RES Columns: Q & A
Band in a Book: Q+A with Wilco's Jeff Tweedy
Words: Jesse Ashlock
Photo: Michael Schmelling
It's only been a few years since Wilco's infamous Yankee Hotel Foxtrot imbroglio, when the band was unceremoniously dropped from Warner/Reprise for making a record the label deemed too uncommercial. But today things couldn't be better for Wilco. In June, they issued their second album on new label Nonesuch, A Ghost Is Born, which extended the melancholy experimentalism of YHF while injecting a bit more of the dusty analog warmth of earlier releases. The past year has also seen a wealth of Wilco-related literary endeavors, including frontman Jeff Tweedy's first volume of poetry, Adult Head, journalist Greg Kot's band biography, How Not to Die, and now a gorgeous picture book the group created with publisher PictureBox, titled simply The Wilco Book. Featuring musings and artwork by Wilco members, never- before-published photos, and essays by writers Henry Miller and Rick Moody, as well as a 40-minute companion CD, The Wilco Book takes readers inside the band's current environment and mindset. Tweedy explains further:
What was the impulse for creating The Wilco Book?
I love books. I love books as artifacts. I love books for themselves as something to hold and look at. I think as a band, our favorite thing to do is to make shit up, and this is just another way to makes shit up and collaborate with some likeminded friends of ours in the graphic design world.
What did the process entail?
It involved getting together, brainstorming, coming up with ideas, hanging out with Mike, the photographer, and taking lots of pictures, generating ideas as far as what other kind of content we would want to put in it. A lot of our discussions with PictureBox were about how the book should flow from the beginning to the end... There are conceptual devices that we used to make it seem somewhat coherent, to us at least...
It's also that idea of it reading like a record? There are little things that remind me of your records, a fondness for automatic writing and for inscrutable little scraps of lyrics or other kinds of content. Was it intended as a kind of visual album?
Yeah. The book was set up to read like a record, or I think one of those devices we use to have a book kind of outline a creative process -- not the creative process but a creative process. And I think that there's a lot of searching and unintelligibility to the creative process, and that's kind of where the book starts off. I think there's a place in the creative process for absorbing other people's work, and that's probably why that's in the middle. Then at the end, you kind of get back to where you were in the beginning, kind of letting it come out and starting over. I love the idea of looking at music as a transient art form. It's like ice sculptures or something; you make a song, and then you forget how you did it. And hopefully that allows you to make a different song next time.
So the book is a portrait of one process, but there are many processes? Every time you tear something down you build it again differently?
Among other things, I think that was one of the outlines for the book. The book I think is also meant sort of to re-create or represent the environment that Wilco works in, as a band, as a collective. I actually think it's the best part of what we do, and it's why I love doing it, is having friends that are likeminded and sit around and make shit up -- and nurture an environment where that's freer as opposed to more restricted and defined. I think that our process is more about trying to undefine it all the time.
The choice to print Henry Miller's essay "The Angel Is My Watermark" is interesting. Obviously, this is just my reading of its inclusion, but I think that critics have always had unusually high expectations of Wilco, especially since the YHF saga began, so you always had this burden of importance placed upon you as a band that's important to the landscape of rock music. Obviously in modern consumer society, you couldn't anonymously paint watercolors and still be Wilco, but is that part of what the essay is about, the burden of authorship?
 Wilco in Rehearsal [Photo: Michael Schmelling] |
On me!
[Laughs] Yeah, on you. On the critics and the people who have to defend it. I don't have to defend it. I just have to do it, because that's what I love to do. There's lots of elements to my life that are work. It is my living, it is my livelihood. But the process is why you do it. And I have lots of other things in my life besides music that become commercial, being offered up for sale, that keeps me in touch with that, and allows the music to be along the same kind of thought processes.
Rick Moody seems natural choice here, because I know he's written at other bands, and he's often referred to himself as a frustrated musician. But how did that come about -- did you commission the essay?
We did commission it with PictureBox and Dan Nadel. We just talked about different people we'd like to see be a part of the book and there were lots of people. Unfortunately a lot of the people I would love to have been part of the book are dead...
Who would have been on your fantasy wishlist?
