MAGNET Magazine: We are beyond shocked and saddened to share that MAGNET senior writer Jonathan Valania passed away unexpectedly September 11. Valania (virtually no one ever referred to him by his first name) was an extraordinary writer whose lengthy cover stories and features helped define the editorial voice of the print magazine throughout our 25-year, 150-issue run. He literally traveled the world for MAGNET, hanging out with and interviewing musicians at length to give our readers a glimpse of a side of these artists they could never see on their own.

Valania was a larger-than-life personality who was never afraid to ask the tough questions—repeatedly if necessary—to get to the truth. But, at heart, Valania was a life-long music fanatic, like the rest of us, who was always on the lookout for something new and great to listen to. MAGNET would have been a very different, lesser magazine without Valania. Not having him around anymore hasn’t really sunk in yet, but it will, and it’s going to be hard.

Honor his memory by reading these stories he wrote, plus anything else that you can find with his byline. And, if you have an hour to spend, check out the podcast at the bottom, wherein Valania and MAGNET editor-in-chief Eric T. Miller discuss what went on behind the scenes during the first 20 years of the magazine.

R.I.P., Valania.

MAGNET Magazine: R.I.P. MAGNET Senior Writer Jonathan Valania

Photo by JOSH PELTA-HELLER

NPR: David Byrne is, of course, the lead singer and frontman of the Talking Heads. The band recorded hit songs like “Psycho Killer,” “Life During Wartime,” “Once in a Lifetime,” “Burning Down the House,” and so many more.

He is also a solo artist in his own right and has recorded instrumental electronic albums, pop records, and spoken word. He’s collaborated with Brian Eno, St. Vincent, Philip Glass, and Selena to name a few. He’s written books, scored soundtracks, even wrote and directed his own movie, 1986’s True Stories.

If you wanted to find a common theme in his work, maybe it’s that David Byrne has always worked to push the boundaries of what pop music can be. While at the same time, he takes high art – the kind of stuff you see in Manhattan galleries or in repertory theaters in Brooklyn – and makes it more accessible and familiar.

American Utopia is his latest project. It started as an album in 2018, then he toured on it with a handful of dates across the U.S. Only, he’s David Byrne, so he went the extra mile and added 12 musicians, all dressed alike in gray suits, carrying their instruments like a marching band and dancing with them. Everything’s also wireless. With nothing binding them to one spot, they can dance and move completely freely. It’s not like any concert you’ve ever seen.

He parlayed the tour into a full on Broadway production, premiering in 2019. Then, American Utopia’s live show became a movie directed by the one and only Spike Lee. That dropped late last year.

If you happen to be in New York, American Utopia will be returning to Broadway on September 17. You can also experience the show on your TV. The concert film is streaming now on HBO Max. It will also be debuting in theaters for the first time on September 15. David Byrne chats with us about American Utopia and his return to playing live music. He also shares some of the music he’s been listening to lately and tells us about where he learned his iconic dance moves. Plus, he’ll tell us why his very different brain powers his art. MORE

PREVIOUSLY: David Byrne — Talking Heads architect and post-New Wave elder statesman of all things arch, artsy and oblique — is the Marcel Duchamp of 20th Century rock n’ roll, transmuting the artifacts of the mundane and the quotidian into magical charms to ward off the confusion, dread and ennui of modern life. He is, in other words, an antidote for our current season in Hell, and his arrival at the Mann last night backed by what is, for lack of a better description, The Greatest Marching Band on Earth, to deliver humane tidings of comfort and joy in the guise of high concept performance art, came not a moment too soon. For the past six months he has been touring the globe in support of his latest album, the archly titled American Utopia, and putting on what I can safely say without fear of exaggeration is, as of this writing, the Greatest Show on Earth. That is not hyperbole, if anything that is an understatement.

In terms of the setlist, the show is an ecstatic blend of modernized takes on Talking Heads quirk-pop classics and the oblique strategies and heartfelt ironies of his post-Heads solo work and collaborations with the likes of Brian Eno, Fatboy Slim and St. Vincent. Which, on paper, sounds fairly pro-forma for an artist of Byrne’s stature and vast back catalog of cutting edge work, but to see it in person, it is nothing short of jaw-dropping — a post-post-modernist miracle of human ingenuity, precision and grace. I call it MOMA-rock: A rapturous  marriage of modern dance, minimalist grandeur, shit-hot musicianship, and gorgeous gale-force chorales that sing the body electric — all performed without wires, fixed instruments, pre-recorded backing tracks or shoes. All of it cooked up by the beautiful mind of David Byrne, who, at the onset of his autumn years, with his thick shock of pure white hair, has evolved into a glorious amalgam of Mark Twain and David Lynch — simultaneously folksy and wise and kind and still barefoot in the head after all these years, displaying the tireless vitality and artistic potency of a man a third of his age. MORE

Artwork by XZIRTAEBX

Alabama Shakes was formed in 2009 in Athens, Alabama — by a postal worker, a nuclear plant night watchmen, an animal clinic worker and a house painter — as a viable alternative to watching the cars rust, which was the prevailing pastime in Athens at the time. Having weathered a dues-paying, teeth-cutting cover band purgatory of sports bars and country dives and all the mightier for it, the Shakes began building buzz when the breathless blogger hype proved not just believable but vastly understated. On 2012’s million-selling Boys And Girls, Alabama Shakes sounded like Exile On Main Street with Aretha Franklin on lead vocals and Jagger on coke and tambourine. Or Lynyrd Skynyrd’s plane crashing into the Big Brother and the Holding Company’s tour bus.

The sepia-toned Americana, tar-black blooze ecstasies and Muscle Shoals-inflected soul salvations of Boys And Girls blew huge smoking holes in the notion that you simply cannot make it in this business dressed in neckbeards and cat lady glasses no matter how possessed you play or how transcendental the sound you make. The follow up, 2015’s Sound & Color sounds like Nina Simone covering Bowie’s Station To Station (note the deep space setting of the video for the title track), wedding muddy water rock n’ roll to the pneumatic wheeze of analog electronica. No longer just The Mouth That Roared, singer Brittany Howard mixed it up, too, alternately purring like a cat on a hot tin roof and shredding apocalyptic like Mary Clayton at the 3:06 mark of “Gimme Shelter.” It was, hands down, the best album released that year or next and fittingly it went to number one and took home three Grammys.

And then they went dark.

At the beginning of the summer, it was announced that, after multiple aborted attempts to write and record a proper follow-up to Sound & Color, Brittany Howard was striking out on her own, leaving a question mark hanging ominously over the future of the Alabama Shakes. A few days ago, she dropped Jaime, a mesmerizing goats head soup of 21st century psychedelia, blunt-stoked R&B, gospel rapture, moonlit lullaby and greasy funk that dances with the devil and gets right with God, somehow all at once. Named in tribute to her beloved sister who passed away at the tender age of 13, Jaime is a deeply personal statement, a shape-shifting series of prismatic sonic vignettes that rips the band-aid off the psychic lacerations of race, region, religion and sexual personae. After just one listen it becomes immediately apparent why she had to walk down this road alone — and the world is a better place for it.

BRITTANY HOWARD + MY MORNING JACKET @ THE MANN WED. SEPT. 8TH

————

My Morning Jacket proudly announce the upcoming release of their ninth studio album. Self-titled, MY MORNING JACKET (ATO Records) arrives Friday, October 22 at all DSPs and in various physical formats, including CD and special edition 2LP vinyl; pre-orders begin today. MY MORNING JACKET is preceded by today’s premiere of the album’s first single, “Regularly Scheduled Programming,” available everywhere now with an official music video co-directed by Jim James and George Mays streaming on YouTube.“This song really hits home for me after what we’ve gone through with the pandemic,” says My Morning Jacket’s frontman Jim James on the release of “Regularly Scheduled Programming.” “But even before then, it felt like so many of us were trading real life for social media, trading our own stories for the storylines on TV, trading our consciousness for drugs. We need to help each other wake up to real love before it’s too late.”

The band’s first new music since 2015’s GRAMMY® Award-nominated THE WATERFALL, MY MORNING JACKET reaffirms the rarefied magic that’s made My Morning Jacket so beloved, embedding every groove with moments of discovery, revelation, and ecstatic catharsis. Produced and engineered by James over two multi-week sessions at Los Angeles, CA’s 64 Sound, the album came to life after what looked like a permanent hiatus for the band. But after performing four shows in summer 2019 – beginning with two mind-blowing nights at Red Rocks Amphitheatre – My Morning Jacket was overcome with the urge to carry on. That sense of purpose can be heard throughout the thrillingly expansive MY MORNING JACKET. For all its unbridled joy, songs like “Regularly Scheduled Programming” and the otherworldly, album-closing “I Never Could Get Enough” once again reveal My Morning Jacket’s hunger for exploring the most nuanced and layered existential questions in song form while simultaneously harnessing the hypnotic intensity of their legendary live show more fully than ever before.

“I hope this album brings people a lot of joy and relief, especially since we’ve all been cooped up for so long,” says James. “I know that feeling you get from driving around blasting music you love, or even lying in bed and crying to the music you love. The fact that we’re able to be a part of people’s lives in that way is so magical to us, and it feels really good that we’re still around to keep doing that.”

MY MORNING JACKET will be available on CD as well as two vinyl configurations: 2xLP Clear Vinyl featuring a gatefold jacket with artwork by Robert Beatty, custom inner-sleeves with lyrics, and digital download; and 2xLP 180-Gram Deluxe Colored Vinyl featuring cloudy blue and cloudy orange colored vinyl, deluxe foil gatefold jacket with artwork by Robert Beatty, 24” x 24” circular fold-out poster, custom inner-sleeves with lyrics, and digital download.

