Wilco live!

Wilco
Auditorium Theatre, Chicago
Friday, November 24, 2006

Wilco play Chicago so frequently it’s easy to arrive at a show with expectations, have them met, and swish-swash your corudroy’d ass back to the North Side. Throw in last year’s live album, this fall’s Jeff Tweedy live DVD, and the coming second album from Pat Sansone and John Stirratt’s The Autumn Defense (not to mention solo albums from Jay Bennett, Glenn Kotche, and Nels Cline), it has all gotten to be a bit much.

So why not fuck with it?

Following a rousing set by underheralded Wheaton College changelings Detholz!, Wilco’s iconic, silhouetted entrance was preceded by a man in a rabbit costume. Perhaps Wayne Coyne was in the building? The charlatan — Bobb Brunn was painted nearby — banged on a drum machine to a taped soundtrack for nearly 10 minutes, confounding an audience with Thanksgiving dinner in the rearview, and dying for a Wilco entrée. Jeff Tweedy’s latent audience contempt was manifest.

But it was hardly anything to dwell on after the headliners set forth a 150-minute, two-encore set equally about basking in old lights as testing new ones. With an anticipated spring release for their sixth album, Wilco expanded upon the three new nuggets presented at Lollapalooza with three more. They also continued tinkering with the arrangements of the songs they’ve been playing for years, casting themselves as some sort of nouveau Grateful Dead or grandiose Band revivalists.

Opening with the new “Shake It Off,” an upbeat Tweedy led the band through selections from mainly the last two albums (Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost Is Born), digging further into “Hell Is Chrome,” “War On War,” “Theologians,” “Handshake Drugs,” and an increasingly dysfunctional “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart.” “Sunken Treasure,” from 1996’s Being There, underwent the most thorough transformation, a bluesy shadow of the heart-on-sleeve ballad it used to be.

Sansone, Cline, Stirratt, Kotche, and Mikael Jorgensen dismantled “Via Chicago” while Tweedy sportlingly kept the vocal pace, using lightning crescendos to thwart the original version’s hesitation. “Shot In The Arm,” “Hummingbird,” and “Muzzle Of Bees” haven’t changed much from the Kicking Television live versions unleashed last year, though the band did dust-off a Mermaid Avenue rarity, “Airline To Heaven,” reimagining it in their current scope.

As the show progressed it turned more resolutely into a homecoming parade (“California Stars,” “Heavy Metal Drummer,” “The Late Greats”) spiked with new songs (possibly titled “Write Myself,” “There’s A Light,” and “Walkin'”). Tweedy did his best to be ironic while rousing the crowd into a screaming frenzy, though he was clearly enjoying himself. That much hasn’t changed.

— Steve Forstneger

Category: Live Reviews, Weekly