August 28, 2002
Breaking hearts
Wilco finds success on own terms in midst of trying times
By MIKE BELL
Succinctly summing up the past 12 months in the life of Chicago band Wilco is virtually impossible.

But bassist John Stirratt comes close.

"It's been a complicated year on a lot of different levels," he says.

Yes, complicated.

And frustrating and tumultuous and groundbreaking and momentous and brilliant and satisfying.

Not to mention well-documented, thanks to articles in every publication from Variety to the Wall Street Journal, as well as a recently released documentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, which was filmed during the most trying times.

The story began with the recording of the band's fourth and latest album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and wound up being an indictment of the recording industry and a victory for artistic integrity.

When the band handed over the finished work, their record label, Reprise, balked at releasing it because of what they saw to be a lack of commercial viability in the songs.

Unwilling to change the disc, Wilco bought the tapes, left the label and streamed the album online, before signing with a new company that eventually released the disc earlier this year.

In the middle of all of that, one of the group's key members, multi-instrumentalist Jay Bennett, also left the band on mutual, though less than amicable, terms.

But ironically, without the story behind the album and the hassle the band members went through, the album probably wouldn't have sold as well as it has (in the U.S. it's outperformed all of their other albums).

"I don't think it would have (sold as well), frankly," Stirratt says before amending that. "I know it wouldn't have.

"The mythology around the record has obviously gotten us a lot more press ... than just the one go-around in terms of the record's release.

"(But) in the life of the band, things felt like there's always been this weird gradual increase. Even early last year, every date we would do, people seemed to be rooting for us."

It's hard not to root for Wilco, which performs tomorrow night at the new MacEwan Hall.

Since songwriter and frontman Jeff Tweedy formed the band after the breakup of the seminal alt country act Uncle Tupelo, they've recorded some of the most exciting material to come out of contemporary music, including the 1996 masterpiece Being There, and two side albums -- Mermaid Avenue Volume 1 and 2 -- collaborating with Billy Bragg on the words of Woody Guthrie.

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is another brilliant statement from Wilco as it pushes them further away from the guttural to the more atmospheric and cerebral.

That new direction, which Stirratt says they're still playing with in new demos the band is currently recording, was the reason Bennett left the band.

"Let me see if I can state this without getting in trouble ...," he says after a number of aborted attempts.

"I don't think he was down as much with the abstract nature of the material. Jay has always been more of a classic rock kind of a person, or '70s rock or post-punk or whatever you want to call it.

"Some of what we were dealing with I think he definitely thought it was frivolous."

"It got to the point where something had to give, unfortunately."

With Tweedy being the one who's perceived to be the main man, that 'thing' was Bennett.

It's that perception, coupled with the fact Wilco drummer Ken Coomer left earlier last year, as well as the friction between Bragg and Tweedy during the Mermaid sessions, that leads to another perception -- that Tweedy is impossible to work with.

"Oh, no absolutely not," Stirratt says. "I couldn't have lasted a year, much less seven or eight.

"Not to say the stage thing is a persona, but the acerbic qualities he has live, it definitely has an effect on people.

"I think people must assume -- especially now with the personnel stuff -- that he's a nightmare.

"But other than maybe a few months out of the band set aside, I've never met a more generous talent."