Jeff Tweedy as songwriter, family man
he really needs to include such personal details, he responds, “I don’t want to romanticize any of this. It wasn’t glamorous or fun, it was awful.”
To sometimes ingratiating effect, he acts as though “Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back)” — a pet expression of his father’s — is being written as it is being read. “I need strings that sound like me, a doom-dabbling, fifty-year-old, borderline misanthrope, nap enthusiast,” he writes, before, as he often does, telling the reader that’s not quite what he meant.
He saves his best writing for a brilliant, Philip Rothian analysis of an encounter he had in Belleville with two women, former classmates he never knew. “Are you still in that little band?” one of them asks. “Are you still together?”
Writes Tweedy, “It was sublime poetry, the way they danced between foggy memory and under-theradar insult. … They smiled and nodded, but like you do when somebody tells you they’ve been living in their parents’ basement and sleeping on a beanbag chair.” Midwestern sarcasm, he adds, “makes you listen more closely. You have to treat every conversation like a safecracker.”
For someone who writes so perceptively about his own descent into drug hell, Tweedy is rather muted in discussing the pill-popping decline and eventual overdose of his extravagantly talented, perpetually wired Wilco mate — and nemesis — Jay Bennett. Tweedy says he fired Bennett, whose creative genius in the studio lifted such albums as “Summerteeth,” because his destructive antics were tearing at the collective fabric of the band — and because “I knew if I didn’t, I would probably die.”
Some believe Bennett, for whom Tweedy expresses love and admiration, got a raw deal. “I get it when Wilco fans are still angry at me about Jay Bennett,” Tweedy writes. “I don’t like it, but I understand. They don’t think Wilco is as good now as it was when Jay Bennett was in the band, because he’s on all of the Wilco albums that mean the most to them.”
But, he came to realize, that kind of extreme devotion to “something entirely made up like a ‘band’ is silly.”
He himself had been hurt when the other significant Jay in his life, Jay Farrar, his partner in the pioneering alt-country band Uncle Tupelo, told him the group “was over.” But the two were never close. Farrar disappeared one day, never to return to the group, and that was that.
Considering Tweedy’s life-threatening addictions and his wife’s frightening bouts with cancer, you can understand why such distant events might lose some of their edge. “Leaving behind as many of the myths surrounding suffering and art as I possibly could was the only path forward,” he writes. This book is a significant step in that direction.
The best-seller lists will not appear this week due to the Thanksgiving holiday.