PREVIOUSLY: Q&A W/ MY MORNING JACKET’S JIM JAMES

BY DYLAN LONG Walking her dog along the streets of Ardmore last summer, Philly music scene veteran Laura Mann happened upon a distinctive Masonic building that struck her fancy. “I have to see the inside of it, she said to herself. Fast forward to September 4, 2021, Ardmore will officially become home to the new-and-improved Living Room 35 E, a 300-400 music space pioneered by Laura Mann, a veteran of the Philly music scene. Located at 35 E. Ardmore Avenue, the titular venue is a precise set of steps away from her previous space, Living Room 35 East, notably located at 35 E. Lancaster Avenue.

“It’s really cool and fun that it worked out to have the same address,” said Mann, after her original Ardmore space was shuttered by the ongoing global pandemic.

“I want people to wear masks when they come in, I want people to be vaccinated or show a covid test at the door,” said Laura on reopening during what is now another daunting phase of the ongoing pandemic. The new venue, which will serve a variety of light snacks, beverages, and continue to allow BYOB, comes after the pandemic caused the original and much more intimate space to shut down.

Not only was the previous space far too small to comfortably social distance, she said, the artists she had her eye on, people like Marshall Crenshaw and John Waite, typically draw far more fans than she could comfortably fit in the 40-capacity space.

“You can’t have somebody that’s a big national artist come in and make the numbers work with that many people,” she said.

While told by many that the original venue was a risk back in 2018, it became an award-winning live room destined for glory. Needless to say, the pandemic brought that momentum to a dead halt.

While perhaps a bit nostalgic for the more intimate setting she previously had, Mann seems more hopeful than ever for the future to come.

“It’s really cool. I have a lot more opportunity with who I can bring in now with the size of the venue,” she said.

The grand reopening of the Living Room 35 E takes place Saturday, September 4th, featuring feel-good folk-rockers US Rails. The venue’s quickly-growing calendar will feature performances from Mr. Crenshaw (10/16) and Mr. Waite (11/07) and more, in addition to also serving a space for movie nights, stand up, and live conversations. Check out the venue’s updated website here.

BY JONATHAN HOULON FOLK MUSIC EDITOR I was always surprised that Tom T. Hall wasn’t recognized during the Great Alt-Country Scare of the 1990s in the way that, say, Johnny Cash and, to a lesser extent, Willie Nelson were.  Sure, there was the obligatory tribute album to The Storyteller (as TTH was often called) that included No Depression stalwarts at the time such as Richard Buckner, Joe Henry, Iris Dement, and Whiskeytown.  They called it Real: The Tom T. Hall Project and it almost seemed like a reclamation effort to rescue the great man from obscurity.  Hall was an enormous country music star in the ‘70s but, despite the good intentions of the alt-country crew, he never seemed to get his critical due.  Well, lemme tell ya:  Tom T. was a giant.  In his own unique way worthy of inclusion on the Hillbilly Rushmore alongside the Man in Black, Hank, Hag, or whoever else you’d put up there.

Tom certainly could veer deep deep into the cornfield at times.  Check out some of these song titles:  “Old Dogs, Children, and Watermelon Wine” (yucko).  Or how about this howler?  “I Like Beer.”  Is that so, T.?  He named one tune “I Love” and then, as he was wont to do in his less accomplished moments, listed the objects of his affection, including in the very first line, “little baby ducks, pick-up trucks, slow movin’ trains and rain.”  Doesn’t really make you wanna check him out, I know!

BUT, at his best, which was really most of the time, Hall abided by his own hard-hitting adage that “some people can go around the world and not see a thing while other folks can take a walk around their block and see the whole world.”  Hall was an eagle-eyed observer – especially of the community he grew up around in rural Kentucky – and has been compared to Hemingway and Carver.  Indeed, his lyrics possess a lapidary dignity that warrants such high praise.

Ol’ T. passed away on August 20th at the ripe old age of 85.  Here’s a baker’s half-dozen for your consideration:

 
“That’s How I Got to Memphis”:  First track on T.’s first record and one of his most covered songs.  To my ears, no one does it better than Tom.  He was not blessed with much vocal prowess but there’s a mellifluous quality to his limited range that works perfectly with his simple but compelling melodies.  Hall sings, “If you love somebody enough, you’ll go wherever they go/  That’s how I got to Memphis.”  He’s singing about a place but also a state of mind.  Legendary Nashville producer Jerry Kennedy gets it all down cold, approximating a sound, to these ears, not dissimilar to that of Blonde On Blonde.  Curious aside:  At a Musicares awards ceremony a few years back, his Bobness attacked Tom T. for writing overcooked lyrics.  The Nobel Laureate was trying to compliment Kris Kristofferson by setting up Tom as a strawman of sorts.  But the whole thing didn’t make sense:  Hall was as responsible or perhaps even more responsible for revolutionizing country music lyrics than Kris Kris and, as far as recorded output goes, the two aren’t in the same league:  T. put out at least a dozen certifiably great records.  You’d be hard pressed to find a single great-start-to-finish platter in all of Kristofferson’s oeuvre.

 
“Forbidden Flowers”:  Tom T. wrote in his Songwriter’s Handbook, “I have often lamented that some of my favorite songs are tucked away inside albums that are out of print. I sometimes wish they could have been single records and given the chance to star in the galaxy of good songs.” Indeed, there are buried gems to be found in almost of all of Hall’s records, especially through the 70s.  “Forbidden Flowers” is one such gem that, like “Memphis,” resides on his 1969 debut, The Ballad Of 40 Dollars.  Though known for his narrative abilities, here Hall leans on symbolism.  I used to sing this one with my band John Train in the old North Star days.  But I was too young at the time to really understand that “if you pick forbidden flowers, you may shatter someone’s dreams.”  I may need to give this one another shake.

 
“Homecoming”:  The title track from T.’s second record, also released in 1969.  Concerning this track, Joe Henry in the liner notes to Real: The Tom T. Hall Project writes: “Here is a one-sided conversation of an adult singing star who pops in on his widowed father for the first time in years for a brief obligatory visit while traveling through on tour.  It’s like a Raymond Carver short story – a bite out of the middle of someone’s life, beginning abruptly and dangling at the end with a flash of almost unspeakable regret.  It’s remarkable that with conversational small-talk, we know in a handful of verses all we need to about this man, his relationship to his family, his arrogant façade and his gnawing self-doubt.”

 
“I Flew Over Our House Last Night”:  I always loved Joe Henry’s version of yet another great sleeper from The Storyteller.  Joe cut it for his 1993 release Kindness In The World where he was backed by the Jayhawks on what has to be one of the best records from the aforementioned alt-country scare of the ‘90s.  At first glance, Henry and Hall seem like odd bedfellows but a closer listen demonstrates that Joe writes with the same sort of precision about our interior world as Tom writes about the outside.  Both problematize the actual distinction i.e. what counts as in vs. out?  Dig? ( Last time http://www.phawker.com/2019/05/16/tribute-let-us-now-praise-joe-henry/ we talked about Joe, he was in the middle of a very serious cancer scare.  I am happy to report that he has recovered and is actually hitting the road later this year!)  In The Songwriter’s Handbook, Hall wrote of this number: “Picture a successful businessman-type in a jetliner; perhaps separated for some reason from a girl he had loved or a woman he had been married to.  Now they are living in completely different worlds.  On this evening, he is flying over her house.”

 

“The Year that Clayton Delaney Died”:  If Tom T. had fallen off the radar, I suppose Steve Young was never even in range as far as the general public is concerned.  I’ve written about him at length in other quarters.  https://www.trainarmy.com/single-post/2017/02/12/rip-steve-young  Check out how the Renegade Picker belts out this Hall classic which originally appeared on 1971’s In Search Of A Song, probably The Storyteller’s best overall collection and as good a place to start as any.  Tom T. travelled down to Kentucky for a week, took some notes, drove back to Nashville and hammered out “Clayton Delaney” alongside a bunch of other bangers based on his trip.  They don’t write ‘em like that anymore, Tom!

 

“Mama Bake A Pie (Daddy Kill a Chicken)”:  When I was putting together John Train’s Mesopotamia Blues LP, I tried to connect the then-raging Iraq War to past U.S. conflicts (yes, the record was a flop!).  I chose this Hall number from 1971’s 100 Children.  Hoss was prolific AF, right?  Here’s the opening stanza: “People staring at me as they wheel me down the ramp towards my plane/the war is over for me I’ve forgotten everything except the pain/thank you, sir, and yes, sir, I did it for the old red white and blue/and since I won’t be walking, I suppose I’ll save some money buying shoes.”  Damn. Convinced yet?

 
“Coffee with Tom T. Hall”:  Talk about criminally underrated, check out this one from my old Record Cellar labelmate, Chet Delcampo.  If my memory serves me well, I think the Man himself might have heard this and given it his seal of approval.  In any case, Chet’s worth checking out too! Hall certainly loved his coffee – he even wrote a couple of songs on the subject – and undoubtedly needed it to wash down the “hot bologna, eggs, and gravy” he sang so affectionately of on “A Week In The County Jail” off his debut album.  I guess Tom T. wasn’t exactly a foodie!  But a legend he was and remains.  Godspeed, Storyteller.

NEW YORK TIMES: Indeed, Mr. Watts was a man of contradictions — a jazzman in the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band, an old-fashioned gentleman among pirates and bad boys, a homebody who spent much of his work life on the road. It was also his contradictions — his loose, swinging style combined with his love of precision; his idiosyncratic technique combined with his remarkable versatility — that made him such an exceptional drummer, and the perfect musical partner for Keith Richards in forging the Stones’s signature sound.

As the band’s former bass player Bill Wyman recalled: “Every band follows the drummer. We don’t follow Charlie. Charlie follows Keith. So the drums are very slightly behind Keith. It’s only fractional. Seconds. Minuscule.” But it makes the Stones impossible to copy.

