Fresh Cuts: Wilco in Davenport, 6/13/07

Balcony, Adler Theater—I’ve developed a tradition going past 15 years now of driving some distance to attend great rock shows in my birthtown of Davenport, Iowa. I’ve only lived in the town for four months but I’ve probably made the trip to see music there at least a dozen or so times. Before last night’s Wilco concert at the Adler Theater, I most recently got rocked by the mighty Tenacious D at the River Center Grand Hall (4/15/02) and awhile before received an equally thorough ass-kicking by Nirvana at Palmer Auditorium (less than six months before Kurt Cobain’s 4/5/94 suicide) with my old roommate Pat (now Professor Pat, the wildly popular St. Olaf chemistry professor soon to be teaching at a high school in Minneapolis.)

Then in 1991-92, four great, beer-sotted shows at the old Col Ballroom: the Replacements, Pixies, Beastie Boys, and Social Distortion. And before any of that the muggy Blues Fest on the Mississippi River with my buddy Dave, call him Russ… but we scored four or five cans of beer apiece even though we were just finishing or out of high school, ages 18/19, and to this day those beers were probably the best I’ve ever drank.)

And also then too many shows to count in Iowa City at the Picador (formerly known as Gabes) as well as the Englert Theater, the Mill, the Green Room, the Yacht Club, Hancher Auditorium, Carver-Hawkeye Arena, etc. but also in Des Moines (Ween last August at the Val Air Ballroom) Ames (Dylan, McCartney, both Rolling Stones and U2 twice), Cedar Falls (George Clinton), Cedar Rapids (John Wesley Harding at CSPS a few years back but well over a decade since I had last caught him in London, where I was living as a student in early 1991), Omaha (1995-97: Social Distortion, Matthew Sweet, Son Volt, Alejandro Escovedo’s band Buick McKane), Washington DC (Sigur Ros and Soundtrack of Our Lives – two nights in a row at the 9:30 Club a few years ago), a couple shows in Lincoln, Nebraska (Dick Dale and the Jesus Lizard) and Los Angeles/California (first five Coachella festivals, 1999-2003; many shows at the El Rey on Wilshire—Flaming Lips 3/30/00, Matthew Sweet with Guided By Voices 4/20/00, Kid Koala 5/15/00, Beta Band 10/19/99, Mercury Rev 4/6/99, Matthew Sweet 9/10/01. Also Primal Scream twice in LA – two nights in a row, House of Blues on the Sunset Strip and then somewhere in Hollywood; Bob Dylan for the first time at the Ventura County Fairgrounds.)

I’ve seen Wilco five or six times now… first saw them play at Gabes with a modest crowd – we sat in white plastic lawn chairs up near the front—just after Uncle Tupelo broke up, before first Wilco record “A.M.” came out in 1995… then at art center in Minneapolis, Iowa City IMU, 11/10/02, the Riviera in Chicago 8/2/02, IC again (a year and a half ago? with a solo Jeff Tweedy and drummer Glenn Kotche.) Missed the Iowa show they canceled due to Tweedy’s health/recovery issues, then missed the rescheduled one. (And before that when Tweedy was in Uncle Tupelo, I saw them at Gabes at least once or twice, then also in Ames. And I’ve seen his UT counterpart Jay Farrar and/or his band Son Volt a half-dozen times total.)

But inre: last night’s show…

This show was as terrific as any I’ve seen in Davenport. At 8:45 p.m. things got off with a bang with “Shot in the Arm” and new/recent Wilco member/live wire Nels Cline spazzing out on lead guitar. From the balcony at least he looks like a Clash-era Paul Siminon, rail thin, rolled up jeans and the big black boots to match. In a show full of aces guitar work, he seemed equally adroit on the pedal steel during the new song “x” from “Sky Blue Sky.”

I always love it when bands seem to be throwing a complete TANTRUM onstage, like when lead singer Jeff Tweedy starts shrieking like a wounded animal about 52 minutes into the band’s “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart” documentary, in the song "Misunderstood": I’d like to thank you all for nothing… nothing… nothing! Nothing! Nothing! Nothing! NOTHING!!! NOTHING!!! NOTHING!!!! et. al., etc.