Too many people -- I like Gertrude Stein, I think it would have been really great to have Gertrude Stein write something for the book. But also some very-much-from-a-different-generation type writers, like William H. Gass, who's still alive, and a writer who I love very much called David Markson. I love his books. They're unlike any others. When we got a little more realistic and thought of contemporary authors that we really liked and felt some kinship with, Rick Moody was on the top of the list, so it was really great that he was interested in doing it.
Moody's essay is a very sophisticated, cerebral analysis of the Wilco corpus, and beautifully written, but at the same time, it's intellectualism might seem like a contradiction to some of your own statements earlier in the book about trying to avoid rigid self-definition and music being a celebration. Do you feel that tension -- the tension between the cerebral impulse and the sort of orgiastic, pure feeling approach?
I think that essay is there to illustrate one of the more aspects of creativity and making stuff, which is that by making stuff you allow someone else to make something out of it. I think that's just as valuable, that's just as much a part of art. The intellect of the viewer or the reader or the listener is at least fifty percent of the equation. That's the only place [art] really exists is in the consciousness of the person that's absorbing it.
Yes, that goes back to the Miller essay, doesn't it? The egotism of authorship can make you forget those things if you don't have perspective.
Yeah -- for everything in Rick Moody's article that I could dispute or feel uncomfortable with if I had said it, I completely accept it as well. That's one of the beautiful things about doing what we do. He let his imagination run wild, made all these connections, presented this intellectual outline of what our body of work is about, and it may or may not be true. It's only true to him. It may not even be true to him! That's the fun of it. I mean, Greil Marcus has made a fucking career out of that, imagining the past.
Is there anything disquieting about that degree of dissection? It's obviously on a much higher level than your standard rock journalism fare.
There's nothing disquieting about it. I don't want to read it over and over again and get absorbed in it. But I find it to be actually really invigorating. I love that dialogue. Even rock criticism, there's rarely that kind of introspection and acknowledgement of subjectivity in rock music journalism. But I love it when it's there, that's the stuff I value the most. It's like, "Wow, somebody made something fucking really much better than I could have imagined."
That was the amazing thing about Lester Bangs.
Oh yeah, Lester Bangs wrote better about bad music than anybody who's ever lived. He made lots of art based on music that was inferior to him.
 Tools of the Trade [Photo: Michael Schmelling] |
Oh yeah, we went through hours and hours of stuff that we have stockpiled over the last three or four years, with PictureBox, and just picked stuff that we all like and tried to arrange it in a similar fashion to the book. There are more coherent songs in the middle and it kind of starts as this really amorphous thing, some primordial stew or something. We just tried to have things be analogous to each other. Actually I think the stuff we put on that CD is some of my favorite stuff, but it's stuff that I don't know if it would work as well in another context. I like the context of it being sort of like a scrapbook and sort of letting go of what we've been talking about a lot, this authorial conceit that you have a story or a narrative.
The book also seems like a manifestation of a desire to extend your creative energies to other places, to take yourselves and the band's identity beyond the set parameters of making a record album. My impression, though, is that you pretty much stay away from music videos?
No, we haven't consciously steered clear -- well, I guess we have kind of steered clear. But there's a lot of nuts and bolts explanations for that. I mean, financially, I find it to be a little ridiculous to spend that kind of money on a commercial that is free content for stations, you know... I don't understand it.
But the other side of it is we just haven't had any good ideas for one, and nobody's contacted us with anything that sounded really exciting or fun to do as far as a video. We don't some kind of hardline stance against it, I think we probably will do one in the future, but I don't know what it'll be. I just want to do it with somebody I really like what they do.
Well, with the book, you married your music to a strong, elegant graphic identity. I can imagine in the same way, you might want to marry your music to elegant moving images. Would you have any interest in doing something similar there?
To me, that could mean just making the biggest stupid gross-out video of all time. It doesn't have to be so elegant. It would just have to be captivating. I want to make a whole movie that's like a total teen flick summer gross-out movie. That would be my dream.
You seem somewhat guarded about your privacy and wanting to protect your personal life. But there are certain Wilco projects or Jeff Tweedy actions that kind of contradict that, which to some extent seem to court a certain voyeurism, things like the documentary and, to a certain extent, this book. This is probably also just a part of being a public person, but do you feel that tension?
