He's also created a body of work unmatched in American music over that time. Played out over five remarkably diverse full-lengths and two more distinct Mermaid Avenue collaborations with Billy Bragg, the constants in Tweedy's records have been change, honesty and critical success -- something he shares with some of rock's most respected icons.
That all makes for a good-looking resume, but Tweedy really matters because he just may be the missing link, the key to the puzzle, the last great hope for the record industry. Like all vital artists, Tweedy has an inimitable way of combining the past with the present just so to create a personal vision with broad appeal that still points toward the future. Which is fancy talk for saying that his music manages to sound familiar, original and timeless all at once. Take Ghost for instance. It's easy to imagine "Muzzle of Bees," "Hummingbird" or "Theologians" tucked alongside a Beatles, Neil Young or Nick Drake song on one of those eclectic 70s FM stations; "Handshake Drugs" or "I'm A Wheel" right after some Minutemen and Replacements on a left-of-the-dial 80s college station; "The Late Greats" and "Wishful Thinking" on a mid-90s roots station like WNCW; "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" or "At Least That's What You Said" along with Yo La Tengo or Gastr del Sol on one of those post-rock Internet stations.
Tweedy and Co. run those classic song-writing skills through a thoroughly modern sound blender often within one song -- opting for punk noise over lead guitar wankery, Krautrock minimalism instead of classic rock bombast, post-rock's incidental sounds rather than by-the-book accents. Tweedy's skills (with a big assist from producer Jim O'Rourke) at marrying classic songwriting and experimentation preened peacock-like across the musical stage on the critically acclaimed (and soon to go Gold) Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. And though the post-rock touches on A Ghost Is Born are organic (via guitars, keys, drums, bass) rather than digital this time, that particular mix is still fundamental. It's there in the majestic opener, "At Least That's What You Said," whose cascading piano chords and panicky guitar lines (think Painful-era Yo La Tengo) suggest an updated or anti-"Layla" epic; in the Neu!-marries-arena-rock-but-keeps-some-Tom-Verlaine-feedback-action-on-the-side 10-minute-plus marathon, "Spiders (Kidsmoke);" in the "I could swear that's a computer"-sounding organ drone that opens "Wishful Thinking," a ballad; in the narcotic swirl of guitar feedback that "Handshake Drugs" eventually nods off into; and in the 12 minutes of rudderless installation sound that mars the otherwise pretty "Less Than You Think" (the one serious misstep on Ghost - though even when it doesn't work you almost have to admire the chutzpah).
Chicago Tribune rock critic Greg Kot, author of a new and extremely thorough biography of the band, Wilco: Learning How to Die, says the new record could just as easily have been called Wilco Does Its Favorite Music.
"They're pretty wide-ranging on this one: "These are the kinds of music we've loved over the last two or three years, and we want to try and bring it all into this record,' " Kot says by phone from Chicago. "(Tweedy's) one of the few guys that every time I meet with him he's on to something new in terms of what he's listening to and what's inspiring him. That's how he is, he really gets lost in these worlds."
Of course, variety in and of itself isn't enough to save rock & roll, or they could just re-release the Clash's Sandinista and be done with the whole damn thing. But that's not all there is to Tweedy. Throughout his body of work there's a populist streak, and even among some non-believers a general fascination with this pudgy fucked-up-regular-guy-gone-all-arty that's made him something a lot of more talented, innovative and genre-bending musicians and bands aren't -- pretty damn popular. Remembering that their considered masterpiece -- Yankee Hotel Foxtrot -- wasn't just rejected by a major label, it got the band dropped, and that streamed copies of it were free for the taking for nearly a year before its official release, half-a-million units moved (retail talk) is some damn impressive work.
And though it's still not enough to get the major labels to put Britney money behind a Wilco release, it does give one the slightest reason to hope. Because ever since the labels began dumping their prestige acts (or "career artists," as Kot calls them) -- along with the music-first A&R connoisseurs that found and nurtured those artists -- it's been quarterly reports, units sold and market formulas that define "popular" music for the folks that have taken their place: Accountants and shareholders. So the only way the remaining major labels will remove their collective heads from their collective anuses and realize that there is still a viable market involving music that hasn't been test-marketed to death first is if it sells.
