s career progressed. This led to incurable friction with Farrar, and when Tupelo eventually collapsed and Farrar quit, Tweedy took the rest of the band with him and renamed it Wilco. Farrar began a new band named Son Volt, and for the next two records, a ‘battle of the bands’ (as Kevin calls it) was on between Son Volt and Wilco.
The overwhelming critical consensus is that Farrar won round one in a knock-out with Son Volt’s magnificent debut Trace; Wilco’s 1995 debut A.M. was seen by most as an afterthought — a middling continuation of the Uncle Tupelo sound — and proof that the real magic in the band came from Jay Farrar. In retrospect we now know that not to be the case, but the gang argues that A.M. is itself an underrated record in its own right, far too quickly dismissed by critics and fans (and even the band) for failing to advance much on Uncle Tupelo’s original sound. Scot and Kevin praise the guitarwork of Brian Henneman (on temporary loan from the Bottle Rockets) in particular, and note that the embryonic “Tweedy style” of lyrical introversion is found in so many of the highlights of this record, like “Box Full Of Letters” and “Should’ve Been In Love.”
Misunderstood: Jay Bennett and Being There
All talk of Wilco as an also-ran in the alt-country scene immediately ended with their second album, 1996’s sprawling 2CD masterpiece Being There. And yet with this record Tweedy was already declaring, on songs such as “Misunderstood” and “Sunken Treasure” (which, as Jeff notes, tellingly open disc 1 and disc 2 respectively), that Wilco was not content to be a mere alt-country act anymore. The impetus behind this shift was Tweedy’s for sure–all of the songs on this LP are solo songwriting credits–but a major reason for the success of Wilco’s sudden musical complexity must be laid at the feet of their newest member, Jay Bennett. Originally hired to be the band’s lead guitarist, Bennett immediately revealed a passion for piano and keyboards and used his skill with them to bathe nearly every song on Being There with graceful and haunting coloristic touches. From “Red-Eyed And Blue” (which Jeff is passiona