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"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.
