South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
Jeff Tweedy as songwriter, family man
Wilco frontman reflects on life lessons with his new memoir
As Jeff Tweedy would admit — and more or less does in his new memoir, “Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back)” — his life hasn’t been all that interesting, at least for a rock star. Raised in a dysfunctional family (his father drank a 12-pack every night), he grew up in a depressed Midwestern town (downstate Belleville, Ill.). As a kid who had trouble getting noticed in school, he embraced music (rock, country, punk) for the companionship and escape it offered. When he got older, he suffered from his own depression and drug addiction before turning things around.
But in his new memoir, the leader of Chicago’s long-running band Wilco isn’t interested in the usual rehashings of life and career. Those expecting lots of backstage dish will have to settle for his account of being mistaken for an usher at the Grammys by Sean “Diddy” Combs. He acknowledges bands that inspired him, like the Replacements, and devotes a chapter to his recent collaborations with the great Mavis Staples. But as for hero worship, Bob Dylan’s “importance to me feels like it’s too obvious to bring up,” he writes, getting to it toward the end of the book.
Tweedy, who spends time on the making and rescuing of Wilco’s anointed 2001 masterpiece, “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot,” but barely mentions the albums by the band’s current incarnation, is much more interested in examining the painful lessons he has learned from his life as a songwriter and a family man. In this he succeeds in entertaining and oddly revealing ways, moving with shape-shifting ease from wry self-effacement to what he calls Midwestern sarcasm to naked confession.
“My comfort level with being vulnerable is probably my superpower,” he writes, testing that theory by telling how, at the rock bottom of his addiction, he stole morphine from his cancer-stricken mother-inlaw. When his wife, Sue Miller, former operator of Lounge Ax, the popular Chicago club where they met, lightly asks whether 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 stu- dio 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 signifi- cant 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.
Lloyd Sachs, a freelancer, is the author of “T Bone Burnett: A Life in Pursuit.”