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Summary
Summary
The singer, guitarist, and songwriter--best known for his work with Wilco--opens up about his past, his songs, the music, and the people who have inspired him in this personal memoir. This ideal addition to your Wilco collection also makes a perfect gift for music lovers.
*A New York Times Bestseller*
*A Rolling Stone Best Music Books of 2018 selection*
*A Pitchfork Pick: Best Music Books of 2018 *
Few bands have encouraged as much devotion as the Chicago rock band Wilco, and it's thanks, in large part, to the band's singer, songwriter, and guiding light: Jeff Tweedy. But while his songs and music have been endlessly discussed and analyzed, Jeff has rarely talked so directly about himself, his life, or his artistic process.
Until now. In his long-awaited memoir, Jeff will tell stories about his childhood in Belleville, Illinois; the St. Louis record store, rock clubs, and live-music circuit that sparked his songwriting and performing career; and the Chicago scene that brought it all together. He also talks in-depth about his collaborators in Uncle Tupelo, Wilco, and more; and writes lovingly about his parents; wife, Susie; and sons, Spencer and Sammy.
Honest, funny, and disarming, Tweedy's memoir will bring readers inside both his life and his musical process, illuminating his singular genius and sharing his story, voice, and perspective for the first time.
Author Notes
Jeff Tweedy is an American singer, songwriter, and guitarist, born in 1967. He is the cofounder of the alt-country band Uncle Tupelo, but he is best known for cofounding the Chicago rock band, Wilco (1994-present). He is a Grammy Award-winning artist who has collaborated with such artists as folk singer Billy Bragg and gospel singer Mavis Staples. His memoir Let's Go (So We Can Get Back): A Memoir of Recording and Discording with Wilco, was published in November 2018.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Alt-rock star Tweedy tells of his musical ascent in this sincere, affable memoir. Growing up in a small crumbling downstate Illinois town "where everybody knows who's cheating on who, and who's been out of work," Tweedy discovered music by following 1980s underground pioneers such as the Minutemen ("Punk rock was an exotic event happening somewhere else in the world"), haunting record stores, and finding like-minded neighbors such as future Uncle Tupelo bandmate Jay Farrar. Uncle Tupelo formed in 1987, but after seven years, Tweedy and the alt-country band split ways in, as Tweedy describes it, a passive-aggressively acrimonious way. Tweedy started Wilco in 1994 and eventually released 10 records, including Mermaid Avenue, a collection of Woody Guthrie songs that the band recorded with Billy Bragg. Throughout, Tweedy writes about his wife, Susie Miller (a Chicago club booker when they met), and touches on his struggle with anxiety and his addiction to Vicodin (it allowed him to write "and not fall into a heap on the floor in a fit of weeping and panic"). Tweedy will delight fans by sharing such tidbits as his favorite moment in the Wilco documentary and how a Noah's Ark analogy powered the Grammy-winning A Ghost Is Born album. Tweedy tells a wonderfully unassuming story of a music-filled life. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
New York Review of Books Review
IN EARLY 1989, an East German government report identified punk as the top problem among the country's youth. And the thing is - as Tim Mohr points out in burning DOWN THE HAUS: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall (Algonquin, $28.95) - the study was more prescient than the authorities realized. By the end of that year, the barrier between East and West Germany had been eradicated, and as much as America likes to credit Ronald Reagan's "Tear down this wall" speech for the historic development, Mohr points to another social force that set the wheels in motion. By the fall of 1989, he writes, "the groundwork laid by punks and other activists influenced by the punk mentality was becoming a magical, spontaneous, mass uprising." A number of new books remind us of the revolutionary power of music - of its ability to transform movements, imaginations and individuals in ways that can radically alter how we think about politics and creativity. Though today's algorithm-centric playlists may not seem the richest source for cultural upheaval, these stories illustrate how, from Liverpool to the Bronx, musicians have consistently found their own ways out of societal dead ends. The stakes are highest in Mohr's riveting and inspiring history of punk's hard-fought struggle in East Germany. The music journalist, translator and former Berlin