The propulsive drive of “Get Off My Cloud”; the manic, percussive beat of “19th Nervous Breakdown”; the gathering sense of menace in “Gimme Shelter”; the jazzy syncopation of “Start Me Up”; the lovely, laconic swing of “Beast of Burden” — all were testaments to Mr. Watts’s gift for modulating the mood of a track to create a musical conversation with Mr. Richards’s galvanic guitar and punctuate Mr. Jagger’s vocals and performance. The drummer had a minimalist’s instinct for how to make the most emotional impact with the most economical of licks, when to withhold and when to step on the gas, and how to effortlessly shift gears between the languid and the urgent, between savage immediacy and elegant formality. MORE

Photo by JOSH PELTA-HELLER

Any aging Gen-X-er worth their scuffed-up Doc Martens will wax nostalgic for music’s middle-alt era, but Thursday night’s show at BB&T pavilion was better than any Third-Eye-Blind reunion supported by the Spin Doctors and the Nixons.  A pandemic postponement from last year, Alanis Morissette’s now-25th-plus-1 celebration of the release of her seminal 1995 debut record Jagged Little Pill traded originally scheduled supporting guest Liz Phair for Cat Power, and retained post-grunge synth-rockers Garbage when it came to at long last to the BB&T Pavillion on Thursday.

Twenty-eight years on now, after their inception as drummer and Nevermind (yes, that Nevermind)-producer Butch Vig’s side project, Garbage is touring in support of their brand new seventh studio album No Gods No Masters, an effort for which singer Shirley Manson boasts her most sophisticated songwriting yet, and an album that ambitiously takes on some heady intellectual, philosophical and current event topics while still being critically heralded as Garbage in gloriously pure form.

Perhaps that’s because Garbage have somehow managed to retain the same original four-member lineup they started with, back in their early days writing lyrics in a cabin in the woods of northern Wisconsin. Now 55, Manson still sounds as incredible as ever on both the new ones as well as the early hits like “Stupid Girl” and “I Think I’m Paranoid.” She doesn’t really dance during the instrumental parts so much as pace intently around the stage, looking as though she’s trying to work something out, and timing the circular deliberation perfectly with her arrival back at the mic to tell you what it is in charmingly menacing vocals delivered from behind her iconic curtain of vermilion hair. More, please. — JOSH PELTA-HELLER

Photo by JOSH PELTA-HELLER

The post-global-pandemic resumption of live music events seems like the sort of thing that should be accompanied with some fanfare, some skywritten announcement or proclamation from a town crier. Something. It’s a big deal, and the abrupt shutdown a year-and-a-half ago of nearly everything — including most painfully, for many of us, live music — was a stark reminder never to take for granted the opportunity to attend, participate in and share these collective cultural experiences.

But that’s old news, anyway: just when post-global-pandemic life may have looked back in June as though it were within easy reach, a new more contagious viral strain threatens to make this fall look a little too much like the last, as what bands had been back on the bill for now remain so only tentatively. Authoritative public health guidance feels too dynamic for comfort, regrettably yoked to political considerations. Numbers climb again, and anxieties heighten by the day. As one devastatingly handsome emo rock-and-roll rabbi once put it: the future’s uncertain, and the end is always near.

Okay, so if no one’s in the mood, maybe cancel the fanfare. But not the shows again, not just yet. Dim the Mann Center house lights and enter Wilco, stage left, filtering over to their instruments quietly, as if to not draw too much attention to themselves following a blistering set from unlikely co-headliners Sleater-Kinney and what seemed like an unusually short intermission. When the spotlights caught him, frontman Jeff Tweedy issued a characteristically humble hello, and was ushered into song by the morse-code-ish first notes of opener “A Shot In The Arm,” a fan favorite now reimagined as the unintended vaccine anthem Wilco never knew they wrote.

After having been postponed from last summer, the rescheduled dates of the ironically named “It’s Time” tour are weathering not just coronavirus resurgence, but Tropical Storm Henri and broken bones, too — the unfortunate result of a recent scooter accident that had opener Nnamdi absent for two tour nights for emergency wrist surgery. Still, this show finally happened. Sleater’s Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker stuck mainly to more recent material that included tracks from the just-out Path Of Wellness, and Tweedy and co. skimmed cuts from across their catalog. Both bands paused, if only briefly, to collectively acknowledge the unique privilege of shared, live music, further helping to diffuse some of the tensions, as masks were lowered and beers raised, a communal secular prayer on one warm summer night in the otherwise cold comforts of these strange times. — JOSH PELTA-HELLER

Photo by JOSH PELTA-HELLER

Photo by DYLAN JARED LONG

“I’ve performed at big arenas, I’ve played Wembley Stadium. I sang on stage with Cyndi Lauper, written songs with Weezer. I’ve been on stage with Joan Jett. And nothing compares to this,” said Laura Jane Grace,  the singer-songwriter known best for founding punk group Against Me!,  mid-set atop the parking lot at Four Seasons Landscaping on Saturday. “I draw a bigger crowd than Rudy Giuliani, and I have more Twitter followers than Donald Trump,” she declared to a sea of eager smiles, “which isn’t fucking so bad for a transgender high school dropout.”

The makeshift stage at Four Seasons was flanked by plants, and just big enough to fit a couple amps, monitors and a drum machine with some walking room left over. The atmosphere was giddy, almost carnival-like, with a setup à-la Punk Rock Flea Market. A cut-out of Rudy Giuliani stood next to a podium. Stands were set up for purchasing pretzels and local craft beer, which sat in cans with custom-made graphics celebrating the momentous occasion. Merch tables for both Total Landscaping and Laura Jane Grace saw lines ten punks deep. For this wasn’t merely your average day acoustic set. It was a celebration.

Chicago-based Brendan Kelly warmed up the crowd with an acoustic set of his own as fans sifted throughout the lot and over next door to catch glimpses of the famed crematorium and porn shop, dubbed Fantasy Island. “I thought this was a hotel,” Kelly giggled into the mic. “What the fuck.” Laughter from the crowd. The whole thing did smell of a fever dream, and I personally couldn’t help but wonder what strange shit in the air had ultimately led us down the timeline where this show was actually happening. To give credit where credit is due, it was Kelly’s idea to do the show at Total Landscaping, according to a tweet from Grace.

Grace was determined to rid all bad juju from the most infamous landscaping service in America, aka ground zero of the Trump campaign’s transition from public menace into toxic farce. For the uninitiated, the venue was the site of a surreal press conference led by Rudy Giuliani, former personal attorney for Donald Trump, four days after the election. A full explanation as to why this venue was selected in the first place remains in the wind, but it screams “somebody fucked up.” The presser was laden with falsehoods and fantastical rhetoric pushing conspiracies about voter fraud in the presidential race, embodying the last-ditch, flop-sweat desperation of the Trump campaign in its failed attempt to overturn a free and fair election banana republic-style.

During songs about embodying your insecurities and the disorienting  journey of self-discovery to an unreleased song simply named “All Fucked Out,” Grace’s powerful voice swept over the crowd, her candid lyrics both poignant and full of elation. Fans shouted along to Against Me! classics such as “Black Me Out” and “Pints Of Guinness Make You Strong,” which were mixed in between tunes of her own. The performance was a spiritual and energetic cleansing, the antithesis of everything that put this unassuming business in the industrial Northeast on the map to begin with. It was pure, and it was punk. — DYLAN JARED LONG

Photo by Christian Lantry

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story was originally published in the pages of MAGNET MAGAZINE in June of 2002, in advance of the release of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. We are reprising it here in advance of Wilco’s performance at the Mann Center on Sunday August 22nd, with special guests Sleater-Kinney.

BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR MAGNET

so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.

That was written by William Carlos Williams, an American poet. Best I can tell, he was talking about the significance of insignificance, that little things truly do mean a lot—like if you could surf the past in a time machine and you did something as small as, say, kicking a stone in the Stone Age, it could send a ripple through the entire fabric of history. Everything after could be slightly different. You might even erase yourself from existence.

I bring this up because this is a story about American poets, who will be referred to hereafter as the rock band Wilco. And this is a story filled with insignificance: business deals, personnel changes, communication breakdowns, creative dysfunction and small personal failures. Basically, a lot of red wheelbarrows in the rain that so much depends upon. Not the least of which is Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, which I’m pretty sure will be remembered one day as great American poetry in thought and word and sound and action. If 1999’s Summerteeth was Wilco’s Pet Sounds, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is its Smile—American beauty edged in transcendental weirdness and giddy invention. YHF is the smoking gun in the case for Wilco being the new Great American Band—a torch-passing tradition that stretches from prime R.E.M. to the Band to Bob Dylan, who got it from Woody Guthrie, who picked it up from Carl Sandburg, who had it passed to him by Walt Whitman.

The wonderment of this artistic triumph is made all the more remarkable by the fact it happened at a time when Wilco—perhaps the last group we’ll be able to refer to as “a great underground major-label rock band”—was completely reinventing itself in public. First, the drummer was asked to leave. Then, the band’s label asked the band to leave. Finally, the guitar player was asked to leave. How and why all these things happened depends on whom you ask. That’s the thing about these red wheelbarrows upon which so much depends.

Don’t Go Back To Rockville
The recent release of Uncle Tupelo’s 89/93: An Anthology—the first step in Columbia/Legacy’s plan to reissue the band’s three indie records—isn’t just a reminder of where Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy has been, but also how far he’s come. He sounds so boyish and tentative on those recordings, especially compared to fellow Uncle Tupelo singer/songwriter Jay Farrar’s glowering, Mount Rushmore gravitas. At the time, everyone thought Farrar was the heavyweight and Tweedy the lightweight, the eager one in the straw hat with the Minutemen jones. And then Tweedy got heavy. He stepped out of Farrar’s shadow Oct. 22, 1996. That’s the day Being There, Wilco’s sophomore album, was released. And on that day, Jeff Tweedy started casting his own shadow, and it’s only stretched farther and wider with each ensuing Wilco album. Not that he cares about shadows anymore, his or anybody else’s. He’s done worshiping heroes; now he just learns from them. That’s what Being There was about.

