Wilco’s Genius Is Ready to Reveal His Secrets
Jeff Tweedy opens up about Uncle Tupelo, Wilco and the opioid addiction that almost killed him
Jeff Tweedy thought Wilco’s 2004 album, A Ghost Is Born, would be his last. At the time, his addiction to Vicodin and his lifelong anxiety issues had spiraled so far out of control that on tour he routinely fell asleep in his bathtub without being sure he’d wake up. He wrote songs like the gorgeous elegy “Hummingbird” for his young sons, “who could turn to it when they were older . . . to have some deeper connection to the dad they’d lost.” When the band recorded “Spiders (Kidsmoke),” he was so far gone he could make it through just one take.
Tweedy’s new memoir, Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back), is full of moments like these, revealing the intense turmoil behind his best songs. The songwriter, who got sober in 2004, says that reliving his personal lows was necessary. “I’m an addict,” says Tweedy, 51. “It’s important for me to get to that pain and all of that awful stuff immediately.”
He writes vividly of his childhood in the factory town of Belleville, Illinois, where it seemed predetermined that he would work on the railroad, like his hard-drinking father. Instead, he found an escape at record stores and befriended a fellow teenager named Jay Farrar. They formed the group Uncle Tupelo in the late Eighties, just as Tweedy’s musical identity was taking shape in the space between the Minutemen and Woody Guthrie. “When I found folk and early country music . . . that seemed like a more artful way to express your anger, to me,” he says. “Hank Williams was as punkrock as anything. It felt more honest for me to play an acoustic guitar.”
Uncle Tupelo made them college-rock stars, but Tweedy and Farrar’s relationship was falling apart by the time they got a major-label deal. With Wilco, which he founded after Uncle Tupelo’s breakup, Tweedy quickly reached new artistic heights. He shares fascinating stories in the book of how he pushed Wilco to keep evolving — having his bandmates trade instruments and overdub several performances to create the sonic wash of 1996’s “Misunderstood.” Yet major-label success remained out of reach. Tweedy recalls grudgingly taking a suit’s advice and handing over Wilco’s 1999 single “Can’t Stand It” to be polished off by Sublime and Sugar Ray’s producer, and attending the 1998 Grammys, where Diddy thought Tweedy was an usher.
He writes about it all with his characteristic understated sense of humor. (“I wasn’t trying to blow the lid off of rock memoirs and make something lasting for the Library of Congress,” he tells me. “It was just to tell my story in a clear enough voice, you know?”) Today, Wilco are a beloved legacy band making music for their own label, but Tweedy’s desire to keep moving forward is still there. In 2018, with Wilco on temporary hiatus, he recorded his first proper solo album, Warm. “It’s a necessity,” Tweedy says. “I just like playing. I don’t know what else to do with myself.”