club D. J. traces the movement to one individual - a Punk Zero, so to speak - named Britta Bergman who spied a photo of the Sex Pistols in her sister's collection of West German teen magazines in 1977, heard the band's "Pretty Vacant" on Radio Luxembourg, hacked off her hair and adopted the name "Major." With minimal knowledge of the action in London or New York, she and her friends keyed into punk's "Do ft Yourself" worldview - ripping and painting slogans on their clothes, forming bands with no musical training or ability - and were immediately perceived as a direct threat to the Communist government. "Major and her friends were being political by having fun," writes Mohr. "To think differently, to speak out or to stand out was to be political." One of the powerful insights of "Burning Down the Haus" comes through in Mohr's explanation of what punk represented in a country with no unemployment or homelessness, but instead a choking lack of control over individual choices and destiny. "The social conditions for punk in Britain didn't exist in East Germany," Mohr writes. Rather than having "No Future," for East German youth the problem was "Too Much Future." The book chronicles, with cinematic detail, the commitment and defiance required of East German punks as they were forced to navigate constant police harassment and repression. The subculture was given support and safe haven by the country's more progressive churches, whose interests converged with the punks over issues like environmentalism and antinuclear proliferation. "When 1 am troubled, 1 sit in church and lament quietly," a minister named Gerhard Cyrus said. "These young people here lament loudly." Even as the punks were monitored and targeted by higher and higher levels of the Stasi ("The concerted action against punk in 1983 and 1984 far exceeded that undertaken against any other opposition group since the installation of dictator Erich Honecker in 1971"), the movement continued to grow - largely because the authorities didn't comprehend that suppressing the obvious manifestations of punk protest only gave its message more power and impact. Punks represented "active constant opposition any time they appeared in public," Mohr writes, also noting that "punk wasn't music or clothing or novelty haircuts, it was revolution from below, it was creating your own reality." East German punk eventually made inroads on the other side of the Berlin Wall, and with like-minded groups in Poland and Eastern Europe. In addition to its role as a catalyst in bringing down the wall, Mohr argues that its legacy lives on in modern-day Berlin. "What's important isn't the locations that survived but the spirit that survived," he writes, "a hyper-political spirit that continues to imbue the city with the ethos of East Berlin punk." The roots of punk, of course, can be traced far beyond the Sex Pistols and the Ramones. Kembrew McLeod's the DOWNTOWN POP UNDERGROUND (Abrams, $27) looks at the various figures and forces that started bubbling up in the early 1960s, later filtered through Andy Warhol's Factory and eventually exploded around the globe from a home base of CBGB. McLeod, a professor of communication studies at the University of Iowa, begins this tale with the experimental theater of collectives like Caffe Cino and the Living Theater. "You took pieces of cable and then swear it was a magic wand, and it became a magic wand!" Paul Foster says of Ellen Stewart's La MaMa. "Nobody told us that it could not be done, so we just did it." Through eight downtown rainmakers - some famous (Patti Smith and Debbie Harry) and some less so (the actor Hibiscus of the Cockettes, the video artist Shirley Clarke, who was "laying the groundwork for a new media age") - McLeod examines the ways in which the nascent creative worlds were deeply intertwined. "Everything was one, the music and theater and art," Hibiscus's mother, Ann Harris, says. "Everybody was interested in everybody then, and it was beautiful." Part of Warhol's genius was attempting to bring all of this energy, and all of this chaos, under one roof. The Factory, Bibbe Hansen says, "had drag queens and queers, children, street hustlers, rough trade, dropouts, runaways, drug dealers, psychiatric basket cases and society bad girls." Sterling Morrison of the Velvet Underground even asserts that the groundbreaking band didn't look at themselves as musicians. "We considered ourselves part of the underground film community," he says. "We had no real connection to rock 'n' roll as far as we were concerned." McLeod's approach is dense and scholarly (complete with neighborhood maps), though his tone sometimes turns a little too dry given the anarchic material. As time goes on, though, more