DISC TWO OF WILCO'S BEING THERE
This morning I taught the first two thirds of a day of Kindergarten—actually it was yesterday when, in the morning, I also taught two thirds of a day of kindergarten—and, as I walked down Bardin Road to the strip mall at the corner with Williams for lunch, checked my cell phone and got a message from my brother—Do yourself a favor and listen to Being There! Loud!—and I responded at this A.M. enthusiasm (this is an unintentional reference [I swear!] to, A.M., the first Wilco album that preceded Being There): In the morning time? and What will the neighbors think! and he text messaged back (which doesn't sound quite right to me because "text messaging" to me means hitting actual keys over and over again to turn an a to b to a c, etc. and my brother has a new touch screen kind of device that Mike Daisey told us certain inaccurate truths about last year that we were able to ignore because there were certain inaccuracies about the truths) anytime! and then fuck em. And then I "wrote" back (because I also now have one of those devices that doesn't old-fashioned-ly text message) Also I could put it on my new iPod camera phone and blare it whenever and then, because he usually works at this time, Have you been blessed w/ a day off? and he said No and messaged me a smily face that was not smiling but instead screaming with eyes closed and waterfalls of tears streaming down its yellow circle non-smily face.
Since I have begun this "essay" (or account of a brief text exchange between my brother and me while he was at work and I was on my lunch break substitute teaching kindergarten for the first of two days in a row) I have listened to the first five songs on the second disc of a copy of Being There that my friend Jaymee found and removed from the area with the CDs and stereo in Campagno's Market & Deli in Monterey, California where she made sandwiches for active members of the military and civilians who like really big sandwiches, off and on, from 2001 until 2006. The CD was removed in 2002 (due to some quick wikipedia fact-checking, and some consequent serious pinwheeling issues, track seven is finishing and I fear time is slipping away), when I got super-excited about Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, the fourth Wilco album, and couldn't stop talking about it (an album I was so partial to—one of the few payoffs for the half-decade Rolling Stone subscription I devoured from age 13 on until I had grown [word choice very intentional] to dismiss and resent it—that I insisted that what I do the first time I smoked pot by myself was to listen to that really loud, which is interesting because, as wikipedia informs us [pinwheeling...] The first conceptions of material for the album came during a particularly stressful time in Tweedy's life. Tweedy had recently quit smoking marijuana,...also I made a great friend who has the same name as me because I saw I am trying to break your heart, the movie about that album at the independent movie theater he worked at)—because it didn't seem like it belonged to anybody and had been in the CD/stereo area of the sandwich shop "forever," and for some reason it was a cardboard "CD advance" version, which turned out to not be at all different. I listened to it all the fucking time. And why this classic of '90s post-Parsons country rock psychedelia—and a "CD advance" version at that—ended up abandoned at the Compagno's Market and Deli just outside the Taylor Gate entrance to the Defense Language Institute of Monterey, and why I happened to have a best friend who lived down the street and for some reason got a job at the age of 15 making sandwiches who decided to pilfer me this bit of media remains to me one of the great minor miracles that have made my life worth living.
Another wikipedia fact, one that seems slightly incongruous and wholly depressing: Valve Corporation used Someone Else's Song as a basis for one of the opening themes in their first-person shooter game Team Fortress 2.
* * * I am in, what I am deciding to be, a moment of indecision. The second CD of the album has finished and the first one did not work in the CD player—above my desk in my parents' garage—that for all of my adolescence was in my room, on which I played, I am estimating right now, between the first five albums—my friend Vicky bought me A.M. and the third, Summerteeth, to continue this theme that the benevolent forces of reality put Wilco's music into my life; and A Ghost is Born, which I bought the day it came out, was essentially the soundtrack of the end of my childhood—in excess of three non-stop month's worth of Wilco, a conservative estimate. I have chosen simply just to replay CD two as I think about this and the first song has ended. Its title comes from the notion that "there is no sunken treasure, rumored to be," a weird sort of non-teleological thinking that, in our forward motion into the past, there is no reward beyond that of the journey. "Music is my saviour, but I was maimed by rock and roll," the song ends. "I was tamed by rock and roll."
And then a reprise, a reprise that always haunted me, the less commercial more abstract version of the single that I didn't really remember, but I remember in the background of a non-existent memory somewhere in the nineties, sometime after I turned 11 and before the 20th century ended. It was two minutes and thirty-five seconds of their biggest hit. I just googled the video...pinwheeling...youtube-geico ad...and they take their instruments on a plane as Jeff Tweedy lip-syncs the song and carries a snowboard used for skydiving purposes (I just read it is called "skysurfing"), and then they pretend to play their instruments on the plane, and then in mid-air, as Jeff Tweedy continues to lip-sync, and I can't really tell if there are doubles or if there is a green screen involved it just looks like they are falling through air with guitars, a snare drum, etc. Although it is incredibly late-'90s-Dawson's Creek-cheesy I am having a hard time not liking it a lot, but I never saw it, I can safely say. The mystery remains...when did I hear this song?
