FILTER REISSUES
Radio Daze
Wilco’s masterpiece that nearly never was celebrates its 20th anniversar y with a model of box-set shock and awe.
By David Fricke.
Wilco ★★★★★
Yankee Hotel Fox trot (Super Deluxe Edition)
NONESUCH. CD/DL/LP
IN FEBRUARY 2002, speaking to MOJO in a New York hotel room a few weeks before its release, Wilco’s founding singer-songwriter Jeff Tweedy explained the eccentric genesis of the country-soul confession, assured-if-bent pop hooks and startling, contrarian noise on his band’s fourth album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. “I was taking this approach of documenting each song as accurately as possible,” Tweedy said, “spending six months coming at each of [them] from another direction… trying to find something else in there that was more exciting than those six chords strung together with a bridge and chorus.”
The improbable, star-crossed saga of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is now established music-business legend: the zealous turn into textural experiment and lyric surrealism; the high cost in band members as two got fired along the way, including Jay Bennett, Tweedy’s co-writer and primary collaborator at the time; Tweedy’s close mischief in the mixing stage with Sonic Youth guitarist and post-rock sage Jim O’Rourke; the album’s rejection by one record company and its eventual release by another imprint under the same corporate overlords – eight months after Wilco put it out for free, streaming the whole thing on their website. Never mind Napster and iTunes; the 21st-century freefall of major-label autocracy starts here.
That would have been so amoral.” with and em purp The enduring irony of all that ruckus: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was decisive risk with a greatest-hits spine, its wilful clatter and abstraction dispatched with the same musical and emotional purpose Wilco brought to the double-album sprawl of 1996’s Being There and the modern-rock tensions on 1999’s Summerteeth. “This is an honest, vivid chaos, and it tells a stor y,” I wrote in my original Rolling Stone review, an assessment that still rings true through the alcoholic storm of the immortal opener, I Am Trying To Break Your Heart; the blizzard of static that falls over the despair in Poor Places, a woman intoning the album’s title (from the phonetic shortwave-radio alphabet) like a distress signal; and the avant-shred guitar slicing through the foggy brass and rapture of I’m The Man Who Loves You. Even in the resurgent age of vinyl, I prefer the CD flow of Ashes Of American Flags’ shattered patriotism into the nostalgic, hippy bliss of Heavy Metal Drummer, a healing sequence broken up between sides two and three on LP and which remains so in this reissue.
“Yankee… was decisive risk with a greatest-hits spine, its wilful clatter dispatched with musical and emotional purpose.”
In every other way, the top-tier edition of this 20th-anniversary party is a model of box-set shock and awe. There is the inevitable remastering of the 2002 album; a celebratory round on-stage from St. Louis that summer; and a period radio interview with in-studio performances. But this reissue goes the extra, illuminating distance with four hours of music from the very process Tweedy describes above. Here are the demo sketches, test-run arrangements and wholly discarded songs that he, Bennett (who died in 2009), bassist John Stirratt, keyboard player and guitarist LeRoy Bach and new drummer Glenn Kotche passed through to the definitive sound of hearts broken, minds blown and those ruins built anew. A solo, acoustic pass at Poor Places is Tweedy with Nick Drake and early-’70s Richard Thompson on his mind. In an early stab at the plaintive, wheatfield Cure of Kamera, the song gets a bright teen-dance kicking like something Bruce Springsteen would have conjured for light relief on The River. And if you want to imagine Wilco as prime-time Little Feat, check out the version of I’m The Man Who Loves You with slinky R&B guitar and jaunty congas.
Wilco’s winding path to the explosive desire and slurred-Dada remorse in I Am Trying To Break Your Heart is spread over several outtakes, an adventure in moving parts and perpetual investigation. A piece of Tweedy’s infamous entrance (“I am an American aquarium drinker/I assassin down the avenue”) shows up in an entirely different, bluesy shuff le, American Aquarium, with a lyric that he pulled, in turn, for the album’s pale beauty Radio Cure. Then there’s the odyssey of I Am Trying… itself through assorted tempers and atmospheres, among them a live-rehearsal draft with psychedelic church organ and the closing-time aura of Tweedy’s poignantly strained vocal with a saloon-piano trio in ghostly reverb. The words and urgency are always there; they’re waiting for the right, illustrative bedlam.
The songs Wilco left behind are more obviously retro but a good-time album unto themselves. The jangling folk rock of Shakin’ Sugar (with a guitar break that shouts George Harrison on Rubber Soul) feels like it’s been hanging around since Wilco’s 1995 alt-country debut, A.M.. Not For The Season – which resurfaced as Laminated Cat on 2003’s Loose Fur, Tweedy’s side-project with Kotche and O’Rourke – bolts out of the gate like The Modern Lovers’ Roadrunner, complete with a Jonathan Richman-style count-off. And Tweedy kept at least one song in reserve, Remember To Remember, retitled Hummingbird when it f luttered on to 2004’s A Ghost Is Born, leavening that album’s extremes like Big Star in Tin Pan Alley. In one of the takes here, Tweedy sings it against a bar-band dub of rhythm section and spook-house organ, making you wish he’d just piled on the guitars and aimed for hitsville.