The conventional wisdom is that Uncle Tupelo pioneered the alt-country genre, and while that’s factually incorrect—‘80s groups like the Long Ryders and Green On Red first wedded rootsy twang to indie rock—the band did succeed in making country music cool in dorm rooms across America. Columbia/Legacy’s reissue series came about when Tweedy and Farrar—who share the same attorney—finally managed to wrest control of their master tapes away from Rockville Records, the now-defunct label that released Uncle Tupelo’s first three albums. Tweedy has nothing nice to say about Rockville: “Ran a very unethical business,” “tried to screw a lot of people” and “cease and desist orders” are some of the phrases he uses to describe the process of getting the band’s catalog back.

He does, however, have nice things to say about Farrar, which is somewhat surprising considering Uncle Tupelo didn’t exactly go gently into that good night. One day, Farrar announced he no longer wanted anything to do with Uncle Tupelo or the people involved—and that was the end. Apparently, a lot of water has passed under that particular bridge. Tweedy actually seems open to the notion of a one-off reunion. “Actually, nobody has asked us,” he says. “There’s no weirdness between me and Jay, we just don’t talk. But you know, we never talked much when we were in a band together.”

Summer Teeth And Some Are Mermaids
In the wake of Uncle Tupelo’s bitter split in 1994, Farrar went on to form Son Volt; Tweedy started Wilco. A.M., Wilco’s 1995 debut, sounds like Uncle Tupelo minus Farrar, which was pretty much the case. All of that changed when Jay Bennett, formerly of Midwest power-popsters Titanic Love Affair, joined the band shortly after the completion of A.M. Bennett brought with him a fairly encyclopedic knowledge of rock music, and his creative partnership with Tweedy opened a lot of new doors, enough to fill the two CDs that would make up Being There. On the back cover of the album is a photograph of disembodied hands hovering over the keys of a piano. This would prove to be a prophetic image: Wilco was about to make a great leap forward artistically.

Although Bennett was hired on as a guitar player, Tweedy was delighted to learn he could also play piano. Tweedy started writing with piano voicings in mind, something he’d never done before. At every tour stop, they would comb junk shops and music stores for esoteric keyboards: modular synthesizers, moogs, mellotrons, theremins. They would doodle endlessly, searching for strange new textures onto which they could project the songs that would eventually become Summerteeth. The Pet Sounds boxed set was released around this time, and it, too, was closely studied.

Tweedy also began to rethink the way he approached lyrics, questioning his insistence on writing in the conversational voice. He relaxed his rule against committing lyrics to paper: If you couldn’t remember it, it wasn’t worth singing in the first place. “I used to want to write songs that anybody could sing, but then I started to think it was OK to write songs that only sound right when I sing them,” says Tweedy.

He began to realize mysterious things happened in the spaces between words, and that when you arranged them in certain ways, you could create magnetic fields of deep suggestiveness. He experimented with collage and cut-up techniques, snipping words out of newspapers and magazines, tossing them in a hat and drawing them randomly to see what sentences they made. He would write a page of lyrics, then switch all the nouns and verbs. To break up the boredom on the road, Wilco and crew would participate in an old surrealist word game called cadavre exquis (“exquisite corpse”). A typewriter would be set up in the back of the bus, and whenever someone felt like it, he could go back and type a sentence. The one rule: You could only see the sentence typed by the person before you; all the rest were kept covered. Some of this accidental poetry would make it into songs, such as the line “Please beware, the quiet front yard,” from Summerteeth’s “She’s A Jar.”

Marriage and fatherhood had deepened Tweedy’s perspective. He learned to quiet his mind in the hours he would sit by his son Spencer’s bedside, waiting for him to fall asleep. “I really just started reading six years ago,” says Tweedy. “It’s not like I didn’t read before, but now I actually finish books. I’ve finished more books in the last six years than I did in the preceding 28 years of my life.” Books like The Making Of A Poem: A Norton Anthology Of Poetic Forms and The Anxiety Of Influence: A Theory Of Poetry by Harold Bloom. Beckett novels. Books about Dadaism, surrealism and minimalism. It was obvious to anyone who was paying attention that Tweedy was becoming something extremely rare in rock ‘n’ roll: a poet.

Billy Bragg seemed to notice. In 1995, Woody Guthrie’s daughter Nora invited Bragg to dig through the dustbowl bard’s extensive archives of orphaned lyrics and build songs out of them. It was Bragg’s idea to include Wilco in the Mermaid Avenue project. In 1997, Tweedy made a pilgrimage to the Guthrie archives in New York City, spending hours sifting through thousands of pages of lyrics, doodles and musings. It’s impossible to ignore the passing-of-the-torch analogies: young upstart American songwriter given the task of finishing the work of a giant of American music.

That December in Chicago, Wilco recorded a handful of tunes it had put to Guthrie’s lyrics before heading to Ireland a month later to record with Bragg. Six weeks under Dublin’s damp, dreary skies took its toll on the band. “It was a rough time,” says Tweedy. According to some observers, this is when Tweedy and Bennett’s friendship and creative partnership began to fray. “Jay Bennett lost his mind in Dublin,” says one insider close to Wilco.

Bennett cops to going a little stir crazy. “We had just come off the Being There tour, which was Wilco’s sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll tour,” says Bennett. “I had just quit alcohol and caffeine. And the sun came out for maybe five minutes in the six weeks we were there.” Despite the misery, it was a prolific time. The bulk of the tracks that appear on volumes one and two of Mermaid Avenue were recorded; in all, 49 songs were put to tape.

Still, it was an uneasy partnership with Bragg, which explains in part why there never was a Mermaid Avenue tour. “As a collaboration, it had worn thin,” says Tweedy, making it clear Wilco won’t be doing a Mermaid Avenue Vol. III. “We never really saw eye to eye. It was hard for us to relinquish control over what we put out into the world, as I’m sure it was for Billy.”

On top of it all, the cruel logic of major-label math meant Wilco’s royalties for both Mermaid Avenue albums were less than $1,000 despite their combined sales of about 400,000. Tweedy had long ago figured out that making records isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme. “Since Uncle Tupelo, I’ve been trained that you put out a record and people buy it five years later,” says Tweedy.

He Fell In Love With A Drummer
In the early days of Wilco, each member called a different city home, with Tweedy living in Chicago, Bennett in Champaign, Ill., bassist John Stirratt in New Orleans and drummer Ken Coomer in Nashville. Everyone would saddle up in Chicago for tours and recording sessions, then go their separate ways afterward. Stirratt and Bennett soon relocated to Chicago, but Coomer elected to stay in Nashville. It was a decision that ultimately led to him being asked to leave the band early last year. He was, quite simply, out of the loop.

After Dublin, Wilco took up residence in a loft space in Chicago’s Old Irving Park neighborhood. It would serve as recording studio, secret hideout and incubator of ideas. “It became a legitimate workshop, and I don’t think Ken ever got the concept of the loft,” says Stirratt. “We were paying a lot of money for it, and we wanted to take full advantage of it. He never even bothered to get his own key to the place. Sometimes he would be waiting outside for one of us to let him in. It was like, ‘You don’t understand. This is your place, too.’”

The band’s finances were a sore subject with the drummer. To this day, Wilco has yet to see a dime in royalties from album sales. Salaries are drawn from touring revenue, and in an off year, each member earns about $30,000—in a good year, as much as $70,000. Tweedy draws additional income from publishing royalties and is said to be more generous with it than most.

Two years ago, Coomer asked that Wilco’s books be audited. Reportedly, when he got the results, his response was, “Wilco grossed a million dollars and I can’t pay my rent?” Wilco is run like a business—the band calls it Wilco World Tours—and as such, there’s significant overhead. “Ken was always the first to ask questions about that kind of stuff but the last to actually look into it,” says Stirratt. “You have to understand, this is a band that spent $125,000 on taxis in one year.”

In May 2000, Tweedy was invited by Chicago’s Noise Pop festival to collaborate with esteemed local highbrow-rock renaissance man Jim O’Rourke, who brought along drummer Glenn Kotche, a Kentucky native formally schooled in percussion. Kotche, a mainstay on the Chicago scene, has toured frequently with O’Rourke and played on a number of his records. The Noise Pop gig went so well that Tweedy and O’Rourke wrote and recorded a soon-to-be-released album with Kotche. One night, the drummer showed up at a Tweedy solo show and wound up sitting in.

“I don’t think he really knew any of the songs,” says Tweedy. “But it seemed like he had been playing them for 15 years. There was a really intuitive communication between the songs and what he was doing with them, and I felt really great about it.”

Sessions for Wilco’s fourth album began that summer: songwriting, woodshedding, demos. The working title was Here Comes Everybody. Wilco would record in two-week blocks, for which Coomer would fly into Chicago. Picking up where Summerteeth left off, Tweedy wanted to continue moving away from the band’s early rip-it-up live aesthetic and into heretofore uncharted territories of mood, vibe and sound. But an air of frustration and vague dissatisfaction hung over the sessions. For Tweedy, it felt like playing in “a Wilco cover band.”

By January, it became clear to the members of Wilco a change had to be made. “I hate to say ‘fired,’ but we let Ken go not based on his personality or our feelings about him as a drummer,” says Tweedy. “It was primarily about a chemistry and a relationship that I had developed with Glenn and his sensitivity to what I was trying to do musically. And I didn’t want to give that up. But it was a decision that could not have been made unless the rest of the band agreed to it.”

