A review of last night's show - with a tip o' the Hee-Haw straw hat to
David Cantwell for the illumination of the ELO emulations on Summer
Teeth.
Carl W.
* * *
WILCO WITH VIC CHESNUTT
at The Guvernment on Saturday
by CARL WILSON
The Globe and Mail, Toronto
I n a certain light, Jeff Tweedy's career - ever since his teenage
group the Primitives in Belleville, Ill., metamorphosed into the
legendary late-eighties band Uncle Tupelo - has been a struggle to
address the question of what to do if it's not possible to play punk
rock anymore.
Uncle Tupelo's answer, famously, was to mine the distant past: With
partner Jay Farrar (now of Son Volt), Tweedy combed old-time country
music for sounds that could resonate in the postindustrial Rust Belt.
But when Tweedy formed Wilco, he changed tactics. Wilco's alternative
to "alternative" is pop music, the 1970s top-40 sound of Tweedy's
childhood, from Cheap Trick to - prominently on Wilco's just-released
third album, Summer Teeth - the power-pop period of the Electric Light
Orchestra.
It's a nervy strategy, and its potential and its failings were
evident in equal measure at Wilco's early-evening, sold-out show on
Saturday at The Guvernment. In a long set that included
double-keyboard sugar shocks, a veritable army of guitars, more than
enough rock-outs and a passel of "ooh-aah" vocal fillips, waves of
pure elation were followed by bland washouts.
Tweedy, the man with the most earnest eyebrows in rock 'n' roll, was
consistently watchable, remarkably engaged with every line of every
song considering the group's punishing tour schedule. The best tunes
from Summer Teeth, including Can't Stand It, Via Chicago and A Shot in
the Arm, seemed so fresh that you could imagine a new generation of
11-year-olds pumping up the radio volume and posturing to them in
front of their bedroom mirrors.
Yet in a few songs from 1998's Mermaid Avenue - a collaboration with
Billy Bragg in setting lyrics from Woody Guthrie's notebooks - Tweedy
discovered much wider thematic territory than he manages to cover in
his own writing. The results are musical pearls such as Hesitating
Beauty and California Stars, which was received like the
time-burnished classic it deserves to be during the
otherwise-excessive double encore.
Much of the time, however, the samey songs seemed undeserving of the
band's prodigious energies, and the hard-core fans' hunger for more
thick-necked rock-show gestures left one wondering whether Tweedy
would ever fully liberate himself from one or another form of
nostalgia. None of those 11-year-olds will ever find out how cool he
is if he keeps pandering to the pushing-40 punters.
By contrast, Vic Chesnutt, in his opening set - sitting alone in his
wheelchair, wrist braces limiting his electric-guitar work, his
poignant voice nearly lost in an inadequate sound mix in the cavernous
club - served no earthly master, not even himself.
The Virginia songwriter specializes in acidic wordplay (he writes
like a maudlin-drunk Dr. Seuss), and the barely-there accompaniment
let the few people who had the courtesy to listen luxuriate in such
lyrical loopdiloops as, "We blew past the army motorcade/ And its
abnormal load haulage/ The gravity of the situation/ Came on us like a
bit of new knowledge."
The shocker here was the reputed misanthrope's easygoing generosity:
After a few pieces from his new album The Salesman and Bernadette,
Chesnutt bantered with the crowd to determine what songs he'd play
next.
And frequently, almost casually, with his Valley-of-Demerol
death-croak on Supernatural or his teetering, lonesome croon on Where
Were You?, Chesnutt hit emotional depths that Tweedy, so far, is just
a touch too calculating ever to find.
