Friday, February 21, 1997
By KIERAN GRANT
You know a band has received enough critical acclaim when even they start to feel overrated.
"This is from our new album Being There," Wilco leader Jeff Tweedy said at the Horsehoe Wednesday as he introduced the song, Forget The Flowers, "which is nowhere near as good as people say it is."
Wilco certainly deserve the good ink, but Tweedy had a point.
The Chicago-based quintet are critics' darlings in the classic sense: They're widely written up as the saving grace of roots-rock. They haven't exactly sold truck loads of records. They're musicians' musicians.
(Anyone hoping to wipe out Toronto's music industry with a single pipe bomb just missed their chance.)
For the roughly 400 people who crammed into the Horseshoe for the first of two sold-out nights, Wilco could have been replacements for The Replacements.
Tweedy and guitarist-keyboardist Jay Bennett have a cult following that stretches back to their days with the highly influential roots-rock band Uncle Tupelo.
Along with bassist John Stirratt, steel guitarist Max Johnston, and drummer Ken Coomer, they comprise a magnificent bar band.
It was Wilco's raw poetry that gave the show its edge.
His voice hoarse and thick, Tweedy seemed to tear off lyrics rather than just utter them.
Songs like Misunderstood, Red-Eyed And Blue, Sunken Treasure, and, well, most of the 19 songs from Being There, had an urgency that in less sincere and skillful hands might look phony.
Wilco also pulled a few songs from their 1995 debut, Am, including Pick Up The Change and Not An Issue.
They reached back to Uncle Tupelo early in the set with New Madrid, and again during their second encore with Gun.
Dreamer In My Dreams was rough and tumble. Why Would You Wanna Live, boppy.
The band's formula - piling their country-rock lilt up into noisy, power-pop crescendos and then letting them collapse into sweet pop songs - is quite possibly the most re-inventive use of folk and rock this decade.
And just as their punkified boogie-jams started wearing a bit thin on Kingpin, Wilco brought the show back to earth with the forlorn tune, The Lonely 1, which would have sounded even more beautiful had the bar been empty.
Some bands just sound better without hit records, even if they do deserve them.