“It was a difficult decision, definitely not for the faint of heart,” says Stirratt. “It was rough.”

“It was handled really badly,” says Bennett. “(Wilco manager Tony) Margherita called him.”

Tweedy and Coomer haven’t spoken since.

When Swag, Coomer’s new band, was on tour later that spring, I asked him what had happened. He shrugged and said, “You tell me.” I called him at his Nashville home in February to get his side of the story. He still hasn’t called back.

Yankee … Hotel … Foxtrot … Over
Last November, Wilco received a letter from Los Angeles photographer Sam Jones. He wanted to make a film documenting his favorite band going through the process of recording and releasing its fourth album. Tweedy liked the idea, and Jones was given unlimited access and permission to film anything he saw fit. With cameras rolling and Kotche behind the drum kit, Wilco set about reworking and re-recording all the songs.

All the basic tracking for YHF was done in the band’s loft, and Bennett insisted on handling the bulk of the recording responsibilities. Everyone else chafed at this arrangement. “Jay had put himself in a position of being something other than a member of the band,” says Tweedy. “I think we would have all been happier if he had spent less time recording and more time making music.”

“Things came to a head between me and the rest of the band because I was wearing too many hats, and I’ll take the blame for that,” says Bennett.

A lot of time was given over to experimentation. The band held “noise parties,” building Rube Goldberg-style noisemaking contraptions, hooking up a fan so the blades struck the strings of a piano or an electric guitar, then running that sound through a chain of effects pedals before putting it to tape. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’s title comes from a recording of a short-wave radio broadcast featuring a woman intoning the NATO Phonetic Alphabet, which was mixed into the noisy coda of the song “Poor Places.” For additional nuance, Kotche would sometimes play one drum kit on the verse of a song and switch over to another kit for the chorus. He brought along his collection of ceramic floor tiles, which he played like a marimba. There was a lot of tape splicing and filtering instruments through modular synthesizers, “basically trying to destroy anything that sounded traditional or natural,” says Tweedy.

Given unlimited time and access to equipment, Wilco wound up recording many of the songs from YHF six or seven different ways, complete with vocals and instrumental overdubs. It was a bootlegger’s dream—seven versions of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot—but in the end, this approach proved exhausting and disorienting. “I would never want to record that way again,” says Stirratt.

At the end of March, the band convened at the Chicago Recording Company (the preferred studio of the Smashing Pumpkins and R. Kelly) to commence mixing. The first step was weeding through upward of 48 tracks’ worth of overdubs—“endless weirdness,” as Bennett calls it—for each song. It was to be a democratic process of elimination, with all members voting on decisions and Bennett steering from behind the mixing console. From the beginning, it was a trainwreck. “The decision-making of the group was not functioning properly,” says Tweedy of the sessions, which routinely stretched into 14-hour days.

According to Bennett, the presence of Jones’ film crew didn’t help matters. “It was as much about making a movie and trying to look like you’re making a record as actually making a record,” he says.

By this point, Bennett’s estrangement from the rest of the band was almost complete. One by one, the other members stopped showing up.

Back at the loft, a new plan was hatched: Bring in Jim O’Rourke to sort it all out and mix it down. Some say Bennett saw this as a slap in the face, but he begs to differ. “I co-wrote a bunch of those songs, and I recorded them,” says Bennett. “Am I the best person to be mixing it down? No. By that point, I was ready to do a hand-off.”

O’Rourke, Tweedy and Kotche set up shop at nearby Soma Electronic Music Studios (owned and run by Tortoise’s John McEntire) and began paring down the material and clearing away the clutter, occasionally recording fresh tracks to reinforce a new direction. The first thing O’Rourke did was strip away all the reverb and dry the songs out. “I don’t like using effects,” says O’Rourke. “I just think it separates the listener from the music.”

“Everyone thinks [O’Rourke] is this avant-garde guy, but he actually made the record less weird,” says Stirratt.

All the while, Bennett was back at the Wilco loft, furiously recording guitar and keyboard overdubs. “When he started to realize how little he was on the record, he would stay there day and night recording tracks and tracks, and it just didn’t fit in,” says Stirratt.

“The record was already done, and when we started mixing with Jim, the idea was ‘more space, less clutter,’” says Tweedy. “That was what was going on on one side of the city. I don’t know what was going on on the other side of the city.”

I Want To Thank You All For Nothing At All
When Reprise Records got word Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was nearing completion, the label penciled in a release date: September 11. Wilco sent Reprise a tape of the first batch of mixes: “Ashes Of American Flags,” “Kamera,” “Radio Cure.” Reprise’s enthusiasm was muted at best.

“We didn’t get an overwhelmingly positive response from them, so we decided that we were not going to talk to them any more until we finished the record,” says Tweedy. “We finished the record and sent it to them and didn’t hear anything for 14 or 15 days. That’s usually not good. When they finally did respond, they thought it still needed work. Our response was we were done with our record and weren’t interested in doing any more work on it. We were happy with it, and that’s the way we wanted it to come out. Their response was, ‘If you’re not willing to make some changes, you should consider whether or not you want to leave.’ And our response was, ‘We can do that?’”

At the time, Reprise was in the midst of a changing of the guard. Label head Howie Klein was retiring (one source at Reprise says he was quietly forced out). Klein was one of the last old-school major-label honchos who still believed in long-term career development. “Wilco was the band on Reprise slated to develop a deep and lasting catalog,” says Klein, who calls Summerteeth “the most beautiful album released in the last 10 years.”

Klein’s replacement, Tom Whalley, was busy tying up loose ends at his post at Interscope, and David Kahne, senior vice president of A&R at Reprise, was acting as label head in the interim. Reportedly, Kahne’s response to the album was, “It’s so bad it would kill Wilco’s career.” A noted producer who’s worked with everyone from Sugar Ray and Sublime to Paul McCartney and Tony Bennett, Kahne has a keen ear for what commercial radio likes to hear; he crafted the Bangles’ “Walk Like An Egyptian.” (Kahne declined an opportunity to tell his side of the story.)

“People have a hard time justifying their jobs when they don’t make some kind of change to what they’re manufacturing,” says Tweedy. “But they aren’t manufacturing something. They’re making copies of it and selling it to people on the street.”

By August, a deal was struck: Wilco would compensate the label $50,000 in exchange for ownership of the master tapes to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and release from its contract. From the outside, it looked like Wilco was getting fucked over by the suits, but to the band, it was like being handed a get-out-of-jail-free card. “Ninety-nine percent of the time, that doesn’t happen,” says Klein, explaining that labels usually drop bands and retain the rights to the music. “It’s the best thing that could have happened to them. I know David thought he was doing them a great favor.”

Most major-label artists earn a royalty rate of 12 percent of the retail price of a CD. The problem is, this 12 percent goes toward paying off the six-figure costs of making and marketing a record. As such, most bands never see any money from album sales. With all debts canceled and a new record bought and paid for, Wilco stands to make a nice chunk of change from the sale of YHF. When you consider Wilco sells 150,000-plus copies of each release at almost $20 a pop, we’re talking about a lot of lettuce. “We think of it as a great rock ‘n’ roll swindle,” says Tweedy.

In the wake of the Reprise buyout, Wilco found itself in the middle of a bidding war, sifting through offers from 30 different record companies. In December, the band settled on Nonesuch, a label that’s had a great deal of success in finding an audience for artier, grown-up music by bands like the Kronos Quartet and minimalist composers like Steve Reich and Philip Glass, not to mention the Buena Vista Social Club. Ironically, Nonesuch is owned by the same parent company as Reprise: AOL/Time Warner, which has now effectively paid for YHF twice. Tweedy was impressed by Nonesuch’s ability “to get a lot of people interested in a recording by a bunch of old Cubans.”

Take The Guitar Player For A Ride
On a muggy August day last year, Jeff Tweedy walked up to Jay Bennett in the parking lot of the Wilco loft and told him he couldn’t take it anymore. Bennett was officially fired. He would be compensated for his contributions to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. He could take all of his gear. He could tell the press whatever he wanted about how his departure came about. But he had to go.

This was a long time coming, as the relationship between Bennett and the other members of Wilco had been disintegrating for more than a year. There were numerous minor sins that pushed Bennett out of good graces with Tweedy and Co. Chief among them were frequent production gigs Bennett took on, which were seen as “whoring out the Wilco name,” according to someone close to the band. Bennett further ruffled feathers by enumerating his contributions to Wilco in the press. “Jay was very concerned about getting credit for what he did,” says Stirratt. “At the same time, in a lot of ways, Summerteeth was very much a Jay Bennett record.”

Then there were the drugs. There was a time when pills—mostly painkillers like Percocet and Vicodin—had a role in Wilco; this is a rock band after all. The pills made you feel warm and fuzzy and helped slow down the velocity of life on the road. They made you feel good onstage. It’s no accident Summerteeth sounds so druggy. At some point, according to sources in the Wilco camp, everybody stopped but Bennett—and that turned into a problem.

For the record, Bennett denies all of this. His explanation for his departure from the band is simple: He made a power grab and lost. “I tried to force an agenda,” he says. “I wanted to make a record that had more of the uptempo pop songs that got cut off the record. But [Tweedy] is the lyricist, and he was trying to make a statement. And I had a hard time seeing that because I was seeing things through my lens, which was, ‘You don’t leave uptempo pop songs off a record.’ I guess, in a way, I saw things the same way that Reprise did.”

