![]() "About one-third of the way into the set, when it became clearer that this wasn't going to be Wilco as usual, the fans' discomfort became palpable," writes Kot. Instead of lassoing the crowd in, Tweedy, anxious to move forward musically with the new, more sophisticated sound that was playing in his head, turned them away with a string of unknown songs from the band's yet-to-be-released album, "Being There." The songs, heavy on piano and often hushed with introspection, bore little resemblance to the pop-rock sound fans had grown accustomed to. At sold-out Irving Plaza that September night, the crowd waited for a roots-rock punctuation to the triumphant night a "good-time barn-dance vibe," as Greg Kot puts it in his new rock biography, "Wilco: Learning How to Die." But Tweedy, as has become his musical custom, had other ideas. ![]() ("No Depression" itself is a 1936 Carter Family song, an ode to better times in the afterlife.) By 1996, though, Tweedy found the categorization claustrophobic. ![]() Tweedy's previous band, Uncle Tupelo - formed with childhood pal Jay Farrar - was the spiritual godfather of the alt-country sound the name of its 1990 debut "No Depression" even morphed into a sort of shorthand for the movement as a whole. ![]() Try to top the Vulgar Boatmen's "You and Your Sister" or Whiskeytown's "16 Days." And they did it with some of the finest, most economical rock songwriting of the last decade. Unapologetically rural in sensibility, they sang about floods (the Bottle Rockets' "Get Down River"), the road (Son Volt's "Windfall"), the big city (Old 97's' "Broadway"), small towns (Whiskeytown's "My Hometown"), getting high (Whiskeytown's "To Be Young"), being bored (the Vulgar Boatmen's "Drive Somewhere"), and the working poor (the Bottle Rockets' "Welfare Music"). ![]() In '96, Tweedy and his Chicago-based band were better known as the torchbearers for the burgeoning alt-country scene built around American bands like the Bottle Rockets, Son Volt, the Silos, Vulgar Boatmen, the Jayhawks, Old 97's and Whiskeytown, who shouted their barroom choruses while also exploring the softer side of life. Wilco had not yet been dubbed one of the few American rock bands that matter that label was cemented when Reprise Records rejected its minimalist masterpiece, "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" as unworthy of release - it found a new home and was quickly dubbed a classic. It was September 1996, during the College Music Journal's annual conference, and Jeff Tweedy and his band Wilco were headlining. ![]()
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