and more boldfaced names edge into the picture - early roles for Robert De Niro and Tim Robbins, Elton John and David Bowie sniffing around for ideas - and it becomes clear that this underground couldn't stay downtown forever. Meanwhile, in 1960s Detroit, another foundational element of punk was being born, and this one had a more overtly political intent. Wayne Kramer's the hard stuff (Da Capo, $28) opens with a quick recap of the 1967 Belle Isle police riot, at which an outdoor performance by Kramer's band, the MC5, turned into mayhem, ft forever radicalized the guitarist, and the MC5 - short for "Motor City 5," though at first they had only four players - would become one of the pioneers in the marriage of rock and revolution. (The group is currently on the ballot for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, its fourth time being nominated.) Kramer recalls that when he was first expressing his desire to pursue music as a career, his mother cautioned him that it would mean working all night and being around alcohol, drugs and loose women. "The things she warned me about sounded great to me," he writes. In fact, "The Hard Stuff" chronicles Kramer's life of addiction and crime far more than it does his music making. Though the MC5 started with a clear sense of purpose and strength - "The most important thing was our solidarity and unity; that we were together in mind, body and spirit" - ultimately its blend of uncompromising sonics, radical politics and excessive chemical habits proved unsustainable, and the group blew apart in a familiar mix of bitterness and legal troubles. Kramer breezes past historic moments (the MC5 were the only band to perform at the 1968 Democratic convention, which he notes only in passing) in favor of detailed accounts of criminal capers, of increasing seriousness, to pay for his habit, and his stints in jail. The stories can't help being voyeuristically dramatic, but his forthrightness falls short of revelation, or even serious self-reflection. In the end, Kramer is an unlikely survivor, saved by finding a new function for his music - working with prisoners through his "Jail Guitar Doors" foundation - and with the adoption of his young son. While punk was coalescing, another musical and cultural uprising was brewing in the streets of New York. But where McLeod documents the scene downtown, Vikki Tobak's CONTACT HIGH (Clarkson Potter, $40) turns its sights uptown and beyond. The book collects the work of the most important photographers documenting hip-hop over the years and offers the stories behind some of the genre's most iconic images. Shots of the earliest days at clubs and parties in the Bronx are almost startling in their intimacy. The photographer Ricky Flores notes that he sought to present a contrast to the "Bronx Is Burning" image of the time. Such historic sessions as the first shoots with Jay-Z and with Kanye West, or an early photo of Eazy-E on a skateboard, wearing a bulletproof vest, reveal stars trying to figure out how to present themselves. Unforgettable pictures of RunDMC and Ttipac Shakur, though, are incontrovertible evidence of hip-hop's bold visual statement matching its musical power. "Contact High" also serves as a love letter to old-school photography on film, by including the contact sheets from which each larger image was selected. The shots not chosen are often surprising - most notably, the outtakes for Barron Claiborne's immortal deadpan shot of the Notorious B.I.G., the "King of New York," wearing a crown, which show the rapper smiling and laughing. The photographer Ray Lego describes the effect, speaking of his shots of Kid Cudi: "It was more like watching a film unfold with each frame related to the next." The collection illustrates the maturing of an artistic, and commercial, community, tracing the steps from impromptu, candid snaps to more styled setups (sometimes literally: Eminem in a "Clockwork Orange" costume, 01' Dirty Bastard imitating Janet Jackson's famous Rolling Stone cover), and from pure street fashion to the high style of Puff Daddy and the Family. A journalist and curator, Tobak has assembled a celebration of both the musicians and those who documented them, who captured this historic era by heeding the words of the photographer Lisa Leone: "Feel the energy. Don't just click away; really see." Only a few musicians could genuinely be thought of in a category of their own. In help! The Beatles, Duke Ellington, and the Magic of Collaboration (Norton, $27.95) Thomas Brothers takes on two of those titans. Brothers, a professor of music at Duke whose "Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism" was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, argues for