Hey, Let's Trash Jeff Tweedy!

I was just watching a documentary on the band “Wilco”. Or should I say another documentary on the band “Wilco”. It seems “Wilco” really likes “Wilco” so they make a lot of documentaries. About “Wilco”.

I’ll start my tale at the time when I had the misfortune to meet “Wilco” shortly after they reached the “semi-national” level. That is where you play large Colleges, showcase night clubs (big bars) or theatres instead of the usual beer-stained, shithole, little bars. You also get to open up for the big name acts at festivals, in coliseums, and stadium shows.

I met them at a festival that traveled the country sponsored by the very “Irish” beer Guinness. They gave it a very Irish, very Gaelic, very annoying name – “The Fleagh Festival”. How fucking pretentious! Just who the fuck looks at that word and knows the proper pronunciation? I guess it’s some kind of advertising ploy. If an advertising ploy pisses you off then it usually is some kind of ploy (ploy’s kind of annoying too, now that I think of it). So this pompous brain fart of a name is pronounced “flah”.

So Wilco’s playing the Fleagh festival, we are in San Jose, CA sometime in 1999. I’m standing at one of the beer and food tables in the hospitality lounge (it’s a fucking tent) scarfing down a bratwurst and a Guinness, when I notice the entire band standing behind me. One of the guys was already deep in conversation with the friend that I was with so I chatted the other fellows up.

Very nice guys for the most part. I knew absolutely nothing about this band, had never heard of them, and I had just seen them play for the first time less than a half an hour ago. I thought they sounded okay for the most part. They certainly didn’t suck anyways.

Outside venues are not great places to really delve into music with great concentration. No, the outside shows are for getting really blasted, just trashed, and dancing with your clothes off. Not the best place to really seriously experience the music.

I struck up a conversation with the lead guitar player whom I would later find out was Jay Bennett. I usually talk to the guitar players (I play, too, so I talk to them). Jay was very concerned with how the sound was. I told him the all around volume could’ve been a little louder, but the band as a whole sounded pretty good.

He then rephrased the question asking not how did the band sound but how did he sound. Oh I get it now. Jay’s fishing for a compliment! I guess I wasn’t gushing enough for certain members of Wilco that day in southern California.

I wasn’t blown away by Jay’s guitar playing. He was good, don’t get me wrong, plus he was a multi-instrumentalist, but he played guitar exclusively on stage that day. He also sat in with another band, on their last tune, before he hit the stage with Wilco.

So I told him that, when he sat in, I liked the solo he did to close the tune they played. “Yeah, I wanted to show those guys how to do a proper rock-n-roll finish.” I realized this guy was being a little cocky here. Plus his solo wasn’t all that great.

You have to understand that I spent a good deal of my youth as a roadie, light-guy, and sound-guy before I ever took to the stage as a guitar player myself. I started playing in 1974, and have done hundreds of gigs. So I wasn’t completely full of shit. This was back during a time that is turning out to be real “Golden Era” type history.

I say this because in Connecticut in the mid to late seventies there was a lot of live music going on. The drinking age was still eighteen years old, thanks to the Viet-Nam era draft. Fake ID’s were easy to get, gas and booze were still cheap. The bars were plentiful, they were always packed nightly full of kids from age sixteen on up, and they all had live music.

The musicianship of the band members at this time was off the charts. There were some amazing players back then that I had the privilege of working for and working with. These fuckers could play. A lot of them are now very successful session players that have played with the best in the business. I’ve had many a shock when noticing someone I’ve worked with onstage at Madison Square Garden, or in the Live Aid concert or Saturday Night Live, etc. All very cool moments I will freely admit!

These people were phenomenal musicians and that was how high the bar used to be. I’m sorry to say a lot of today’s musicians just do not even come close to that level. Today’s modern guitar heroes do not come close to the level of the players from the sixties and seventies. Of course that is just my opinion, but it’s a very popular opinion.

So here I am trying to think of some thing nice to say to this guitar player that’s fishing for a compliment. And this is after he just said something kind of cocky. I just smiled and said “Well hey man, you play a really nice guitar.” Now this is well known amongst guitar players to mean that you play well. It doesn’t mean you have a nice guitar.

Jay Bennett gave me just the slightest of dirty looks as he hesitated for just a second before he replied. I think he was trying to determine if he’d just been insulted or not. “Oh, I wished you had said ‘You play a nice guitar well.’ He said through pursed lips and squinty eyes. “That’s what I meant.” I assured him in order to assuage his ego.