Well, the irony is that I think a lot of these things that have been looked at as a part of Wilco's myth-making process, like the documentary and Greg Kot's book, the thought processes that led to those things happening were kind of the opposite. Maybe we learned some lessons doing that. But with the movie, we definitely thought we didn't have an image worth controlling, so whatever, let him do whatever he wants. And I still believe that it's not worth the energy to try and orchestrate an environment that you can present the exact persona you want to present. I don't believe it's possible unless you completely 1000 percent marry yourself to that persona and become it. I don't have any interest in that. I'll leave that up to the Madonnas of the world. That's a fascinating phenomenon, but I don't feel like I have it in me.
I was shocked at how calcified and -- I really shouldn't have been -- but how powerful just five seconds of film is in how people perceive you. People that I've met since the movie's been out, it's been incredible how people react differently, you know, to you just being a normal guy. To answer your question, I don't really feel that tension. I can see how people outside of the band would look at a lot of these things as contradictions to the amount of insulation we've tried to place around ourselves, because we have let people in, we have let people say whatever they want. We have not actively fought it. With Greg Kot we cooperated, he was going to write the book anyway, we might as well give him our side of the story.
Specifically, what was your reaction to that book?
I read it once. I read it pretty quick. I thought it was interesting that a big part of the book that seemed to have the most energy was his narrative about Uncle Tupelo and pre-Wilco stuff, which he wasn't really there for and hasn't written a lot about, and once it got to stuff that he's kind of covered in his articles in the [Chicago] Tribune and things that he's witnessed firsthand, he seemed to have a lot less room to color it in, he seemed to be more like, "Aw, you already know this stuff." But it was all right. I didn't freak out completely.
What's your musical life outside of the band like?
Well, lots of different things. I guess Loose Fur would be the obvious one, which I do with Jim [O'Rourke] and Glenn [Kotche]. I play a lot of music at home with my kids [Sam and Spencer, ages four and eight]. Actually Spencer is a really good drummer. Everybody's kind of been on vacation in the band for the past few weeks, everybody's kind of been doing and doing their other musical projects. Spencer and I went and recorded a song for the Jandek tribute album, just me and him. It turned out great. It was really fun.
In The Wire recently, you mentioned new material in the works. Is there timeline for another Wilco album?
I think it would be really nice if we could get something recorded and finished a little quicker than we did last time. And there is a lot of material left over -- I don't know if that's the right word because it's maybe stuff that didn't get quite as much attention paid to it -- but then there's lots of new stuff being generated. And I think the dynamic of the band, the six-piece band, is really exciting, so there's a lot of creative energy as far as what's going on. I think everybody would like to get in the studio pretty soon.
It seems like the overall outlook of the band and the sense of infinite possibility is just worlds away from what it was a few years ago. There's obvious reasons for that, but everything just seems so much more... good, optimistic.
I think it's just getting closer to the philosophy that we tried to have, but personality-wise and band dynamics and for whatever reason, we had a hard time integrating into the way the whole thing worked. I still think the records kind of came out adhering to some philosophy of allowing things to change and accepting what you get and all of that, but it was more difficult over time with the people who were in the band to have that be something that everybody collectively saw. Now it's very much been built up more obviously around -- maybe because the records have been around awhile too -- that we're able to find people that could kind of inherently understand that coming into the band, and are very excited about that kind of environment. I think it's a really amazing situation and I feel really grateful for it, to be in a band that seems to be getting bigger in spite of itself. I think that's a really fun place to make weird stuff, is when you have this knowledge that there's a fair amount of people that are going to try and make something of it.
Do you feel like Nonesuch has been a perfect landing place?
I can honestly say for the first time in my life that I love our label. Yeah, they've done a great job. I really respect those guys, and their musical knowledge and backgrounds and their approach to their business is totally in keeping with a lot of the things that we've tried to do. They don't try to just plug every item into the same marketing scheme or whatever. It's not driven by that. It's driven by making records that they love and hopefully finding the people that would love them as well. Fans or consumers, whatever you want to call them, people that might care about them, and that takes a lot of, um...
Guts?
Yeah, a lot of guts! And that's like what independent labels do, but it's been good for us because Nonesuch is a label that has enough resources... I mean for a lot of independent labels, if we had done something after we were dropped from Reprise with a smaller label, it would have been a lot scarier proposition for a lot of smaller labels. You might ship 50 thousand records, but you don't know if you're going to get half of them back -- there's not that kind of leeway... You can run the risk of having your friends be completely bankrupt by the scope of your records. So it's been really good.
www.thewilcobook.com
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