the creative similarities between Ellington's orchestra and the Fab Four: "They each brought a composer's vision to the dynamics of collaboration." His larger point is that while Ellington was presented as the embodiment of the solitary genius, the orchestra's songs were often built from ideas initiated by such great soloists as Bubber Miley and Juan Tizol, or from creative partners like the brilliant composer and arranger Billy Strayhorn. (When Strayhorn died, Ellington eulogized him as "my right arm, my left arm, all the eyes in the back of my head, my brain waves in his head and his in mine.") Brothers concludes that the Duke's "most fruitful method actually resembles a moviemaking model that is much less centralized." In contrast, the Beatles have always been considered the paragon of creative cooperation, the defining model of a band. By establishing early on that all songs by John Lennon and Paul McCartney would be attributed to both, Brothers writes, "collaboration was not only visible and audible, it was inscribed." By embracing outside influences, from the Beach Boys to Indian music, and utilizing a structure that encouraged rather than dissuaded teamwork, the Beatles were able to expand their range and burnish their image. All of which is certainly true enough, though hardly anything new. Books including Terry Teachout's 2013 biography of Ellington and David Hajdu's landmark Strayhorn study, "Lush Life," have documented the composer's liberal use of his band's musical ideas (often compensated, sometimes not), while an ever-growing library of Beatle tomes has frequently explored the Lennon-McCartney relationship (including Joshua Wolf Shenk's fascinating study of creative partnerships, "Powers of Two," which is conspicuously absent from Brothers's bibliography). The pairing of the Beatles and Ellington in "Help!" comes off as somewhat arbitrary despite an interesting quote from Lillian Ross, in The New Yorker, noting that "the Beatles, like Duke Ellington, are unclassifiable musicians." There are better questions to ask here: Why has jazz remained so dependent on the ideal of the leader-with-sidemen structure? Why has American rock 'n' roll been defined by individuals (Elvis, Dylan, Prince) while England has been led by bands (the Beatles, the Stones, the Who)? - but those are left unexplored. Sometimes the most revolutionary thing about music comes down to its ability to transform an individual. With his engaging memoir, let's go (so we can get back) (Dutton, $28), Wilco's Jeff Tweedy presents himself as someone - to quote the Velvet Underground and close this circle - whose life was saved by rock 'n' roll. He describes the feeling that came from learning to play guitar: "When I figured out how to do the standard da-da-dada Chuck Berry riff, it was like I'd split the atom." Tweedy has survived his own struggles with addiction, spurred by combinations of migraines and depression, and he doesn't shy away from that part of his story, noting early in the book that "nobody has the disposable income to splurge on a memoir by a moderately successful indie rock 'stalwart' if it's not going to deliver something pretty entertaining." But the most memorable sections of "Let's Go (So We Can Get Back)" - aside from the almost physical awe that Tweedy conveys in his love for his wife and sons - are his descriptions of the act of songwriting. "I write for myself first, pretending that the audience isn't even there and will never be there," he says. "I can expose shadow selves that I believe I should keep my eye on. I can admit things about myself without really having to take ownership of anything." As an architect of the "alt-country" movement that transitioned into a more experimental and modern group, Wilco has straddled multiple worlds, and Tweedy goes from being a kid at Black Flag and Replacements shows to later encounters with Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash. "I feel like I'm part of some connective tissue between two worlds that don't really interact the same way anymore," he writes. "I feel like I might be a member of the last tribe that made it across the divide before time changed." Sometimes his language gets a little too self-consciously cutesy, but in the end - as with the punks and rappers and jazz players and rockers and all the musicians before and after him - the ability to put notes together to express something, to communicate, to make sense of the world, changes everything. "Anyone who makes stuff," Tweedy writes, "lucked out that they found an outlet for what most of the world has as a condition." ALAN LIGHT is the author of "Johnny Cash: The Life and Legacy of the Man in Black" and the co-host of "Debatable" on SiriusXM.
