Jeff Tweedy, Solo Acoustic In A High School Auditorium

Recently, I had the rare pleasure of seeing Jeff Tweedy, singer/songwriter/guitarist of the band Wilco, perform solo acoustic. While that in and of itself is something that I felt unbelievably lucky to be able to witness, what happened the rest of the evening, well…..blew my mind. I went not with the intention of writing about the show, without a camera and without an abundance of notebooks in which to furiously jot notes to myself. While on the way home, while talking of fandom, Wilco (and, to be fair, My Morning Jacket, as well) fun facts and the overall show with two new friends I met on the train…I knew that I wanted to collect my thoughts and share it with all of you. In short, Jeff Tweedy played in a high school auditorium. Pete Seeger was his opening act, along with a fourth grade class and their teacher. To commemorate Earth Hour, he unplugged his acoustic guitar, sang and played “Someone Else’s Song,” sans power. Really, I can’t make it up. It was just too…bizarre.

 Let us begin at the beginning. I have a thing for Wilco. The first article I ever wrote for this site was about them, (you can read it here: http://www.geekscape.net/features/4093bada752d92524b702a3973e12464/ ) and it doubled as the first time I ever wrote about music, which is something so unbelievably dear to me, it is kind of ridiculous. I can never duplicate how I felt while writing that first remembrance, or first experience with my love-affair with Wilco, so I’ve stopped trying and now continue only writing about what music I love.

OK, I shall digress no more. Here it goes… …I traveled the hour plus train ride out of New York City to the small town of Beacon, New York, to the Beacon High School Auditorium, where the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, (an organization co-founded by Pete Seeger to combat pollution on the Hudson) was holding a benefit concert. I went by myself, which is how I often like to see Wilco; because when I get emotionally involved in the show, I do not always like to hold it in, even among friends. From the subway, the commuter train, the ride from the nice lady whom I met on the train into town, and then the taxi cab to the high school, I walked into an actual high school. It was decked out to the nines with kids having a bake sale, and the walls were adorned with posters around for powderpuff football sign ups, and fliers for what was to next to grace the auditorium after Tweedy; a production of “Annie.” It seemed worth the hopping, skipping and jumping already. How often do we get to journey back to a generic site of some of our life’s worst memories to see one of our heroes play acoustic guitar? Uh huh, that’s right. 

A ninety-year old Pete Seeger opened the event with a greeting and a sing-along to “Somewhere Over The Rainbow.” I tried my hardest to focus on how totally sweet this was, and less on the girl in my row who was, clearly, auditioning for “American Idol” with her rendition. From there, “The Kids From Room 12,” a class of fourth graders came onstage in the matching t-shirts we all had some variant of in elementary school, with the pants of their choice. (The ham in the loud red sweatpants in the front row was my favorite.) They, along with their teachers and Seeger himself, sang old folk-protest songs, and one the kids had written themselves. To someone who was dying for Tweedy, it went a little long. To the other half of the crowd who were concerned environmentalists, members of the community and parents of the fourth graders, I’m sure it was just right.

Jeff Tweedy always seems to be in some condition of what most would call, ‘rare form,’ each time I see him perform. In New York City, at the revealing of a macramé owl, which was the seventh member of Wilco during their 2006 tour, he encouraged fans to mail their best macramé samples to Wilco, care of the City of Chicago. Then, there was the urgent reminding his sons to go to bed if they were still up listening to the radio broadcast at the Chicago residency, not to forget the cute reparte in New Orleans, (hometown of bassist John Stirratt) of the John Stirratt Fan Club being in attendance. And finally, my favorite, his insistence on our removing the phrase, “I love me some (fill in the blank)” from our personal jargon at the show I attended with my parents in Berkeley. Maybe he’s taking sketch comedy classes, maybe he’s just feeling really fantastic in these years post-rehab, maybe he’s really just amazingly insecure and we’re privy to his onstage persona as his prime defense mechanism. On this night, he was more ‘on’ than a late-night television host. (Jimmy Fallon: take note.) There were stories about his Dad bringing his own beer to Jeff’s wedding, afraid that the bar wouldn’t have his brand; (“not like it was an obscure Belgian micro-brew, it was Pabst”) and one of Dad telling his Jeff’s sister that should she ever be kidnapped, not to worry; her abductors would let her out of the car at the first stoplight.