"The big failing of the record industry in the last 10, 15, 20 years is that they underestimate the intelligence of the buying public," says Kot. "They think we like to be spoon-fed our stuff, and we can't handle anything that's complex...Tweedy has never underestimated the intelligence of his audience, or his own, or his band's, and as a result they put out music that's challenging on a lot of levels, but they trust themselves and their fans to get it."
Of course, not everybody does. While each record has earned Tweedy new fans and increased sales, they've also left scads of old school Wilco loyalists scratching their heads. Others have jumped ship for good.
"The nature of my musical interest is to be pretty curious and to shift," the 38-year-old Tweedy says. "Not everyone comes around to it."
And they're not afraid to let him know. Kot writes that during the second of two sold-out New York shows Tweedy was playing with his jazz-oriented side-project Loose Fur last year, someone in the audience hurled a familiar epithet up at the stage loud enough for everyone in the 1,200-seat hall to hear. "Judas!" cried the disgruntled fan, echoing the infamous fan who yelled it at Bob Dylan on his first electric tour.
Tweedy says he doesn't resent those fans who aren't interested in following him wherever each record happens to take him. But he says that "being open-minded enough to just go along for the ride" results in a more rewarding experience, at least according to his own listening experiences.
"I always feel that if they really like the third record, they should just listen to the third record," he says by phone from the band's studio in Chicago. "If that's all they need, that's great, if that's what they want. Hopefully some other people will find this record and it'll be new to them and they won't have the preconceptions that upset the people that expect something different."
What Tweedy won't abide, however, is the suggestion that he alters every album just for shits and giggles, or just to be difficult -- an assertion that often says more about the accusers than him. Tweedy maintains integrity as a serious musician precisely because these recorded expressions of his musical interests are done neither to please the hipster community or to piss off the hit-makers at the major label who happen to put out his music -- another charge that's been levied against him.
Kot says it's the only time he's ever seen Tweedy furious.
"I don't do this to fuck other people up, I don't do this to be a contrarian," Tweedy told Kot. "I do this to fuck myself up. I'm interested in doing something that I haven't done before, and I enjoy the feeling of feeling like I'm doing something new for me."
But hand in hand with that musical curiosity goes a healthy skepticism about stardom and the music business in general, born of the punk roots in his first band, Uncle Tupelo, and his experiences during Wilco's early years. The notion of stardom doesn't exactly fill Tweedy with glee -- his songs are more often than not therapeutic exercises in overcoming his infamous anxiety (his pre-show panic attacks are sadly legendary). His issues with the music industry are chronicled most succinctly on Ghost in the refrain from "Handshake Drugs," in which he asks, mantra-like: "Exactly who do you want me to be?"
His uneasy co-existence with the notion of stardom has probably been a significant factor in not repeating himself on record, which has kept him from hitting it big in the old fashioned way -- by giving his label the "radio-friendly" single they so desperately demanded from Yankee. Kot speculates that the original demos for Yankee -- straight-ahead rock, "Being There with Summerteeth production," he says -- "would have been a marvelous record to put out at that time from a commercial standpoint."
Instead, Tweedy's dissatisfaction and boredom with those versions of the songs led him to junk them, fire long-term band members and start all over; any success that emerged afterward is success largely on Wilco's terms. Any other way may just do him in. Tweedy's restless history and personal problems with crippling anxiety, depression, puke-inducing migraines (the most infamous scene from Sam Jones' excellent 2002 documentary I Am Trying To Break Your Heart) and a long-standing addiction to painkillers (recently addressed in rehab) are often played out in his lyrics as a way of confronting his fears and overcoming them. And that humanity is another pull that draws a good number of fans to his songs.
"The one thing I always hear in a lot of their music is the vulnerability -- he's not afraid to expose who he is, and you definitely sense the fragility of this guy on these records," Kot says.
But Tweedy's songs also "evoke the work of the great songwriters," Kot writes, by virtue of the way they "marry the everyday with the surreal, the opaque with the anthemic, (and) the acerbic with the melodic."
"Love him or hate him," Kot says, "you have to pay respect to the integrity of the work."
Integrity in the music business and success? Could it be a winning formula? Stay tuned...