Guardian Review
Tweedy recalls his musical obsessions, and opens up slowly about his drug addiction and begging to be institutionalised A potted history of the Chicago alt-rock band Wilco yields no shortage of drama. Over the years there have been lineup changes, record company falling outs, illness, addiction and rehab. Their story was deemed sufficiently action-packed for the film-maker Sam Jones to make a documentary, I Am Trying to Break Your Heart (2002), that chronicled frontman Jeff Tweedy's disintegrating relationship with the guitarist Jay Bennett, and his battle with debilitating migraines. Wilco have been through the wringer, all right, but you'd scarcely know it from Tweedy's memoir. Wilco fans will doubtless have expected as much. Despite their many successes, Tweedy and his bandmates aren't known for living the rock'n'roll high life, having always appeared most comfortable lingering just below the radar. While they wear their hearts on their sleeves musically, modest understatement is their default setting. When Wilco won a Grammy for their fifth LP, 2004's A Ghost Is Born, they were in Birmingham, Alabama, on tour. "We got the news, made a little toast, and then we played our show," writes Tweedy. You can practically hear him shrug. Let's Go takes us from his upbringing in Belleville, Illinois, via his time in the band Uncle Tupelo alongside his school friend Jay Farrar, through to his subsequent founding of Wilco, a band now approaching its 25th year. Much of Tweedy's childhood, we learn, was spent watching TV with his mother long into the night while his father tried in vain to sleep in the next-door room before his 4am shift. His dad worked on the railroads and would come home and drink his body weight in beer. At 23, Tweedy would swear off alcohol permanently to avoid what he calls his "genetic destiny". After stealing his mother-in-law's pain medication, Tweedy took himself to hospital and begged to be institutionalised He was eight when he began buying records; bands such as the Clash, the Ramones, Sex Pistols and the Replacements swiftly turned into an obsession. Reluctant to follow his father and two brothers on to the railroads, he busied himself trying to master the guitar. Uncle Tupelo lasted seven years, after which the growing discord between Farrar and Tweedy made carrying on impossible. Weeks after their 1994 split, Wilco was born. Tweedy's playing down of his own suffering is an enduring motif and, on occasion, leads to the odd narrative glitch. At one point he starts to refer to one of his brothers, Greg, in the past tense, but omits to tell us when and how he died. He is so uneasy about discussing his wife Susie's treatment for cancer nine months into their relationship that, rather than addressing it directly, he instead duplicates a conversation during which they mull over whether or not it should feature in the book. It's actually rather touching, inadvertently offering a glimpse into the dynamics of their relationship. Elsewhere, Tweedy's hesitant tone reveals the push and pull between his desire to be as honest as possible and wanting to draw a veil over his less salubrious moments. After spending much of the book dancing around the subject of the migraines that led to his opiate addiction, he finally lets us in on his misery and shame. Once, before the band were due to open for REM, his bandmates found him crouching under a stream of cold water in the shower, sobbing from the pain. After Susie discovered that he'd been stealing his sick mother-in-law's pain medication, he took himself to hospital and begged to be institutionalised. In discussing rehab, he once again inserts a transcript from a conversation with his wife to help him articulate the hard bits. "They were treating you like a shitty drug addict," she recalls. "Like you were wasting their time and they just wanted you out of there. 'Why don't you try the mental hospital so we can take care of the real patients' It was awful." In the epilogue, Tweedy remarks on his good fortune at having sought help and fought his way out of addiction, noting that it was one of the reasons he decided to write Let's Go. "I wanted to write about, and understand, and share the part of me that has always been able to be vulnerable," he explains, which goes some way in summing up his struggle. Vulnerability may be Tweedy's calling card as a songwriter, but he takes a long time finding it here. - Fiona Sturges.
