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Friday, April 19, 2002

By Ed Masley, Post-Gazette Pop Music Critic

Coming off of "Summerteeth" and in the midst of wrapping up a second batch of Woody Guthrie songs with Billy Bragg, the members of Wilco were talking about how much they'd like to make a record that would take them by surprise when, as bassist John Stirratt recalls, Jeff Tweedy said he'd like to see the band arrive at "something that didn't sound like music."

And as fate would have it, that's not too far off from how the A&R reps at Reprise would come to hear the finished tapes of "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot," which were not unfairly deemed too heady for the TRL crowd.

When the label expressed its disinterest in putting the album out without some budging on the band's part, band and label split, and Wilco's reputation only grew.

When the band made the music available for streaming on its Web site so people could actually hear it, it turned out the album was not only stunningly anti-commercial but brilliant, maybe even Wilco's best.

On the eve of the album's April 23 release on Nonesuch, "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" is the band's most eagerly anticipated album, with advance sales placing it at No. 5 on Amazon.com.

In other words, Reprise has never done a better job of generating interest in a Wilco record.

"I'm amazed that people are talking about it this much," Stirratt says. "But it's become a story" -- one in which the members of the band are cast increasingly as poster boys for everything that's wrong with corporate avarice as the world spirals ever downward into one enormous multinational controlling everything.

Or words to that effect.

	Wilco WITH: Neil Michael Hagerty. WHERE: M, Strip. WHEN: Tomorrow at 7:30 p.m. TICKETS: $20 advance; $25 at door. 412-323-1919. BAND SITE: www.wilcoworld.net

"I know," says Stirratt with a laugh. "And it's like, I don't know if we're worthy of all that. But it's nice to see that there are people out there who want something else."

To further illustrate his point, he cites a crowd of 40,000 in Chicago (Wilco's hometown) for an outdoor performance last summer by Radiohead, a band whose dedication to the artistry of pop is closely mirrored in the spirit of adventure fueling Wilco's most experimental record yet -- a label you could safely slap on every proper Wilco album when it hit the streets, from "Being There" to "Summerteeth" to "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot."

But, as Stirratt says, "That might say more about where we were starting from than where we ended up."

The band began, essentially, as Uncle Tupelo without the other singer, Jay Farrar, recording "A.M." -- an album that rocked like latter-day Replacements at the Grand Ole Opry -- with four members of the band (including Stirratt) that launched the alternative-country mini-movement of the '90s.

There's nothing alternative-country about the sound of Wilco's last few proper records.

But the labeling persists.

"I've been amazed to see even Chicago writers that we know continue to say alt-country pioneers," says Stirratt. "It's kind of strange. I can't imagine these people even thinking about it."

As pleased as Stirratt is to know that some early alternative-country fans have followed Wilco to another new frontier with every record, he's not real concerned with those he left behind to read their No Depression magazine while another bar band dresses country.

"It's very entrenched in a really strange way," he says, "I guess the way the folk scene was in the '60s, with a lot of people shunning Dylan for going electric. I don't know why these scenes that evolve -- these folky scenes -- are very protective in that way. I just think of Pete Seeger or something. These are guys that are very stodgy, you know?"

As for the densely layered cinematic sprawl of "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot," Stirratt chalks it up to "learning how to do it or how to play around with it. Not that 'A.M.' was playing it safe. It was really organic. We got together and made the record really fast after Tupelo, so I don't think there's anything calculated about it, like 'Hey, we'll start slow and then get weirder.' It's been a really natural progression and obviously, this record is taking it out even further -- in many regards, thanks to Jim O'Rourke."

The band called in O'Rourke, who'd done some work with Tweedy and played in a band with new drummer Glenn Kotche, to make some sense of all the weirdness at the heart of "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot."

"We really tried to mix the record ourselves," says Stirratt, "especially some of the longer pieces like 'Ashes of American Flags' and 'Poor Places.'

And that was a really big failure unfortunately. We just had sounds. We just came in and applied sounds. The pallet was huge. And I had really gotten into Jim and his records a lot over the last year and a half -- especially the 'Eureka' record. I guess it was bound to happen. Because our heads had been in this stuff for so long, he was able to sort through it and really find what he thought the interesting sounds were and get it all down, mostly with Jeff. And that's really kind of how the record took shape."

While O'Rourke is no stranger to weirdness, both Tweedy and Stirratt insist that Wilco's early mixes were a whole lot weirder than the ones that made it to the album.

"People are gonna think Jim made this record weird," says Stirratt, "when in fact, he made it less weird. And better."

