Wings For Wheels

If somebody had ever told me that one of the benefits of moving to Chicago was the opportunity to see Jeff Tweedy of Wilco performing at a synagogue half a mile from my apartment, I would have thought this city was filled with nutjobs.

And yet, that’s exactly what happened last night.

As I mentioned on Episode 58, a few months ago, Tweedy’s son had his Bar Mitzvah at the Emanuel Congregation in the Edgewater neighborhood where I live. As a thank you, Tweedy held a benefit performance for the synagogue a few days before Wilco embarked on a world tour. Tickets ranged from $54 to $200 for VIP seating, which also included a meet-and-greet with Tweedy and Peter Grosz, a comedian and writer for The Colbert Report who opened up.

Grosz began by saying that he hadn’t performed in front of this many people in a synagaogue since his Bar Mitzvah, so he was expecting to be ignored by girls a foot taller than he, and to have everybody in the audience give his father checks after the show. But he did express remorse that, as a result of the benefit, litle Jeffrey Goldberg had to have his Bar Mitzvah at Schubas.

Then Grosz did the unexpected and turned his comedy in the direction of the headliner, saying that Wilco have had 87 members in its 15 years of existence, and that he was once at a gig where Wilco fired a guitarist in the middle of a set. Quality stuff.

After a brief intermission, Tweedy, rumpled as ever, came on and asked us all to raise our beer. He then recited the Hebrew blessing over the wine, adding, “That’s the extent of my knowledge.”

He then launched into a perfect one-two punch of Sunken Treasure and Remember The Mountain Bed. I’ve gotten so used to Tweedy’s quiet voice that I had forgotten how powerful a singer he is at full voice, as on the “I am so/Out of tune/With you” portion of the opener. It reminded me how much he had learned from Paul Westerberg (I have a bootleg from 1997 where they cover Color Me Impressed and he says, “Everything we do is basically based on The Replacements”).

I’ll Fight from the recently released Wilco (The Album) was next, but not before he stopped the song in the middle of the intro waying that he just realized that the song mentions Jesus, and he wasn’t sure if it was okay for him to do it in this setting. Of course it was. Then again, it was a shock when, late in the set, he performed Theologians.

As a solo act, Tweedy is much looser than with his band. He jokes with the audience in a remarkably dry wit, chastising those who get the titles of their requests wrong and telling stories about a neighbor whose daughter hated Hummingbird. This was the second time I had seen Tweedy solo. The previous occasion, in February 2001 at the 9:30 Club back in DC, he expounded at length on the different connotations of the word “cock” to great comedic effect.  But in the Emanuel Congregation with the rabbi present, Tweedy kept it clean.

Another example of this was during Pick Up The Change, the first “Yay!” moment of the show for me.” He had to stop the song midway through the first chorus because he forgot the words. After many of us shouted, “We used to have a lot of things in common,” he came back with “One at a time, please!” He then went into the audience to get the words from somebody in the front. After the song, he joked that he spent so much time learning the blessing that he forgot the words to his earlier songs. “There’s only so much room in there.”

He also understood that there were some people in the crowd who were there to support the congregation but unfamiliar with his music, and my guess it that he tailored the setlist to avoid some of his bleaker material, even if they lent themselves perfectly to a solo acoustic show. As a result, we didn’t get such Wilco concert staples as How To Fight Loneliness, Via Chicago, and I Am Trying To Break Your Heart. The only really depressing song was Shot In The Arm, but it’s so damn singable that it didn’t matter.

So in addition to the aforementioned Pick Up The Change, we were also treated to such rarities as Pecan Pie (!), One By One, Box Full Of Letters (a request from the rabbi), Nothingsevergonnastandinmywayagain (!!), and the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot outtake, Not For The Season. But there were also plenty of crowd-pleasers, like California Stars, Airline To Heaven, and Hate It Here. A guy behind me kept yelling out for Far, Far Away, but Tweedy didn’t choose anything from Being There. Nor was his time in Uncle Tupelo featured, which was probably a good thing for those next to me, because I would have squealed like a schoolgirl if he had broken out Gun or New Madrid. As it was, I could barely handle Pecan Pie.

Tweedy’s guitar playing, overshadowed first by Jay Bennett, and now by Nels Cline, is highly underrated. As with his voice, his sense of dynamics is always right for the song, whether he is strumming with a pick or his thumb, or playing an intricate fingerpicking rhythm.

The concert, including an encore that featured a cover of Dylan’s I Shall Be Released and an aborted attempt at Jesus, Etc (again, the wrong venue), fell a few minutes short of the two-hour mark, the right length for a show such as this. Unlike just about every other show I go to these days, the crowd was silent throughout and nobody yelled out for Free Bird (although somebody requested the Grateful Dead’s Ripple, which prompted a few chords and a funny story about Bob Weir and Phil Lesh). And eight minutes after leaving the temple, I was back inside my apartment. How can you beat that?