The songs nobody knows: have a drink with Wilco

Being There (Reprise)

Being There

"Play me a song that everybody knows," Jeff Tweedy sang on Uncle Tupelo's last album: "children in the playground, folks in the home, anybody anywhere who's ever been alone." Silly as it may sound--the idea of Grandpa leaning back in his rocking chair and hollering along to "Whiskey Bottle"--that image was what Uncle Tupelo was all about. The fiddles and mandolins and pedal steel, the pounding rhythms and dirty guitars; they all came from somewhere else, even if you couldn't say where. The songs told stories of moonshiners, coal miners, and drunks, and of a band trying to survive without many fans or records sold, trying to stay true to a singular vision of American music that made traditional forms into something vital and new. Four albums, it turned out, was enough to make them legends, but that's only the beginning of the story.

Jeff Tweedy had begun to grow out of Tupelo's folk-derived style on Anodyne, their last album, into something closer to his Southern roots: a more straight-ahead, blues-tinged, honky-tonk style that celebrates gambling, drinking, fast cars, and foolish, what-the-hell romanticism. A.M., the first Wilco outing, was a great country-rock album, with Tweedy's ragged voice and a few innovations courtesy of his versatile mandolin/lap steel/fiddle player, Max Johnston. It seemed that things were settled, that Tweedy had found the tradition he wanted to continue. Everybody, after all, grows up.

"Misunderstood," the first song on Being There, begins with a low wail of feedback and a thump on the drums, and builds into a zig-zag of backwards tape loops and more feedback. Before the first piano chords have sounded, you know that Tweedy isn't done with tradition yet, and he's out to break some hearts in the meantime: "You're back in your old neighborhood, the cigarettes taste so good, but you're so misunderstood" By the end of this screeching, flailing, six-minute-long ballad-from-hell, he's singing, "I'd like to thank you all for nothing at all."

Biting every hand that's fed him, from Tupelo fans to his hometown, to the Reprise executives who were talked into releasing a double album from a largely unknown band, Tweedy proceeds to bust through one pop cliché after another. On "Monday," he adds a Jew's harp to a Stones-y riff, and then brings in a Motown horn section. On the shaky, slow country song "Red-Eyed and Blue" he sings "Alcohol," with a twang of conventional lament, and adds, "and cotton balls--drugs we can't afford on the way." If on A.M. he wanted to celebrate decadence, Being There is an ode to excess. This is an album recorded and mixed in six studios, with eight players on nearly 20 instruments; there's a gospel choir humming when you least expect it, solos straight out of Lynyrd Skynyrd, and random screeches and laughter as songs end. Tweedy sometimes even adds effects to his voice--sacrilege to old fans used to hearing him ragged and close-up. Nothing is sacred, and that's the point.

In the midst of all this, there are some damn good songs, and some awful ones as well. Most of the first CD is outstanding, especially the haunting "Hotel Arizona," evoking a bleak night in the desert on tour: "rental cars / with tinted windows / make us want to feel like stars." There's quite a bit of the large-hearted lover that we've heard before, always willing to turn another sentimental rhyme in the hopes that all will turn out right. After a few times around, you get the impression that Tweedy's essential style hasn't changed much from A.M., though he'd like you to think that it has. There's still part of him that wants to sing sorrowful folk-tinged songs like "Gun" and "Wait Up," only now at the bar in an old hotel in Memphis, as it were, with a drink and a full ashtray nearby.

The worst parts of this album are when Tweedy goes far afield into drunken experiments, ones that should have been outtakes from the single album this should have been. "Dreamer in my Dreams," the last song, is a ridiculous, jarring, barroom stomp, with Tweedy singing in an exhausted rasp.

Tweedy sees his story as having a few more chapters. In "Someone Else's Song," a lover accuses him of musical and romantic redundancy, but he refuses to give up--nothing is ever fully new, he seems to say, and it's ridiculous to try to be. Creatures of habit that we are, every song can be a revelation, every new love as heart-breaking as the last, if we pour every last bit of ourselves into it. Tweedy has given us everything on Being There. The least we can do is buy a drink and give him a patient, loving ear.

--Jess Row