It helps, of course, to start with songs as strong as Tweedy's tend to be -- "Misunderstood" to "She's A Jar" to the new album's opening cut, "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart."

As Stirratt says, "I think a lot of bands would like to do this kind of thing, completely play with arrangements and turn them upside down, but a lot of the things that we did originally were a little straighter than they came out. When you're working with really strong lyrics and melody and just recreating the framework around them, you just have so much more of a chance to succeed in doing that."

Although parts of the album do much to make good on the promise of "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart," the album, as a whole, is ultimately not as dark as "Summerteeth."

But then, what is?

"I think it's hopeful," Stirratt says, "in that I think we had a number of songs that were a lot more optimistic than 'Summerteeth,' which was based around this one, like, harrowing group of songs."

He laughs.

"And from that record, we were just trying to work backwards and trying to make things a little bit brighter. It feels airier."

If that makes it an easier sell than "Summerteeth," that point was lost on Wilco's label, whose reaction came as no surprise to Stirratt.

"Every record we delivered had some sort of contingency attached to it," he says, with a laugh. "There was always a red flag every time. They would ask for a fiddle track to be taken out. This goes back to 'A.M.' 'Hey, this will work much better at radio if you take out this or that.' And then with 'Summerteeth,' we delivered it and they said 'Guys, we just need another song. Just one more song.' And actually, we didn't really have a problem with that."

He laughs.

"They paid for us to go and record more. So we kind of looked at it that way. But this time around, they just weren't able to verbalize anything. They were never able to speak in musical terms whatsoever, but this time, they just didn't call us back for two weeks."

Stirratt laughs again, then adds, "We took that as a bad sign."

Reprise's disappointment in the album helped the band in two important ways. It got people excited about the album and it gave the band a chance to figure out a way to play the songs in concert.

"We had an extra five or six months to learn how to play this stuff," says Stirratt, "and that's really helped us."

While learning to play the songs beneath the wall of weirdness, Wilco also found itself absorbing the loss of multi-instrumentalist Jay Bennett, who had signed on just in time for "Being There" and quit after working on "Yankee Hotel."

"He kind of took the engineer's role on this record, kind of knowingly set himself apart from the rest of the band," says Stirratt, who feels that part of Bennett's problem may have been that he had trouble thinking of or talking about music as abstractly as the other members of the band. "He bought a lot of gear, and he's an able engineer, but he was kind of in that chair for the whole process and really didn't record many tracks, especially compared to 'Summerteeth,' where he was just prolific. But he kind of put himself in that role. And so, it wasn't quite as jarring, the move from this record to whatever we're doing now, because he just wasn't as present from a musical standpoint."

Either way, as Stirratt sees it, "I think any time you shake a group up that's been together for a long time, there's generally a breath of fresh air."

In the interest of keeping it fresh, the set list on the tour that brings the band to M tomorrow should be drawing heavily from "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot."

And the fans are cool with that, says Stirratt.

"Even the December tour," he says, "was mostly 'Yankee Hotel' and people were very patient and great about it. It was really, really cool. And more people seemed to know the material live than they had when 'Summerteeth' was out for a month. It was really remarkable."

And proof, he says, that letting people hear your music on the Internet for free is ultimately good for business.

"You have to look at it in terms of promotion," he says. "I mean, obviously we're lucky in that we have fans that really seek out what we do and everything, but that to me was like well, people know this material before the record's coming out. That's a good sign. Maybe labels should take notice of this. The new airplay. We still can't get on the radio. That's what the Internet can do, I guess."

If the drama surrounding the making and delayed release of "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" sounds a little like a movie, soon it will be.

A documentarian got it all on film.

"I think it's going to be great for fans," says Stirratt. "I hope it's great for non-fans as well. It was just a very tumultuous year. The whole thing started a couple of days after we lost our other drummer, so there's definitely a pall -- a weird vibe -- through some of it."

Like "Let It Be"?

"A good comparison," he says. "It has some of the same foreboding in the air that will be palpable to moviegoers. The tension. It wasn't very fun to be filmed during that period, I have to say. I wish we were being filmed now, frankly."

With the documentary, "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart," set to hit the big screen sometime later this year and the album set to hit the streets on Tuesday, Stirratt says the band's already started working on the follow-up.

"Actually," he says, "we've already recorded a good bit. We've had one great session so far, so it's encouraging. I think we were a little worried, and it's like well, you know, let's get back to a four-piece and see what it's like. And it's been going great so far."