Wilco – Overture Hall (Madison, WI)
There was a skeptical buzz before this show from doubters who dismissed the band’s upbeat new disc, Sky Blue Sky, as Jeff Tweedy on Paxil. Add in the fact that Overture Hall is a lavish new theater designed more for symphony orchestras than rock bands, and many of the ticket holders (despite the reasonable ticket price of $35) seemed to feel cheated even before the lights went down.
Tweedy has made a career out of putting the songs first, the audience second. It hasn’t failed him and tonight was no exception. Even the folks with the sky-blue-sky blues got over it quick and rose to their feet for a rousing two hours of music.
This was the first night of Wilco’s fall tour, and they seemed eager to fly. The five-piece appeared on stage at 7:59, a minute early, and charged into “Via Chicago”. The opening organ phrases created a wall of dissonance that blanketed the sold-out hall from the front row to the highest seat of the third balcony.
Tweedy is among rock’s most prolific and thoughtful songwriters, but his greatest gift is interpretation. And while Wilco’s lineup has changed over the years, he has a knack for surrounding himself with interpreters of equal skill. This infuses risk into the band’s treatment of their own songs. Not in the way a group will fool around with a song they know well; just the opposite. Familiar material seems to call Wilco to work harder, to nose through the dark corners of their own music, sniffing out change, growth, and danger.
When the band covered an older number such as “Too Far Apart”, it was like watching a potter handle clay on a wheel. The shape of the song stood up, but, from measure to measure it wasn’t clear what the finished product would look like. This joined the performers and the audience in the act of discovery.
Lead guitarist Nels Cline looked like a modern-day Pete Townsend, dressed in high-water black pants with bright red socks showing. Cline’s playing, angular one moment, shredding the next, gives very little warning about where he wants to take the song. But he takes it, all right.
Nowhere was this more of a kick than when Wilco changed into a three-guitar band with Tweedy and Pat Sansone framing out the melody of “Impossible Germany”. The incredible Cline, off to the side and lost in his fretwork, shimmered out bright, sunny notes, feasting on the meat of the music served up by his bandmates.
The Sky Blue Sky tracks received the same raw treatment, bringing even those previously mentioned skeptics closer to the stage. Offering no apologies, Tweedy reeled in those folks by putting even more loft into already bouncy songs such as “On And On And On”.
The 22 songs this night were flashy and loud. The band marched through a marathon encore that included “Hate It Here”, “Red-Eyed And Blue”, “I Got You”, “Ashes Of American Flags” and “Spiders” before the knockout punch, the reassuring show-closer, “California Stars”.