Question: though the record is very loose, most songs produced in a day, the band is at the top its game—why do betray their professionalism with the inclusion of bits of studio banter, laughter, etc.? Why does genius seemingly reside in the ability to capture feeling before rehearsal squeezes out the realness, and why does it fall apart at a certain point when it seems too improvised and off the cuff? Why does it seem to serve the artist in this moment more than the listener/viewer/reader? I think it has something to do with dreams. I want to hear songs about dreams as a concept, about people's actual dreams, about life influenced by dreams, about dreams as a metaphor for aspirations. But never do I want to hear a slick, overly-produced, written for pop singer of the moment song about dreams. There are two songs with "Dreams" in the title on this record, and one is called "Dreamer in My Dreams," and the album is a huge discussion of longing and hoping and aspiring, songs directed towards successful singers, or about aspiring singers, and the lyrics, otherwise, are surreal and the abstract instrumentation floats, and one song's words read like a haiku with the lines repeated centered around the quadrupled line "Why would you wanna live in this world," with a variation in its last phrasing, "Why wouldn't you wanna live in this world?" Maybe at a certain point, when you've been playing music and smoking weed for what feels like forever, and you have your first kid and your band gets kind of successful, but not really, you realize you don't need your cannabinoid shortcut to surrealism anymore and it becomes even weirder to stop smoking pot. I wouldn't know. I don't mean to answer the question. "I've got blisters on my fingers!" is the best moment of "Helter Skelter" in this aesthetic I am describing, which is that of a double album which the Beatles' "white" album is, btw.
I am back to the last song, a free-for-all barnburner, as much as a Wilco song can be, and Jeff Tweedy sings one about himself in the third person, the aforementioned "dreamer in my dreams":
There's a blister on his brainThe song ends with, I think, Jay Bennett saying "That's it" and then slamming a piano shut with lots of giggles.
that's driving him insane
'cause all good things gotta go
well there's a child on the way
it could be any day,
but how his life will change him, that we don't know.
I am going to get a beer and figure out how to listen to the first CD.
DISC TWO OF WILCO'S BEING THERE
While I just listened to disc two twice in a row and could probably listen to it again, I always found the first half more captivating, putting "Misunderstood" on half a dozen mixtapes, and "Hotel Arizona" on half a dozen more. And the actual single and not its reprise is on it. And this time when I put it in my teenage bedroom's CD player it played, and I turned it up loud and wrote the next paragraph.
I just had a minor epiphany while listening to "Misunderstood," the album's first song about why this song is so captivating still, or, more interestingly, why it is more captivating than it ever was: Jeff Tweedy was me and my brother's age, just a couple years older than I am now, when he wrote the album, more specifically he was my age when he started writing songs for it and my brother's age (actually two months older) when it came out, and—while it is about all of those important rock and roll anti-authoritarian the world is not what it seems messages that one so easily falls in love with at the age of 16—it is more accurately about being on the verge of 30 and not knowing what exactly to do with all of these truths that were taught to us by a culture that gave more virtue to drug use and drinking than churchgoing and just about everything else that one is quote unquote supposed to do. I just thought he was kidding when he sang in "Monday": "Well, I cut class, in school, yeah, but now I know I made a mistake, I made a big mistake," because it just sounds so hokey and Jeff Tweedy couldn't have made a mistake, he made some of the most important albums of my generation, or, I guess, his generation, or whatever. I just finished a biography of David Foster Wallace and he cynically refers to a famous artist's occupation as "polishing the statue," which, if the statue is of a drug addict, or a genius, or a mentally unstable person, can be a harrowing, and literally unhealthy, image to maintain. But if that's what the kids want it's what the kids want.
But "Monday" is a weak song, it's back to back with the single version of the single, which seem out of place on an album the rest of which sounds like a later Wilco album—abstract, cohesive, artistic, often really dissonant and borderline self-serving, but never quite. For the first time during this experience I am going stop typing and actually just listen and think, a good idea, for a change...
"What's the world got in store for you now" is a rhetorical question on several levels.
I think Wilco played "Hotel Arizona" when I saw them in 2005 when they played with Jim O'Rourke, still in support of A Ghost is Born, I don't quite remember. It would have tied a lot together for me if they did. But then not really cause this epic number's post-crescendo conclusion is
I guess, all this history's just a mystery to me* * *
One more worried whisper right in my ear.
(That would be a great way to end an album, or this essay, but it goes on with an on the road missing you love song, because the band was still a country-based pop band, accessible, on the brink of the avant-garde. The work with Billy Bragg finishing unfinished Woody Guthrie songs solidified their place as rock and roll intellectuals, and Summerteeth went backwards a little bit with songs that were a little too bubblegum, and studio production that was too traditional and safe, though the songs were good. The sonic surrealism reaches a new peak with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and the band as it was, as it began with Being There [with Jay Bennett], ceased to be, which is right when I caught on and watched the documentary of that band falling apart and losing its label only to have a subsidiary of that label rebuy the album that its parent company already paid for, and my friend who has the same name as me got the movie poster from his work when the film left and gave it to me and it hung on my wall for the rest of my adolescence.)
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