In any event, Bennett is moving on. He got married in January and currently resides in Arlington Heights, a Chicago suburb. His basement—stacked floor to ceiling with his extensive collection of vintage musical instruments—has been converted into a recording studio. In the Wilco divorce, Bennett got the gear used in the recording of YHF. He reunited with old friend and songwriting partner Edward Burch, and together they have a new album called The Palace At 4am (Part 1). It’s mostly full of uptempo pop songs in the classic mold of Bennett’s idol, Elvis Costello, including a couple songs that didn’t make it onto YHF (“Venus Stopped The Train” and “Shankin’ Sugar”). Bennett says he couldn’t be happier. “I wanted to be in Wilco, but I didn’t want to be in Jeff Tweedy & Wilco,” says Bennett. “I knew I was second fiddle all along, and Jeff didn’t need a second fiddle anymore. And by that point, I wanted to be first fiddle.” It’s no accident The Palace At 4am was released the same day as Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

Down With Wilco
“I would like to salute the ashes of American flags,” Tweedy sings on YHF. File that under Careful What You Wish For in the Archives Of Eerie Coincidences. Tweedy spent the morning of September 11 playing slot cars with his six-year-old son Spencer. All told, it seems as reasonable a reaction to the day’s events as any. Later, Tweedy drove over to Soma, where Wilco was in the middle of working with Young Fresh Fellow Scott McCaughey on a new album by the Minus Five, McCaughey’s ongoing side band. The name of the song they recorded was “I’m Not Bitter.” The name of the album, scheduled for release later this year, is Down With Wilco—McCaughey’s sarcastic rejoinder to Wilco’s troubles with Reprise.

While recording the Minus Five album, Wilco was rehearsing for a national tour that was slated to begin in less than a week. It was a ballsy move, touring in the immediate wake of September 11 on an album that didn’t come out, just one month after firing Bennett (who was widely regarded as the fulcrum of Wilco’s live sound). There was a lot of debate within the band as to whether it should cancel the tour. “I just thought it would be cowardly not to do it,” says Tweedy.

Leroy Bach, who joined Wilco during the tail end of the Summerteeth sessions as a keyboard player, took over Bennett’s multi-instrumental duties. Up until YHF, Bach was something of a junior partner in the band, rarely doing interviews or posing for group photos. With Bennett gone, Bach has become the go-to guy onstage. “It’s not like I got a gold watch or something,” he says dryly.

The band streamed YHF on its Web site (www.wilcoworld.net) to give hardcore fans a taste, and the tour was a sellout. The first few nights were a little rough, but by the time Wilco got to the West Coast in early December, it felt like a band again.

I Need A Kamera To My Eye
I’m interviewing Tweedy in his New York hotel room. Sam Jones is there with his film crew. He’s shooting the final scenes of his documentary, titled I Am Trying To Break Your Heart and set for a late-summer release. As the cameras roll, I ask Tweedy about Bennett. It’s like poking a sore tooth.

“I’m not going to have much to say, I’m just warning you,” says Tweedy. “There are definitely a lot of things that: a) I can’t talk about; and b) I don’t think are important. Jay’s contributions to the band were important and valued. As far as the actual circumstances of Jay’s leaving, that’s up to him to define. As far as my feelings about it? I couldn’t be happier.”

And, cut.

Tweedy offers to play me Wilco’s “new” album. “Our plan is to record a different album every month, and then at the end of the year, we will have 12 albums to select a greatest-hits record from,” he says, only half-joking. Recorded over the course of a week in early February, the album consists of four proper Tweedy songs—they have the same ELO-meets-the-Band vibe of YHF’s “War On War” and “Jesus, Etc.”—and four improvisational pieces, wherein the rule was no one could use an instrument he knew how to play. For one of the improv pieces, the band “played” a newspaper article about a suicide like it was a piece of sheet music. “The motto was ‘hear the sound before the sound hears you,’” says Tweedy with a chuckle.

Via Chicago
Carl Sandburg called it the City Of Big Shoulders. The Wilco loft is situated in a prototypical Chicago neighborhood: grey-hued and walled up by meat-and-potatoes architecture bannered with neon signage that blurs by the taxi window: OASISLOUNGEBARGROCERYLIQUORPARKINGINTHEREAR.

The loft is standard-issue brick-and-pillar, illuminated by Chinese lanterns and stuffed with gear and bohemian bric-a-brac: acoustic guitars, old-school synthesizers, bongos, a sitar, a grand piano, old radios, Clark Nova typewriters. There are workbenches with amps and guitars in various states of undress. The master tapes of YHF sit on the shelf; one is marked “Reprise Slave Reel.” Tweedy and Stirratt have their own desks, framed by bookshelves. A quick scan of titles: Thus Spake The Corpse: An Exquisite Corpse Reader 1988-1998; Conceptual Art (Art And Ideas) by Tony Godfrey; Technicians Of The Sacred: A Range Of Poetries From Africa, America, Asia, Europe And Oceania; Zen Concrete & Etc. by D.A. Levy; Purple America and Demonology by Rick Moody. And there are CDs: John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Steve Reich, Raymond Scott, Syd Barrett, Public Image Ltd., lots of Dylan bootlegs.

Stuck to the refrigerator door is one of those magnetic poetry kits arranged into the following phrases: Eternity Car Whispering; Fiddle Finger Lather; Please Incubate; Me Smell Rock; After Chocolate Ask; Say Put Puppy Girl; Frenetic Peach Crush.

Jeff Tweedy Is Trying To Break My Heart
What more can I tell you about Jeff Tweedy that he hasn’t already told you himself? He’s an American aquarium drinker. He doesn’t believe in touchdowns. His mind is full of radio cures. He shakes like a toothache when he hears himself sing. He spends a lot more than three dollars and 63 cents on Diet Coca Cola and unlit cigarettes. He doesn’t so much walk or swagger down the avenue—he assassins. He’s the man that loves you and, yes, he’s trying to break your heart.

So what was I thinking when I said hello? I know what I was thinking when I said goodbye: You should never try to write a magazine profile about a band you really love. It’s too humbling. I followed Wilco to New York, Chicago and the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in Los Angeles like a dog fetching a stick. I asked too many questions and learned more than I wanted to know. And now Tweedy has asked me to stop calling him. That’s OK, I understand. I would’ve told me to fuck off a long time ago if I were him. But I’m not. Because even though he’s the last person who would ever admit it—even to himself—Jeff Tweedy is special. Special like Dylan. Special like Guthrie. Special like Thom Yorke.

People talk about Wilco the way they talk about Radiohead, the way they used to talk about R.E.M. Wilco is a band that people listen to in their bedrooms and talk about at parties. Wilco can sell out a national tour in support of a record that didn’t even come out. Wilco is a band that people make movies about. Wilco sings softly and cuddles a big stick. Wilco is standing on the shoulders of giants.

Tweedy has been to what Greil Marcus calls “the old, weird America,” and he’s seen the future age. And he’s come back here to tell us that, well, he’s come back here to tell us writer types that we’re making asses of ourselves when we say that kind of stuff about him.

“I just talked to this journalist from Germany who told me our record had a distinct advantage because it was written by a prophet,” says Tweedy, shaking his head in disbelief. “Hilarious.”

WILCO + SLEATER-KINNEY + NNAMDI @ THE MANN CENTER SUN. AUG. 22ND

BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR BUZZFEED In 1965, Tacoma, Washington’s The Sonics released a debut album of raw-boned, hemorrhagic garage-punk and maximum R&B called, simply, Here Are The Sonics. Exponentially louder, wilder, and weirder than their woolly-bully frat-rock brethren on the SeaTac teen club/roller rink/armory circuit, The Sonics sang about witches, psychopaths, Satan, and strychnine as a social lubricant, along with the more standard themes of hot girls and fast cars, or, even better, fast girls in hot cars. The 12 tracks on Here Are The Sonics capture the needle-pinning, speaker-blowing, tonsil-shredding, balls-to-the-wall mating call of five hormonal mid-’60s teenage savages forever in hot pursuit of Mad Men-era booze-cigarettes-sex-magic and the glorious din that made it all possible.

Fifty years after its release, Here Are The Sonics still sounds, as one wag aptly put it, “as raw as a freshly scraped kneecap.” On the continuum of rock ’n’ roll as a 20th-century art form, Here Are The Sonics remains a vital and important relic, the aural equivalent of a prehistoric cave painting, as primitive as it is seminal. It changed music. More accurately, it changed the people who would change music.

Jack White called it “the epitome of ’60s punk.” Kurt Cobain said it had “the most amazing drum sound I’ve ever heard…it sounds like he’s hitting harder than anyone I’ve ever heard.” On “Losing My Edge,” LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy concludes his itemized list of the essential artists in the definitive hipster record collection by invoking The Sonics four times in a row, as if casting a spell.

Feeble national promotion and ham-fisted distribution may have ensured that few outside of The Sonics’ Pacific Northwest stomping ground heard Here Are The Sonics when it was first released, but in the fullness of time its sphere of influence now transcends generations and spans continents thanks to the Esperanto of electrifying noise.

Just don’t tell The Sonics that.

“I think that’s overstating it a little,” says Larry Parypa, 68, The Sonics’ guitarist and de facto leader, when I recite some variation of the last two paragraphs to him. “I’m not sure how much influence we had on rock ’n’ roll.” “Parypa” is a Hungarian name that means “man of strong horse or something,” he says, but I just don’t see it. Parypa is more mild-mannered than you’d expect from a man whose claim to fame is playing guitar on a song called “Psycho,” and, it turns out, is suspicious of grand statements, especially about his band.

“I know we did some things that were very different, but to that degree? I don’t know,” he says with a shrug. We are sitting in the living room of Parypa’s house situated in a leafy suburban cul-de-sac outside of Seattle and paid for not by The Sonics’ paltry record sales royalties (about $4,000 a year) but a decades-long career as an insurance adjuster from which he finally retired earlier this year. He is only mildly amused when I point out that it only took 55 years for the guitar player for The Sonics to finally be able to quit his day job. Parypa is oddly joyless given that the thwarted rock star dreams of his youth have finally come true in his old age. Perhaps he senses, deep down, that it’s come too late.

