I’m being led down a low ceilinged stairwell somewhere in the bowels of the Fox Theater. I’m second in a line of some twenty-five people following a worn out looking roadie who leads us to a surprisingly shabby room considering the grandeur of the Fox. It is long, rectangular and not particularly clean. The roadie points to a cheap folding table with two coolers of beer. “There’s beer here, there’s the opener, there’s more beer here.” He makes a vague gesture to a refrigerator against a wall and quickly disappears.

I’m at the after party of the Wilco show by an accident of good fortune and a circuitous chain of relationships. As the room fills up and the coolers empty I watch the members of the band filter in. They are immediately snatched up and start animated conversations with the zest of old friends reunited. All of the sweat stained members of the band are there, except for one, the one I’m waiting for. Against my natural tendencies of shyness and consideration I have come to the conviction that I must, as some strange gesture of appreciation, shake Jeff Tweedy’s hand when he arrives … if he arrives. I try to look casual as I crane my neck in 360 degree surveillance while taking large swallows of beer to calm my nerves. It’s hard to decide what I want to say to him. How do you sum up a dozen years of musical patronage in a couple of sentences? Whatever I say has to be tight and meaningful, it has to convey the depth of my gratitude, but at all cost it must not devolve into rambling sentimentality. There’s a part of me that knows how pointless it is; he’s heard it all before and he’ll probably forget whatever I’d say even if by some small miracle I make a coherent statement of my appreciation. But I’ve got to say it, maybe for myself more than anything else. In a sudden break of my anxiety I realize to my astonishment, the depth of meaning that this band has in my life. I can see how far I am removed from the easy mood of assurance that I had walked into the Fox with some odd hours earlier. I have been jolted out of complacency by an unbelievably great rock show and thrown into the wonderfully unbalanced state of abject fandom.


Just after eight that night I arrived at the Fox, a theater that never fails to impress me by its lush beauty, but I’ll admit to feeling slightly at odds with the opulence of my surroundings. I waited in line with a group of well dressed and cleanly scrubbed individuals to pay $6.50 for a bottle of Yeungling. Then I made my way to the orchestra with the assistance of an elderly usher who politely pointed the way with a flashlight. It all felt odd, the expensive beers and easy prosperity, the constraint of the seats, the distance from the stage (even though the seats were very good), the audience of glammed up girls and short haired men that looked straight from a corporate meeting. It had been a while since I’d seen a show of this scale and I couldn’t help but long for the times when I’d seen Wilco up close and rubbing clammy shoulders with my ill-washed neighbors. Those old shows seemed an entirely preferable experience than this gentrified version of rock and roll.

"The set of old familiars was constantly enlivened by the fresh input of creativity." It’s a good thing Wilco started playing so that I could be pulled from my insufferable recollections and small club reveries. What I got was a wake up call via a solid dose of professional expertise - the kind that you won’t find on display in tiny clubs in front of a hundred spectators. In an incredible marathon set that touched in-depth nearly every period of Wilco’s history I was reminded of every reason that I had loved this band so much and for so long and shamed by the fact that I’d forgotten how amazing they are.

The show opened with 'Wilco (The Song)', the opening track off of their 2009 album Wilco (The Album). It’s a brazenly confident song that offers the band’s music as a tonic to life’s troubles, “A sonic shoulder for you to cry,” and Jeff Tweedy soothingly assured those present that no matter what, “Wilco will love you, baby.” The early part of the set focused on the new album, but they really hit stride with the sixth song, ‘Shot in the Arm’ from Summerteeth. Wilco has gone through a lot of line up changes over the years, the only constants being Tweedy and bass player John Stirratt, but the current six man incarnation is the only one I’ve heard that brings to full life the dense, layered songs from Summerteeth. It got the crowd singing for the first of many times and from there the show seemed to take off, interrupted only by Tweedy intermittently bantering with the crowd. Tweedy is genuinely charismatic and funny on stage and on this night his sharp wit was trained on a member of the audience who was about to be kicked out for taking photos of the band. Granted a reprieve, the guy went back and forth with Tweedy until he threw a note up on stage accidentally accompanied by a twenty dollar bill. Tweedy calmly pocketed the money saying, “I’ll accept this as an apology.”

The show powered on as they bounced from album to album reaching a crescendo with a lushly instrumented version of ‘California Stars’ and then ‘Poor Places’ that faded out into noise while the stage was darkened amid a flurry of activity as antique style lamps and oversized chairs were brought to the front of the stage. This ushered in an intimate, acoustic part of the set, kicked off unlikely enough with 'Kidsmoke'. It has to be the most unlikely song in the Wilco library to be turned acoustic and it was phenomenal. All night I noticed variations in the songs, some subtle, some obvious, but always done expertly: from the bluegrass version of 'Casino Queen' to John Stirratt’s standup bass on ‘Hesitating Beauty’; the set of old familiars to longtime fans was constantly enlivened by the fresh input of creativity.

A rousing rendition of the Mermaid Avenue song 'Airline to Heaven' transitioned the stage back to the earlier configuration and seamlessly segued into a goose pimple inspiring version of ‘Via Chicago’ - perhaps the highlight of the show. It was about that time where I started anticipating the end of the set; after all, we were over twenty songs into the show and I would have welcomed a chance to catch my breath from the breakneck pace and reflect on the goings on. But amazingly they went on, song after song, pausing only to give Tweedy a moment to change guitars. It was an amazing, almost deliriously ecstatic scene. In one of those perfect moments of a great rock show Tweedy asked the crowd to sing ‘Jesus etc.’ and crowd pulled off an admirable job carrying the song through the second verse and after a good fake earlier in the song Tweedy finally joined in singing with the crowd: “Our love … Our love … Our love is all we have.” It may seem hokey, or it may just be good showmanship, but it really felt as if Wilco appreciates how far they have come and the fans that have been along for the ride.

The set ended with ‘I’m A Wheel’, the thirty-third song! After the briefest of rests the band came back for one more, fittingly a cover of Big Star’s ‘Thank You Friends’. Wilco left the stage nearly three hours after they took it, a band playing better than they ever have and giving the fans all they could ever hope for.


As for my experience … I’m sure there has always been a cult of the new around modern music, but I don’t think it has ever been as noticeable as in the mp3 era. The music world is flooded with albums and to try to be abreast of even a fraction of them is a fulltime job, so much so that you can neglect your back catalog and you can forget your musical priorities. Wilco released their seventh studio album in 2009, not their best but still a very good album, but I lost it and the band in the wash of trying to keep up with the goings on in a genuinely outstanding musical year. Somehow I began the night with the cavalier mood of musical consumer rather than participant for my favorite band, a band that I had once thought so important that I made it a point to wear their concert tee during the birth of my first child. I was almost ashamed as I waited in that dingy room for Jeff Tweedy. How could I have neglected, even for a moment, these songs that I’ve listened to hundreds of times over more than a decade, before this town was my town, before the woman I married was my wife? How could I lose sight of these documents of my life? I felt like a happily married man who makes a fool out of himself in a dalliance with a younger woman, only to be patiently welcomed home by his loving wife.

And so I waited for Jeff Tweedy in a dirty yellow walled room, still hoping he’d show up even as the crowd thinned out. Eventually I had to admit that he wasn’t going to be there for me to shake hands with and I left. So I didn’t get to speak to Jeff Tweedy, but that was all right- he’d already spoken to me.