Kirkus Review
The frontman of Wilco on vulnerability, creativity, and taking the long cut.Tweedy (Adult Head, 2004) would like to avoid the usual trappings of the rock memoir: stories of sexual exploits, drug use, and endless road tours. Of course, these elements are present in his memoir, just not in the manner one might expect. The author, lead singer of the American rock band Wilco and founding member of alt-country group Uncle Tupelo, actively demythologizes the rock-'n'-roll hero. Instead of painting a self-indulgent portrait of bravado, unflagging charisma, and innate musical talent, Tweedy relates tales of social awkwardness and panic attacks overcome by hard work and an encyclopedic knowledge of rock history. The author lays claim to vulnerability as his defining artistic trait, a characteristic that fuels an intense openness to emotions, musical influences, and artistic relationships. Fans will appreciate early sections recounting the search for obscure albums and the necessity of playing dilapidated venues. Tweedy also details productive yet embattled relationships with the two Jays, fellow band mates Jay Farrar and Jay Bennett. Some of the most powerful sections cover Tweedy's lapse into, and recovery from, opioid addiction. Jettisoning the hackneyed image of the womanizing rock star, the author also recounts an anguished story about a sexual encounter with an older woman when he was 14. Taken as a whole, the memoir provides lessons in making art from a person who needed to create in order to combat loneliness and despair. At times, the writing meanders, though this could equally be described as the book's changing tempo, as it alternates between plot-driven sections and more ruminative pieces. The introduction, moreover, is discordantly jokey. Sincerity is what bolsters this book. Tweedy writes movingly about his parents, his wife and children, and his desire to find an artistic home for his band.Thoughtful, earnest reflections on family, creative integrity, and a life in music. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Tweedy (b. 1967), cofounder of the band Uncle Tupelo and leader of Wilco, has written a memoir every bit as openhearted and captivating as his best songwriting. He states at one point that he imagines the reader sitting across from him, much as he's written many of his songs; that directness sets his book apart. It doesn't hurt that Tweedy has a great way with an anecdote or that he is a master of self-deprecation. Readers who have lived through one too many tales of humble beginnings, struggle, success, drug addiction, band breakups, rehab, and glorious rebirth might be tempted to give this a pass. They shouldn't. Even the most difficult events in this page-turner are edged with humor and the hindsight of someone looking back from a better place. VERDICT Though stories of contemporary musicians occupy a crowded field, this one's a cut above the rest. Tweedy proves himself delightful company, and, as with his music, readers will hear this resonating long after they've finished.-Bill Baars, formerly of Lake Oswego P.L., OR © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 The World's Longest Main Street I grew up in a place called Belleville, a town of about forty thousand in Southern Illinois, a half-hour drive outside of St. Louis. It's the "stove capital of the world," or at least it was at the turn of the century. That's what we were told, anyway. It's also the home of Jimmy Connors and Buddy Ebsen (Uncle Jed from The Beverly Hillbillies), and when I was growing up they made Stag Beer there. So as you can imagine, my childhood was pretty magical. In reality it was pretty depressing. Depressing and depressed in all of the familiar ways common to dying midwestern manufacturing hubs: a lot of old empty buildings and a lot of occupied barstools. The things that made our town unique and special were hard to get super excited about. Belleville has (purportedly) the longest Main Street in the U.S., spanning 9.2 miles and ending somewhere around East St. Louis. One stretch of road and so many opportunities to get loaded and almost zero chance of getting lost. I don't know how many bars were on Main Street, but there must've been a lot, because Belleville's other claim to fame was having the most taverns per capita. I found out later that wasn't true, which was kind of a relief, because it never felt like something worth bragging about. As if day drinking was a commodity we could have exported and sold to the rest of the world. I lived just a half block off the Main Street with too many bars, on a tree-lined street with a name like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting: Fortieth. Our small single-family wood-framed house with a porch and a swing ended up being the last home my folks would ever own after my mother impulsively paid $16,000 for it at an auction in the early spring of 1967. Apparently she knew she was pregnant with me but hadn't told my