“I’m not gonna thank God, because I don’t think He has anything to do with this,” Wilco singer Jeff Tweedy said concluding a litany of appreciations near the end of his band’s sold-out show at 9:30 Club last Thursday. “This is unholy.”
This was the only thing Tweedy got wrong all night.
In her book “Blues Legacies and Black Feminism,” Angela Davis declares that organized religion is hostile to the blues and rock and roll not because the music rejects religion, but because it seeks to replace it, because it offers us the same things as sacred texts and towering holy men: something to believe in, a different sort of God. The god Dionysus drove the Maenads to ecstatic highs with his wine, but also with his music. Might Mick Jagger do the same?
The answer is yes, but as Wilco established (and subsequently transcended), ecstasies and divine revelations aren’t the only thing the musician borrowed from the priest those many years ago. Perhaps more salient than any other aspect of religion in modern indie rock and roll is the idea of ritual. The call and response that permeated traditional rock and roll and found its root in black churches has been transmuted into a sort of staid set of signifiers calling to mind nothing more than the tired genuflections of an unthinking child in an Episcopal church in a sleepy Southern town – song, song, song, talk, song, song, song, last song, applause, encore, house lights, fin.
Wilco, whether you like them or not, seems an unlikely band to upset this arrangement, as that would be to bite the hand that feeds them – perhaps no band has been mythologized, sacralized even, in the past decade. Made famous by their David vs. Goliath fight for freedom and creativity in releasing their magnum opus “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot,” the band has been etched in stone, their very essence canonized while they live. Wilco bit, though.
Reaching back as far as 1996’s “Being There” for some decade-old magic – “Forget the Flowers” was particularly stunning, all gravel vocals and nicotine-scarred romance – the band drew mostly from “YHF” and their ambitious 2004 follow-up “A Ghost Is Born.” Drummer Glen Kotche pounded the drums like a man possessed, keyboardist Mikael Jorgensen coaxed the sound of a dying calliope out on command and guitarist Nels Cline shook like a loose telephone wire, shivering the sounds out his axe like a Pentecostal snake-handler. The real star, as always, was Tweedy. His songs were delicate and beautiful, tired but assured, as his sighs went to screams and back again.
The whole show was gorgeous, and the encores featured a stellar cover of Randy Newman’s hilarious “Political Science,” but it was Tweedy’s send-up of ritual that defined the show. Not content to be worshipped, Tweedy insisted on bursting the bubble. After a terribly moving rendition of “Airline to Heaven,” Tweedy began what first appeared as small talk but would blossom over the course of the night in to a mini-thesis on ritual in rock and roll.
“How ya doing?” he asked. “I’ve been missing the early set check in lately. I apologize. I’m gonna have to start writing it on the setlist, after the third song: ‘Check in audience. Say hi. See how they’re doing. Ask them if they’re having a good time.'”
Later in the show, during a seemingly proscribed encore, Tweedy busted the commonly accepted reality again, when he interrupted the crowd participation piece “Kingpin” with detailed instructions and discourse.
“We’ve been playing a lot of places we’ve never played before, which has required me to do a lot more explaining about this ritual than normal,” he said in the middle of the song. “The ritual being, as I will explain briefly, as some of you may not have attended a Wilco show before, at this point, we’re grandfather-claused into doing this. I apologize. It might be old-fashioned. I stand by it; I still stand by it. It’s like, it’s kind of like baseball or something, I don’t know … here’s the point: I say, ‘How can I,’ and you scream.”
And we screamed. And Tweedy continued the thesis presentation. “Okay, this is the part of the show,” he said. “This is the part of the show I said was grandfather-claused in. I can’t avoid doing this; I wish I could, but I can’t avoid this: I have to say you can do better.”
And we screamed louder.
Noticing that the median age at this show was about a decade older than most 9:30 events I attend, I joked to my friend that Wilco played NPR rock (only to find out later that this event was, in fact, being broadcast on NPR), which seems to be borne out by the fact that when I started getting into Wilco around five or six years ago, my parents casually mentioned that they thought they had heard of them before. Oh, that’s right, they saw them at a country and bluegrass festival a few years before. I can count the number of contemporary artists that my parents and I would pay to see independently of each other on one hand, and the fact that Wilco is one of them doesn’t make it fogy rock. Rather, it makes it timeless.
I mean, sure, looking around the sold-out U Street venue one could see 100 baby boomers and their slightly awkward 12-year-olds at their first rock concerts, but none of it was contrived, not when “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart” was spiraling sadly in to the ether in the background. There’s a reason some material is made sacred, and Wilco honored that by tearing the sacred apart, by killing their idols, even when the idols were themselves.