When Tweedy consented to play an acoustic version of “Hummingbird,” he did so only if we as an audience promised to sing the strings outro in the nasal voice he and his wife use with one another to annoy each other, like a “nyah nyah nyah nyaaahhhh.” He made fun of himself for forgetting one of the approximately nine verses in his opening song, “Remember The Mountain Bed.” Tweedy commented that since the venue was a proper auditorium with lights, he was trying to suspend belief that there were actually people in the audience, yelling for songs, laughing, and clapping, since he couldn’t see. He didn’t want the sounds he was hearing to be mistaken for the voices in his head. When a super-vocal super-fan loudly asked what the voices sounded like, Tweedy responded first with a, “not like that,” and then softened to give us (creepily) interested parties a few examples. He mentioned a voice which critically scolded, ‘dude, I can’t believe you missed a lyric in the first song!’ and a supportive bro-voice, ‘hey man, look they’re eating it up! This is going awesome!’ Tweedy commented that he found it bizarre that he was asked to play at a high school. Shortly after this keen observation, a super-fan hollered for him to play “Handshake Drugs,” to which Tweedy retorted that it was inappropriate, since we were at a school. He didn’t play the song, but the environs did not stop him from doing a (gorgeous) version of “Via Chicago” which opens with, “I dreamed about killing you again last night/and it felt alright to me,” as well as “Heavy Metal Drummer” with the chorus, “I miss the innocence I’ve known/playing KISS covers, beautiful and stoned.”

We were given “Acuff-Rose” and “New Madrid” from the Uncle Tupelo era, “Jesus, Etc” and “I’m The Man Who Loves You” from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, “Airline To Heaven” and “Remember The Mountain Bed” from the Woody Guthrie covers albums with Billy Bragg, “Passenger Side” from A.M., B-side “Bob Dylan’s 49th Beard” and Loose Fur’s side project’s “The Ruling Class” (two cuts known by those who can truly dig the minutiae) and most importantly, three songs off of Wilco’s June release. I can only assume that the new songs are tentatively titled (who knows what official name they will be given, if they will make the final master of the album, AND we can only speculate at the title of the album itself…) “Solitaire,” “Everlasting” and “Wilco (the song).” I tumbled headfirst into the trap Tweedy masterfully and artfully laid out for me when he sang his new track “Wilco (the song): ‘Are you under the impression that this isn’t your life?/ Do you dabble in depression, someone twisting a knife in your back/Are you being attacked?/Oh this is a fact that you need to know/oh, oh, oh, Wilco, Wilco, Wilco will love you baby.’ Like, totally freak me out, like holy s***t. Thanks buddy. I fell hook, line and sinker for your emotionally honest, ‘yes-that’s-me,-yes-I-really-can-relate-to-those-lyrics.’ For being such a dude’s band, (the only other time I’ve ever seen a men’s restroom line shorter than the ladies’ room was when I saw Tom Waits) I am one chick who truly Can.Not.Stop.Listening. (Even if I, given the choice, would rather take Sue Tweedy out for a pedicure instead of sitting around bullshitting over coffee and cigarettes with Jeff, but I guess that’s cool.)

Tweedy humbly and respectfully mused his disbelief in playing AFTER Pete Seeger. The show’s first encore was Tweedy, Seeger, and Seeger’s grandson, Tao Rodriguez-Seeger– playing “Midnight Special” and “Jacob’s Ladder.” The second encore commemorated Earth Hour. Tweedy played and sang without a mic or an amp. There was light, however, which seemingly defeats the purpose of such commemoration, though, I can’t imagine a couple hundred people in total darkness, in a strange place, as a collective listening to music.

Somewhere at the front of the stage at a high school auditorium in the Hudson River valley under lights that render performers without the ability to see more than shadows, Jeff Tweedy played tunes for a group of people who were with him for each breath. We laughed and clapped, shouted out requests and enthusiastically “wooooo hoooooed,” even though Tweedy thinks its weird to woo hoo at an acoustic show. It was a live music experience that was one of a kind, environmental awareness, fourth graders, folk icons, rice krispy treats for sale, and all.