dad. I was the card up her proverbial sleeve to ease his expected top-blowing at her fiscal irresponsibility. The previous owner had died in that house, which creeped me out as a kid, and as it turned out both of my parents ended up dying there as well. So everyone who ever owned the house I grew up in died there. Which is, I think, the main reason my siblings and I weren't overly sentimental about hanging on to it after we buried my dad in 2017. Aside from all of that backstory, the place was fairly nondescript. The one word I think would be most useful in setting the scene of my childhood? Mauve. There was a lot of mauve. Mauve carpets, mauve wallpaper, mauve furniture. Everything was mauve. Think of a smaller me, and then picture the color mauve, and you've conjured my childhood in a nutshell. I'm not sure if my parents intended to have me. I've heard different accounts. The popular story is that I was an accident. Regardless, I was late to the family party. My older sister, Debbie, who's fifteen years my senior, was born when my dad was just eighteen. They had two more kids, Steve and Greg, and by the time I showed up, my dad was in his midthirties, an age that most men of his generation considered well past prime baby-making years. My dad changed his story over time. He once told me, "I remember your mother called me at work and said, 'I want another one,' and I was home before she hung up the phone." I don't know if that's true. He always told that version with at least a six-pack under his belt, so I can't vouch for its veracity. It's possible he was trying to spare my feelings. Who wants to be an accident? That's a hard way to come into the world, created just because the responsible parties weren't paying attention. On the other hand, aren't we all accidents? Sorry, moving on . . . My dad-his name was Bob, but for the purposes of this narrative, let's stick with Dad-worked on the railroad (yes, all the livelong day). He dropped out of high school after he got my mom pregnant when she was fifteen and got a job as a diesel mechanic for the Alton and Southern Railway. In the early 1960s, some higher-up figured out that Dad was way smarter than his lack of a high school diploma would indicate, so they sent him to Arizona to study computers and learn how to program with punch cards, and eventually he got promoted to superintendent of the switching yard. That's almost the extent of what I know about what my dad did all day. I only went down to the railroad to see him once, as far as I can remember. I never had much curiosity about his job. For his part, he didn't seem that curious about me, either, and I never felt much pressure from him to care about trains. Which is odd, because what kid doesn't like trains? However, my dad did have a record I was fascinated by, Sounds of Steam Locomotives. It was a collection of recordings of train engines. That's all it was; the rhythmic clanging of steel wheels on steel tracks, the heavy chuff of heated steam being pushed through a locomotive's smokestack, a train's moaning whistle that always sounded to me like voices. It was a weird record, even more so because it was owned by my dad, who spent the vast majority of his waking hours around trains. Wouldn't that be the last thing he'd want to hear after coming home? Was there a time before I was born when, after work, he would sit with a beer next to the hi-fi, listening to tracks like "2-8-2 No. 2599, Chicago Northwestern" and "4-8-4 No. 801, Union Pacific" and nodding along like they were pop songs? I guess when I think back on it, it makes total sense how I developed a fondness for almost any recorded sound. Maybe indirectly (because my dad and I never openly discussed it), I learned from him how you could find music in just about anything. I wasn't an only child, but I grew up like one. Since my sister and brothers were so much older, most of the time it was just my parents and me. My dad was on call at the railroad twenty-four hours a day, so he'd always be gone or in bed early. It got pretty lonely in my house growing up. Most nights I'd stay close to my mother, who was born JoAnn Werkmeister, as she watched TV and smoked cigarettes on the couch. It was the best she could do. She'd been a mother for so much of her life that by the time I came around, she'd kind of given up on parenting. Well, maybe not given up, but she wasn't interested in being an authority figure. I wasn't given a lot of boundaries or rules. I didn't have a bedtime. If I made it to bed at all, it was usually my decision. She was a night owl-she took occasional naps throughout the day, like a house cat-so she always stayed up late, and she'd let me stay up with her. We'd watch Johnny Carson, and then later, on channel 4's late-night Bijou Picture Show-the Turner Classic Movies of its day-old movies my mom would tell me she'd seen in theaters when they were brand-new. She adored Judy Garland, so I especially have memories of watching movies