I really regretted doing that right away. I realized that I wasn’t really that bowled over by this guy’s performance. I didn’t know who the fuck he or his fucking band was. Plus I wasn’t really all that impressed with the band for the most part.

As I mentioned before it wasn’t real clear to me at that time just who the band’s front man was. I did notice someone standing just a tad back from the group bull session that we were having with a kind of removed, amused look on his face.

He wasn’t talking to anyone so I thought maybe he was a roadie or something. I had just seen them for the first time so I didn’t remember if he was on stage or not. I was just being polite when I tried to include him in the conversation I was having with the bass player (bass player good guy). “Oh please don’t let me interrupt! He exclaimed a little too quickly, “Please go on with your conversation.”

He said this as he kind of waved me away, letting me know he was interested in watching the interaction, but not at all interested in participating in the interaction itself. He just stepped back with his arms crossed and a bemused look on his face. I like to watch the monkeys play, but if I joined them, well, they’re just so dirty….

This makes you an asshole.

This dickhead, I later found out, was the ever lovable Jeff Tweedy, leader, front man, and lead singer/songwriter for “Wilco”. I can recognize a pompous musician with great ease. I asked my friend if he was ready to split. “Yeah let’s go. These guys suck anyways.” I didn’t disagree at that moment so we said our goodbyes to the guys in the band.

As I said the other guys that were Wilco at the time were very cool, very nice guys. It was just Jay Bennett that was an egomaniac and Jeff Tweedy was just plain arrogant. He was, to me, the worst kind of arrogant also. I really try to keep up with music and had never even heard of these guys. You can almost forgive arrogance from a real celebrity, fame does do some real fucked up things to a person.

Jeff Tweedy fired Jay Bennett from Wilco soon after that. He of course sighted creative differences. The last disc they recorded together “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” contained eight of eleven cuts that were co-written by Tweedy-Bennett. The previous disc was almost completely written by the pair. It’s pretty obvious to me that those numbers suggest, along with almost universal praise for the album, that the creative differences were just what the band needed.

So what if life wasn’t a fucking fairyland? When is it? They were living a life millions of musicians and billions of wannabees would kill for. I could understand sacking someone that is making the creative process impossible. No problem.

But true collaboration requires concessions. And a true “band” requires loyalty.

There are many things a band member could do that might be construed as disloyal. Firing a band member for selfish reasons is something a band leader should really take seriously. It keeps the other band members from worrying if they’re next.

Doing solo gigs. This makes the other band members feel that they are no longer needed.

Forming a second band while you are already in a band really detracts from the whole “band” concept. I’d be real fucking worried about my job security if this happened.

You should realize that the Wilco band members that didn’t have writing credits or publishing rights don’t have royalty and residual checks coming in the mail every week.

By this time Jeff Tweedy was a rich man and his band mates were not (this part I did research). After firing Jay Bennett, Tweedy went on to write almost all of the Wilco songs exclusively. Jeff Tweedy was now “Wilco” personified.

And Jay Bennett is dead.

Somehow Jay Bennett was having a hard time affording his health costs. This is right after co-writing an album that sold 500,000 copies. Just before he died of an accidental overdose Jay sued Wilco for $50,000.00 in unpaid royalties.

The Tweedy-Bennett collaborations yielded more sales than just about all the other albums combined*.

Four of the twelve songs on “Sky Blue Sky” the credits are listed as (“Tweedy, Wilco”).

Sure sounds like “HIMSELF” and “them” to me. Talk about being thrown a bone. I’m just using simple deduction here (I’m guessing), but I would think that the writing credit “Wilco” refers to everyone in the band except Tweedy. There were six other people in the band besides Tweedy. That means six people split the royalties from four songs on their worst selling album to date. That is what is known as “Getting Fucked” in the music business. What a guy!

There are a lot of musicians that write songs that are long, drawn-out, and boring. But they’re not disloyal, pompous, control freaks. In one documentary Tweedy, during one of his solo appearances, chastises the audience for talking while he’s playing his precious oh-so-important songs.

One fan jokingly shouts out some reference to marijuana. Tweedy takes this personally and with extreme arrogance asks this “moron” “Maybe you didn’t know I just got out of Rehab? It was on the crawl on CNN, the CNN news crawl.”

Tweedy says this like it is common knowledge. If you are at a Jeff Tweedy show and you don’t know his personal history or have to talk to someone while “HIMSELF” is singing one of his boring-ass songs, you may just get chastised from the stage by the singer “HIMSELF”.

If this is “Rock-n-Roll” then I’m going to go get a haircut. Then cut my wrists.












*With the demise of real music sales due to file-sharing most CD sales figures are obsolete.