Parypa is not a sentimental man. You have to look hard to find signs that the guitar player from The Sonics lives here. He doesn’t have copies of the original pressings of The Sonics’ ’60s recordings. No film footage of The Sonics performing live or even a video clip of their 1966 performance on Cleveland’s Upbeat, their one TV appearance. He doesn’t even have any old photos of the band from back in the day. “We just never kept that stuff,” he says, again with the shrug.

There are a few framed gig posters tucked away in an upstairs hallway — but nothing older than five years ago. Parypa never even bothered to tell his now-adult daughter that he was in The Sonics when she was growing up. She had to find out on the street when she was 14. “She must’ve gone to a record store and saw my picture and asked the guy behind the counter and I guess he made a big fuss,” he says, with that I-don’t-see-what-the-big-deal-is tone of voice he adopts when talking about the band. “She came home with a Sonics album and was like, ‘What’s this all about?’”

The reason we are debating the band’s place in the canon of rock ’n’ roll is that a reconstituted Sonics — Parypa, saxophonist Rob Lind, singer-songwriter-keyboardist Jerry Roslie, all three original members, plus bassist Freddie Dennis and drummer Dusty Watson (replacing original bassist Andy Parypa and drummer Bob Bennett, respectively) — are on the verge of releasing This Is The Sonics (out earlier this week), the first proper Sonics album in nearly half a century.

Wisely they enlisted the production services of Detroit garage guru Jim Diamond (White Stripes, The Dirtbombs), who laid down the law on day one.

“I told them, ‘You know, you’re not 19 years old, so it would be silly to try and copy your ’60s records; having said that, we have to stay true to the spirit of those recordings,’” he says a few weeks later, calling from somewhere in the ruins of the Motor City. “I want you to play like you haven’t gotten any better than when you were 19. Raw and mean. If it’s not punk as fuck, I’m not putting my name on it.”

Well, Jim Diamond put his name on it, as well he should. Despite the 48-year gap between albums and the fact that the median age in the band is now 70, one spin of This Is The Sonics makes a persuasive case that The Sonics are still The Rawest Band on Earth. Parypa can still swing a riff like a Louisville Slugger, the drummer still beats the drums like they owe him money, the sax player still honks as if he’s horny, and the singer still sounds like he gargles with gasoline and can’t be trusted with breakable things. All of which means The Rawest Band on Earth are now old enough to be your grandfather — and more popular than they ever were in the prime of their youth.

Anthony Bourdain, host of CNN’s Parts Unknown, used “Have Love, Will Travel” in promos for the current season. He emailed the following when I asked him why: “The Sonics were true originals, garage before garage, the way rock and roll should be: loud, dirty and dangerous.”

The cruel irony of The Sonics story is that Jerry Roslie, the guy who screams like an electrocuted banshee on record and writes songs about guzzling strychnine for kicks and going psycho at the sight of a beautiful lady, is pathologically bashful, bordering on socially phobic, a condition that seems to have worsened over the years. It wasn’t much of an issue when he was living a quiet, anonymous middle-class life in the suburbs of Tacoma, laying asphalt for a living. But all that changed in 2004 when Land Rover licensed The Sonics’ version of “Have Love, Will Travel” for a TV ad, triggering a revival of interest in the band.

In 2007, after years of politely declining lucrative reunion tour offers, The Sonics begrudgingly agreed to reunite for one night and perform a completely sold-out show at the Cavestomp! garage-rock festival in New York. Backstage before they went on, everyone had butterflies — after all, it had been 40 years since they plugged in together — but Roslie was scared shitless. Could he still do this? Did The Sonics still have it? Would the audience laugh at these sad old men trying to relive long-past glories? “We heard that New York can be a pretty tough crowd,” he says. “I remember before we went on looking around for a garbage-can lid to shield me from the rotten fruit and vegetables. When they opened the curtain it was like déjà vu, spooky, we’d gotten older but the audience was the same age as they were when we played back in the 1966. And they welcomed us right away.” And 21st-century audiences have been welcoming them ever since.

In the eight years since they played CaveStomp, The Sonics have crisscrossed the globe repeatedly — not bad for a band that never got farther east than Cleveland back in the day. “We’ve played in European countries where they don’t speak much English,” says Lind. “And the crowd is down at the front of the stage singing every word of ‘Strychnine’ and waving their beer bottles.” When The Sonics played Mexico City last summer, they were so mobbed by autograph seekers after the show it took half an hour to go the 20 feet from the backstage door to the shuttle van. When they played in Spain, grown men cried in their dressing room, begging to touch the hem of their garments. Two months ago they flew to São Paulo, Brazil, for a completely sold-out one-night stand. The next morning they were mobbed in the hotel lobby by autograph seekers. One eternally grateful fan passed the band a handwritten note with the following message.

To The Sonics

Thank you for existing and the good job you did (and still doing) for mankind.

Big Respect,

Rodrigo

Sao Paulo, Feb. 2015

Not too shabby for an ex–insurance adjuster, retired commercial airline pilot, former proprietor of an asphalt paving business, laid-off Experience Music Project tour guide, and the guy who played drums for Lita Ford from 1980 to 1984.

Tacoma and all points in between. Every red-blooded, non-jock male under 25 has a rock ’n’ roll band. Or wants to start a rock ’n’ roll band or just got kicked out of a rock ’n’ roll band or at the very least goes out to see rock ’n’ roll bands all the time. Because that’s where the girls are. Jerry Roslie and Rob Lind are no exception. Roslie plays keyboards and Lind blows sax. Their band is called The Searchers. “We started going out on Saturday nights on a dual mission and the mission was: hear rock ’n’ roll bands and meet women,” says Lind, a recently retired US Airways pilot, on the phone from his home in North Carolina. “We’d see something cool and then go home and try and play it and kinda get it wrong, but in the process make something that was ours.”

One Saturday night they met a guitar player named Larry Parypa, who had an instrumental band with his brother Andy called The Sonics — named after the sonic booms emanating from nearby McChord Air Force Base. But something was missing. Like Lind and Roslie, the Parypa brothers liked their rock ’n’ roll loud and mean. They quickly agreed to join forces and ditch The Searchers moniker in favor of The Sonics, which was wise because there was already a band called The Searchers in the U.K., with actual hits. By process of elimination, Roslie became the band’s lead singer. He was the least bad of the bunch.

“People always ask me how come you guys are so nasty and dirty, and I always tell them that Seattle bands were jazzy and swingy and really good musicians,” says Lind. “Down in Tacoma, where we grew up, it was a blue-collar city, our fathers all worked in mills and on the waterfront and all we wanted to do was rock ’n’ roll. We wanted to kick your ass.”

“We all wanted to play hard music, and it got so aggressive,” says Parypa. “We wanted loud drums and back then you didn’t mic the drum kit, so if you wanted loud drums the drummer had to hit really hard. That meant everybody else had to turn up to be heard over the drums, and Jerry would have to scream to be heard over the din. And that just became our sound.”It was slow going early on, but soon they landed a regular Friday-night gig at a teen club called the Red Carpet, which would become for them what the Cavern Club was for The Beatles: the place where they got their chops from playing marathon four-hour sets nightly, learned their lessons about stagecraft the hard way, and began harvesting the fruits of their labor, namely girls and beer. “After a while, we’d pull up to the back to load in our gear and there would already be a line of kids waiting to get in that stretched around the block,” says Lind.

Some nights Roslie’s preternatural bashfulness would get the best of him and he’d succumb to debilitating stage fright. “He’d look out at a packed crowd and turn to me and say, ‘I’m not singing tonight!’” says Parypa. “I’d be like, ‘But you’re our singer!’”

The Sonics soon caught the attention of Buck Ormsby, bassist from The Wailers, who had started Etiquette Records to put out his band’s recordings and harvest local talent. He told them if they had a record under their belt, they could command at least twice the $500 they were pulling down a night at the Red Carpet. But to make a record you had to have some original material, and at that point The Sonics were still just a cover band. Roslie went home that night and wrote a this-evil-chick-done-me-wrong song, as was the style of the day, around a catchy stair-stepping riff that — when played simultaneously by the guitar, sax, and organ — sounded as menacing as the title. He called it “The Witch.” Ormsby liked what he heard and took the boys into a two-track studio in Seattle that was primarily used to cut ad jingles.

“We were all of 17 and so keyed up and nervous that when they pressed ‘record’ we played it three times as fast as it was supposed to be,” says Lind. “I remember afterwards laying on the living room floor at the Parypas house and listening to the master, and all of us were distraught. We felt like we’d totally screwed it up and we’d spent $500 of our own money to record it.” The Parypas brothers’ father was so incensed he called up Ormsby and threatened to drive over to his house and punch his lights out for ruining his sons’ budding musical career.

Six months later it was a hit.

Despite the phone ringing off the hook with requests for “The Witch,” the big Seattle radio station WKJR refused to play the song before 3:30 p.m. — when the kids were home from school — for fear this creepy, lo-fi song about a witch would scare off the lucrative daytime homemaker audience. Despite such restrictions, the single sold 20,000 copies in the first week of its release. “The record label was like, ‘Holy crap, you guys are hot! We have to follow this up with an album!’” says Lind. “And we were like, ‘OK, when are we going to make this album?’ They said, ‘Tomorrow.’”

