Jeff Tweedy live in Indiana: “We’re not gonna indulge any more balderdash!”
“Is there something tense happening?” Jeff Tweedy asks the crowd at the historic Buskirk-Chumley Theatre in Bloomington, Indiana. Or, more specifically, he asks two warring factions near the front of the theatre: one party that proclaims very loudly and perhaps drunkenly that the “dead” crowd should stand up and dance to the music, and the other party that can’t see around those standing up.
“Is there something tense happening?” Jeff Tweedy asks the crowd at the historic Buskirk-Chumley Theatre in Bloomington, Indiana. Or, more specifically, he asks two warring factions near the front of the theatre: one party that proclaims very loudly and perhaps drunkenly that the “dead” crowd should stand up and dance to the music, and the other party that can’t see around those standing up.
Tweedy appears flabbergasted at the disruption, but barely misses a beat as he expertly defuses the situation. “I appreciate you asking me, as if I’m the one in charge,” he laughs. “I just work here, sir.” When someone chimes in from the nosebleeds, Tweedy responds, “We’re not gonna indulge any more of this balderdash,” as he and his band launch into “Feel Free”.
They were going to play that song anyway – the guitar tech has already brought out the appropriate instrument – but it’s a perfect exclamation point to this strange conflict of concert etiquette. The song, from Tweedy’s excellent new triple album Twilight Override, is his version of Isaac Hayes’ “Do Your Thing” or The Isley Brothers’ “It’s Your Thing (Do What You Wanna Do)”, an exhortation to express yourself in whatever way seems appropriate to you: “Shave your head in the sink. Be brave, don’t think.” Like so many of Tweedy’s recent songs, it’s warm and funny and welcoming: a big-tent anthem by a guy who, as he tells those sit down/stand up litigants, just wants “everybody to have fucking good time.”
There’s an egalitarian quality to Twilight Override and this tour, which Tweedy has extended into the new year. The band includes his two sons, Sammy and Spencer on keyboards and drums respectively, along with their old friends Liam Kazar on guitar, Macie Stewart on violin, and Sima Cunningham on bass.
They’re spread out across the stage in a line, everyone visible and no-one obscured. The old guy takes centre-stage, of course, but often lets the young ’uns play and sing lead. Sammy grabs the mic to sing the heavy metal chorus of “Forever Never Ends”, on which his dad remembers being his son’s age and getting drunk at the prom. On several songs Tweedy steps back to let the band jam for a bit, as Kazar takes a guitar solo or the rhythm section destroys the coda of the Sukierae track “Diamond Light Pt 1”.
Perhaps the most unexpectedly poignant moment in the show is when Tweedy introduces his band, which he calls his “extended family”: “I knew every one of the people on this stage when they were little kids. And two of them I knew before they were little kids.”
After seven weeks on the road together, this band are loose and limber, moving easily through these knotty grooves and bright choruses with a casual precision and a collective personality very different than Wilco’s. For one thing, everybody sings. Their subtle but sharp vocal harmonies are some of the underrated joys of Twilight Override, and they’re even more prominent onstage – not a frontman and his backup singers, but something more akin to a family choir.
But is it a tense situation? This band, like Tweedy’s day-job outfit, savour the friction between beauty and distortion, between his precisely structured melodies and the scribbly passages on “One Tiny Flower” (which opens the show) and “New Orleans”. Tweedy warns us not to get lost in nostalgia on “Caught Up In The Past”, but every song seems to have some reference to one of his heroes: “Get born in the USA,” he exhorts on “Feel Free”. He has a song called “Cry Baby Cry”, which shares its title with a White Album tune. And they end the set with “Lou Reed Was My Babysitter”, whose krautrock verses barrel into a punk chorus that goes, “The dead don’t die! The dead don’t die! The dead don’t die!”
His own love of music may be Tweedy’s most enduring subject. It fuelled Wilco’s first handful of albums, which sound conflicted about his relationship with music: rock’n’roll promises everything and delivers little. As much as he loved The Beach Boys and Big Star, he wasn’t always optimistic. Especially after the recent release of the massive Ghost Is Born anniversary boxset, which documented perhaps the direst moment in Tweedy’s life, these new songs sound a little more hopeful, a little more settled, a little less immersed in that internal tension. With this band he’s reaching out well beyond himself, curious to see how music affects a community.
Perhaps it helps that he gets to share that music – his own music, his favourite music – with these younger players, who won’t let him play the curmudgeon. On this current tour, they’ve been adding songs relevant to whichever city they’re in, which not only gives fans a unique setlist but possibly eases the tedium of touring. Here in Indiana, they cover “Doing Something Wrong” by Magnolia Electric Co, whose founder Jason Molina lived in Bloomington on different occasions and was signed by the local label Secretly Canadian. While Tweedy laments that he could not help the troubled artist because he himself was barely functioning at the time, he sounds so natural singing Molina’s melodies and lyrics that he could easily do a whole covers album.
The same can’t quite be said for their version of “I Want You Back” by The Jackson 5 (who hailed from Gary, nestled far up in the north end of Indiana). After one false start, they all start trading off vocals, each band-member reaching up into their falsetto and trying to replicate Michael Jackson’s liquid-mercury phrasing (Sammy Tweedy comes the closest). It’s goofy and barely holds together, but everybody, especially Tweedy, looks like they’re having a blast playing something they’ve barely rehearsed. The sense of fun is infectious: nobody has to be told to stand up.
SETLIST One Tiny Flower Caught Up In The Past Parking Lot Forever Never Ends This Is How It Ends Low Key World Away KC Rain (No Wonder) Betrayed Mirror Stray Cats in Spain Out In The Dark Cry Baby Cry Flowering New Orleans Diamond Light Pt. 1 No One’s Moving On Feel Free Lou Reed Was My Babysitter ENCORE Twilight Override Family Ghost Doing Something Wrong (Magnolia Electric Co cover) I Want You Back (Jackson 5 cover) Enough