“I Am Trying…” is their fourth song tonight, after a couple news ones from their new record Sky Blue Sky. I think Rolling Stone’s David Fricke described this one best in his review of the 2001 Wilco record Yankee Hotel Foxtrot: “it sounds like a bicycle being thrown out of a bar.” The song starts real wobbly, with tentative piano notes barely able to stand upright… and then the whole mess is tossed into the street all drunk and weary and alarm clocks and bicycle bells ringing before it staggers to its feet and lists a few steps down the snow-dusted sidewalk sparkling under the low-lit street lamps. What was I thinkin’ when we said HELLO! Tweedy sings by way of greeting his audience for the first time directly, his voice seeming airier and lighter – a little higher in pitch, maybe? – than the usual nictotine-scarred ache that was his voice before he kicked the smokes. (Also note that the first few words of this song that opens Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, I am an American aquarium drinker… and the same words that open what most literary circles would consider another Chicago masterpiece, Saul Bellow’s 1953 novel The Adventures of Augie March… I am an American, Chicago born…

“Via Chicago” starts with a dead-weary strum and at first feels as mellow as any slow- to mid-tempo Wilco song. Musically, at least… because even here the quiet is weighted with a low, droney undertow of menacing noise and a lyric that belies the gentle strum it accompanies, as the narrator sings he dreamed about killing you again last night.

At this point during the concert I leaned into my sweetheart and told her It’s gonna get really noisy... and then BOOM, it DID, with all the volume and violence of a 767 landing at O’Hare, roaring in low and fast over flashes of blinding white and red light, the projection lighting up the Adler like an airfield at night and sounding as if you’re standing near its center. But then the song almost abruptly relaxes again, cooling you out like the metallic-tasting tranquilizer you choked down twenty minutes before takeoff…

The encore kicked off with a new one about washing dishes and mowing the yard. “We don’t have as much time as we thought, so no more talking OK?” (I read the other day some musician complaining about how frustrating it is to have anything you write compared to the Beatles if it happens to be poppy or melodic, or else Led Zeppelin if it’s powerful and heavy. I have to say that sort of glib comparison sometimes lazily employed by rock critics annoys the hell out of me too…but this new Wilco song really DID sound like a mix of those two bands... but in the best possible way you can imagine!)

Unfortunately I missed most of another great new one called Walken. I went to the lobby in search of an open bar... but finding none I took my twenty to the merchandise table instead to conduct what turned out to be some extremely tedious business. So the main guy behind the table has someone’s credit card and he’s trying to call it in on a cell phone, apparently. Meanwhile, I’m next to him with the twenty in one hand and two items in the other – Kotche’s solo CD and a $5 pair of wristbands. ( I always the merch tables are the best place to buy things because the money goes directly to the band, like most of the ticket price you pay does but unlike when you buy their record in a shop – the band gets almost nothing from that sale.) But anyway, the man behind the table just didn’t seem very interested in making our little deal happen.I had to explain twice that the Kotche CD is not $15 like all the others but $12, as it says clearly on the sign. Well, shit. The math seems to be a problem, now he can’t find any ones, and it seems like this is pretty much the first financial transaction the guy has ever made. Took FOREVER, and meanwhile I’m missing the show inside. Excrutiating!!!

Then back inside it’s the “Late Greats” and Tweedy with a friendly chide for an overzealous fan up front: “You’ve been cheating all night, jumping up and looking at the set list!” He’s an all-around friendly gent, really. During Hummingbird, Tweedy ditches the guitar and croons into a microphone, shakes a few hands, relaxes on an amp and crosses his legs. And later before the encore: “We don’t have as much time as we thought, so no more talking OK?”

THEN, at some point toward the end of the show, there was apparently an altercation of some sort, though we couldn’t quite see what was going on from the balcony. Several band members gathered stage right up front. People booed. I’m still not sure what happened, but then the band went back to playing and ended their 18-song, 1:45 set with an extended, wicked freakout called Spiders/Kidsmoke.

Last night’s show in Davenport was the band’s first stateside since touring Europe, and this gave occasion for Tweedy to remark about the band’s recent haircuts. “We all got haircuts except for (drummer) Glenn,” Tweedy said. “Next time you see us in Davenport, we’ll look like Rip Van Winkle…” (or did he say “Rumplestiltskin”?)

Either way, let’s hope it won’t be THAT long.

-30-


Set list

*** Note how some songs in the set list line up with the actual track number of the song on record – they’ve got such a deep reservoir of songs to draw from, from six records now? I’ll bet they were being deliberately playful here…)

1 Shot in the Arm
2 New – sun comes back… organ/Hammond keys? amazing drumming
3 Sunshine – new – thru the water, voices accidentally … 6 piece, two keys, two guitars, bass, drum/percussion… macrame owl hangin from keyboard
4 I am trying to break your heart
5 Kamera
6 Handshake Drugs ***
7 New wrote it last night, JT goes from acoustic to electric…
8 Drunks richochet NEW song;
9 Via Chicago ***
10 New our dreams… three notes… sleep Led Zep powerful Tweedy:
11 Theologians
12 Jesus, Etc.
13 Walken
14 I’m the Man Who Loves You
15 Hummingbird
16 Encore: dishes/yard
17 Late Greats
18 Spiders/Kidsmoke