That night after playing their standard four-hour set at the Red Carpet, they asked the owner if they could stay and rehearse for a few hours. They worked up a couple numbers that Roslie had been chipping away at: “Boss Hoss,” inspired by a bitchin’ red Mustang he saw in a hot-rod magazine; and “Strychnine,” a bitter white crystalline powder widely used as a rat poison that causes convulsions and death through asphyxia in humans. It was also widely rumored at the time that LSD was cut with strychnine, which turned out to be a myth spread by law enforcement types to discourage use of the hallucinogen. A third original, the aptly titled “Psycho,” was made up on the spot that night. The rest of the album would be fleshed out with covers from their live set, including their now-iconic version of Richard Berry’s “Have Love, Will Travel.”

Lind remembers the recording session was booked for the middle of the night to get a cheaper rate. “We used to call Etiquette ‘Cheap Screw Records,’” says Lind. “It was like 3 a.m. Everything was done in one take. We’d be like, ‘We could probably play it better if we did it again.’ And the engineer would be like ‘Naw, sounds great, let’s move on.’ I remember the top of the piano being covered with burgers and soda cups and there was this thick fog of cigarette smoke.”

Etiquette hired famed rock photographer Jini Dellaccio to shoot the band for the cover. Formerly a fashion photographer, Dellaccio had started turning her lens on the moody, hirsute young men that peopled the local music scene with striking results. Always shooting in black and white, Dellaccio eschewed the fussily arranged studio setups that were de rigueur at the time in favor of spontaneous shots taken in rustic outdoor settings near her home along the waterfront.

The Sonics’ debut sold well in the Pacific Northwest but distribution snafus kept the album from breaking nationally. “They would start playing it on a radio station in Miami, but by the time they got the records into stores there, the radio station had moved onto other things and it died on the vine,” says Parypa. “I think that kind of thing happened a lot.”

Still, Here Are The Sonics opened a lot of doors for the band — including regional tours with The Kinks, The Mamas & the Papas, and the Beach Boys — and tripled their asking price for headlining gigs. “I remember the first time we got paid $1,500, boy, we felt like we were The Rolling Stones,” says Lind. And in a big-fish-little-pond way — getting drunk with The Kinks, trading backstage pranks with the Beach Boys — they were. After all, The Sonics’ prime directive always was and forever shall be getting laid, and, for a time at least, it was raining women. And when it rained it poured.

“We did not want for female attention back then and sometimes that caused problems,” says Lind. “We used to play a lot out in cowboy country. Not a lot of people know this but if you go over the Cascade mountains, all of eastern Washington is like Kansas, basically one big wheat field and combines. So when we would play out that way; lots of dudes would come to the shows in pickup trucks wearing cowboy hats and plaid shirts with the sleeves rolled up. Well, their girls were attracted to us — we were young, skinny, good-looking guys and we’re up there playing rock ’n’ roll music.” This kind of thing happened all the time. Invariably the band would be cordially invited by jealous boyfriends to discuss the matter over knuckle sandwiches in a darkened alley behind the club. It got to the point that The Sonics guys started learning karate.

It wasn’t just jealous boyfriends they had to worry about. Though it’s hard today to understand what all the fuss was about, in 1965 — especially in the rural redoubts of the Pacific Northwest — having hair longer than a buzz cut marked you as some kind of beatnik-commie-queer. “We’d stop at some gas station out in the middle of nowhere and we’d ask directions how to get back to the interstate and the owner would say, ‘Oh sure, boy — say, are you a boy or a girl?’ Ha ha. Like we hadn’t heard that a million times,” says Lind. “Then he’d give us directions and we’d thank him and soon find out the directions lead to the middle of nowhere. We used to refer to them as ‘Sonics Directions.’”

They toured around in a shit-brown ’62 Ford van they christened The Turd. “When the sun hit at a certain angle you could see there was some writing on the side of the van that said EAT OUT MORE OFTEN,” says Jerry Roslie. “We couldn’t stop laughing about that, because, well, we were 18.”

When Etiquette decided they’d played out the string on the first album, it was time to record another one. Tomorrow. “Again, we had, like, no songs,” says Parypa. Though many rock snobs worship at the temple of Boom, which is widely recognized by the iconic Jini Dellaccio shot of the band on the cover — five tall drinks of water dressed head-to-toe in midnight-black and Beatle boots, elegantly staggered and striking poses of sullen teenage cool before a backdrop of whited-out oblivion — musically speaking it’s kind of a wet firecracker. The frantic energy of the debut has dissipated, Roslie largely abandons his lacerating vocal style, and the improved clarity of the recordings doesn’t really do the band any favors. The Sonics always did their best work in the murk.

By early 1966, when Boom was released, the times were clearly a-changing. The Beatles and the Beach Boys and Dylan had moved the game to a whole new level. Recording artists were expected to be poets and seers taking rock ’n’ roll to strange new places — places well beyond The Sonics’ reach as songwriters. They were primitives in a new age of artistes. Not that they didn’t give it the old college try. In late ’66 they jumped to Jerden Records, a Seattle label with deeper pockets thanks to labelmates The Kingsmen’s million-selling version of “Louie Louie.” Jerden sent them to Hollywood to record at Gold Star Studios, hoping for higher fidelity and a more current sound. It was a disaster. “We wound up hating it,” says Lind. “We’d just as soon forget that one.” The band disowned the record before it was even released, and it died a quick and ignominious death upon arrival. In the aftermath of their ill-advised slouch toward the fringes of competence, finesse, and commercial viability, The Sonics crumbled like vampires in the dawn’s early light of psychedelia, and its members soon vanished into the jungles of Vietnam, straight jobs, and the middle-class domestic tranquility of the suburbs from whence they came.

Which brings us back to where we started. The sun is going down on Larry Parypa’s house. The man of strong horse is looking a little saddle sore. He’s dreading the epic trek to São Paulo next week. “It will be fun to play in Brazil, but that’s going to be a horrible flight,” he says. The band’s upcoming coast-to-coast U.S. tour — a first for The Sonics — is also cause for concern.

“I live for that hour on stage, but everything else is bullshit,” he says. “You’re always tired, you get home at 2 a.m. but you’re kind of hyper, and you’ve got to be in the lobby at 6 a.m. to go some other place. And then when you get there, they want to do interviews and all that stuff. I hate waiting, I hate sitting in those little cramped greenrooms, I hate airplanes.”

Though The Sonics have managed, thus far, to defy the restraints of senior citizenship, time waits for no man. Not for very long, anyway. None of them are getting any younger. At 65, Freddie is the baby in the band. Lind and Roslie are septuagenarians, and Parypa is not far behind. Not to mention Roslie underwent a heart transplant back in 2008. Let’s face it, rock ’n’ roll is no country for old men. I ask Parypa how much longer he thinks The Sonics can keep this up. “I ask myself that all the time,” he says. “I asked Jerry about that like three weeks ago. He’s in the same boat, like, ‘When do we quit, man?’”

Photo by DYLAN LONG

The long-awaited return to live music at Philly’s beloved Union Transfer was spearheaded by none other than Philly’s own Japanese Breakfast. The breakout indie pop unit, headed by frontwoman, author and director Michelle Zauner, played its second of five sold-out shows last night to a packed, masked up crowd spanning all ages, backgrounds and creeds. In terms of homecomings, five nights over six days is wildly impressive without the existence of a pandemic, and exactly what the people needed with one.

The night was as beautiful as it was a stark reminder of the pandemic. The same quirks of concert going returned as we left them: the awkward shifting and glancing around the venue while waiting for the band to go on, fans filling the silence in between songs with scattered yelps and quips, and strangers propositioning you for the purchase of a cigarette in exchange for a dollar. But looking around, having never experienced a live music show with everyone in the crowd wearing masks on their face, I’ll admit: it was fucking weird. Like, a how-is-this-real-life weird. Along with masking, the venue, upon request from the band, checked for proof of vaccination or a negative test within 48 hours of the show upon entry. A girl outside the entrance spoke frantically on the phone. “They’re not letting me in without my vax card. It’s either in my closet or on the stand by the dining room table.” It was a mix of emotions.

The kind of Woodstock-esque cathartic emotional release you’d expect of the crowd was not immediate. Punk rock and indie trio Mannequin Pussy, also Philadelphia natives and direct support for the first three shows of the run, played fast, furious, and with unbridled passion. “Is this your guy’s first show back?” frontwoman Marisa Dabice asked gleefully, and the crowd responded widely in the affirmative. The fans, however, seemed reserved and cautiously enthused as the band powered through their set. The majority of us were, after all, readjusting to live music in a crowded space for the first time in years.

In between songs, Dabice approached the mic. “People say you’re not allowed to scream,” she said quietly. She paused for a moment. “Guess what? You can scream. You can scream and it will feel good. Let it go.” Perhaps sensing the hesitation in the crowd, she proceeded to lead the audience in a group scream. On three, the crowd collectively let out a billowing, cathartic scream, synthesizing the wide variety of emotions the pandemic has elicited into an emotional and blissful release. Fans laughed, cheered, and high-fived. They were home.

It was a textbook warming up of the crowd, and any anxiety that fans had brought in with them to the show had been dissolved just in time for the main act. Zauner took the stage in a gorgeous white gown and a mallet in hand, which she used to ceremoniously ring a gong during the band’s opening song “Paprika”. The crowd sprung into action, dancing their hearts out to hits like “Be Sweet,” “Savage Good Boy,” and “Boyish,” as Zauner alternated between her microphone, guitar and piano in between songs. Spinning spells with her words and effervescent movements across the stage, Zauner took fans on a journey, weaving her melodic vocals through the lush, dreamy synths Japanese Breakfast has so finely honed.

Standing outside of the show, conversation between the bouncers revolved around the pandemic. A woman walked out of the venue, ripped off her mask, and proclaimed with a sigh of relief, “freedom at last!” Music is an escape; live music a destination to leave all of your worries at the door. For now, they’ve found a way in. And while we’ve still got a long way to go, Japanese Breakfast provided a safe environment for fans to celebrate and cherish life once again. — DYLAN LONG