Wilco - A Ghost is Born Tour 2004 - The Rave, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Aug 03 '04
The Bottom Line In which tall buildings shake and voices escape singing sad sad songs.
Sometimes, I feel a little cheated, like I was born too late to experience firsthand all the really good stuff that rock music had to offer. By the time I was born, Jimi and Janis were gone, the Beatles had broken up, the Beach Boys were hitting the oldies circuit, and the BeeGees were about to go disco. Don’t get me wrong: I love what I got left with. Men at Work and Tears for Fears and the Thompson Twins, men with make-up and women with flaming bottle-blonde mohawks, colorfully layered clothes and robotic dance beats.
But, still.
Sometimes I wish I could have felt what it felt like to watch the Who destroy their equipment on television for the first time, to see that act as something other than a kind of rock n’ roll sacrament, to see that act as something unorthodox, even heretic.
The guys from Wilco didn’t destroy their equipment on stage at the Rave in Milwaukee on Monday night (8/2/04), but somewhere in the middle of their first encore, I felt like one of those black-and-white TV-footage kids from forty years ago seeing their rock and roll heroes on stage, and getting their minds blown so hard that all they could do is shake their bodies, and scream, and wipe away the sweat pouring off of their foreheads. For a moment, as Jeff Tweedy and Co. banged recklessly through “I’m a Wheel” and the nervy punk of “Kicking Television”, I could almost imagine that I was witnessing what the Who were to kids in 1965. I used to wonder what exactly it was that made all those teenage girls hold their hands to their cheeks Macaulay Culkin-style and spontaneously burst into tears like they did. But I feel like I got a taste of it as Wilco whipped the crowd into a frenzy with the funkified stomp of “I’m The Man Who Loves You”.
Two hours after the show, my jeans are still soaked through with sweat, and I can feel my temples pumping like the mechanical throb of “Spiders (Kidsmoke).”
Oh yes. My ass has been kicked.
Of course, to compare the live sound of Wilco to the Who is probably doing Jeff Tweedy a disservice. He’s no Roger Daltrey. While he has a boundless energy onstage, and an instant, sustained connection with the audience, he’s a kind of anti-frontman. His speaking voice is surprisingly high-pitched and boyish, his banter hopelessly (tragically) dorky, his “dancing”, the sort of rhythmless swoon adopted stagily by actors playing mentally handicapped. Like the playground nerd acting out to command the attention of his not-really-popular friends, he’s more pathetic than glamorous, practically inhaling the outpouring of sympathetic love from the crowd, and exhaling it as bathroom-mirror rock-stardom. One minute, he’s leading us all in a campfire singalong of “California Stars”, and the next, he’s talking about the booger that was hanging from his nose that whole time.
But to focus on Tweedy’s performance is to unjustly minimize the band, who, throughout the two-hour, twenty-one song concert created a series of dazzling sonic sculptures. The ticks and twitters and meticulous layers of the “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” album emerged fully intact in powerfully-rendered performances of “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” and “War on War”.
“Poor Places” creeps out slowly and quietly from the ambient, noisy remains of “Theologians” twinkly piano figures stand in vivid contrast to a sound that underneath grows darker, stormier and more abstract - like the sound of thunder from a storm that hasn’t hit yet - until nothing’s left but a discordant squall of amplifier noise; which in turn gives way to the mathematical pumping and trippy Eight-Miles-High guitar improvisations of “Spiders”. Which in turn, give way almost haphazardly to a series of chunky classic-rock riff breakdowns.
At one point in the heart-tugging, crowd-pleasing classic “Via Chicago”, the unassuming melody, and Tweedy’s unassuming singing plow through long seconds of unmitigated chaos to come out unscathed, sounding even more delicate and sweet than before, and the effect is akin to watching someone talk as a plane passes overhead, and feeling that sense of relief and connection when you can finally hear what they’re saying again.
And steadfast connection was what this show was all about. As the band created dueling cyclones of noise, something simpler, sweeter, and more fragile was always constructing itself just below the surface. And those moments of tranquility – “Jesus, etc.”, the opening of “At Least That’s What You Said”, “Poor Places” – were always loaded with the portent of an awesome, rapturous, Book-of-Revelations, tongues-of-flame-style release: not Leonard Cohen's idea of a cold and broken Hallelujah, but the opposite - a blazing-hot, triumphant one.
SETLIST:
Muzzle of Bees
Handshake Drugs
Company in my Back
Hummingbird
I Am Trying to Break Your Heart
Shot in the Arm
War on War
At Least That’s What You Said
Via Chicago
Jesus, etc.
I’m the Man Who Loves You
Hell is Chrome
Theologian
Poor Places
Spiders (Kidsmoke)
The Late Greats
I’m a Wheel
Kicking Television
Passenger Side
California Stars
The Lonely 1
- - - - -
MORE WILCO:
A Ghost is Born (2004)
A.M. (1995)
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Member: Paul Lorentz
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Somebody turn the lights on...
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