like Presenting Lily Mars, Meet Me in St. Louis, For Me and My Gal, Strike Up the Band, Babes in Arms with her. Sometimes I'd drift off-it's hard to stay awake at 3:00 a.m. when you're a little kid-and sometimes she'd fall asleep. With a lit cigarette still dangling in her mouth. I'd watch mesmerized as it slowly burned down to the filter and hold my breath in suspense as an ash the length of an entire cigarette would somehow balance itself against her breathing for whole minutes before plopping onto the lap of her robe. That might sound like really irresponsible and dangerous parenting, I know, but it's a memory that evokes nothing but warm feelings for me. The smell of the cigarettes and the black-and-white TV flickering in the dark, the only sounds being Judy Garland's familiar voice-"Psychologically, I'm very confused, but personally I feel just wonderful"-and my mom's gentle breathing nearby. I never felt so content. Almost every night we'd wake up my dad, who was trying to sleep in the next room. We had a small house, so the master bedroom was inconveniently located right next to the living room. There was just a wall-not even a particularly thick wall-separating him and whatever we were blaring on the TV. He'd burst out of the bedroom in his saggy white briefs and start screaming, "Goddammit, shut this place down, JoAnn!" "Go back to bed, Bob!" she'd scream right back at him. "Do you know what time it is? It's two o'clock in the goddamn morning! I have to be up before you even know what day it is!" He'd slam the door shut and my mom would light another cigarette. "Mom," I'd whisper, trying to be conciliatory. "Maybe the TV is a little bit loud." "Don't let him tell you what to do," she'd say. I'd turn the volume down anyway, at least until we heard snoring coming from the next room and we knew he was asleep again, and then the volume would go right back up. It was a nightly battle of wills, and my mother always won. I tried to be the arbitrator between my parents, the neutral voice of reason, but they both knew I was on her side. My mom was very permissive with me about a lot of things, because she was more interested in having me as a friend and an ally than being my parent. We were a unified front against an unfair and unreasonable world (i.e., my dad and his demands for a quiet home after midnight). She took great strides to keep me by her side. If I ever said, "I'm lonely," she wouldn't suggest something rational like "Why don't you call that kid who lives down the block and go play with him?" She'd teach me how to play solitaire. That was her solution to my loneliness. "Here, I'll get you some cards." Because she wanted me there. My parents did the best they could without a lot of role models in terms of making good boundaries and healthy decisions for their children. My mom's dad, the cabbie/pimp and career alcoholic, left emotional scars she never outgrew. When she was nine years old, she got a pair of pink cowboy boots for her birthday. It was the only gift she'd asked for, and for a girl not accustomed to getting what she wanted, it was a glorious surprise. She couldn't remember herself ever being that happy. But then she went outside to play, still wearing the boots, and she got hit by a car. It was pretty horrific. They took her to the hospital, and she was so severely injured that they had to cut her brand-new pink cowboy boots off her body. She ended up being in traction for more than a month. Her dad only came to visit her once that entire time, drunk and causing such an awful scene that he had to be forcibly removed by the police. It's hard for me to even imagine my mom at that age, feeling the world fall apart all around her. Barely nine years old, run over by a car, with her cherished pink cowboy boots destroyed, and then her dad finally shows up for a visit, weeks later, wasted, and has to be dragged from her room, kicking and screaming, "I'm here to see my little girl. Let go of me, you cocksuckers!" It's just sadness piled on top of more sadness. I felt bad for my mom and dad. Not at the time. At the time, I felt closer to my mom, I needed her more, and I loved that I was her confidant and best friend. I was the uncontested oedipal victor, a psychiatrist once told me. I really didn't like the sound of that. It was only later, when I was old enough to think about their relationship, that I could recognize how my father could legitimately claim he was being treated unfairly. He was getting up at four o'clock in the morning, sometimes earlier, to drive down to the railroad and work a twelve-hour shift. On top of that, he was always on call. The phone could ring at any hour of the night or day and he would be expected to deliver himself to the railroad's needs above all other concerns. It wasn't easy for him to get eight hours of rest even without us almost intentionally ruining whatever sleep he could manage. There's no reason we couldn't have watched TV in the kitchen or even gone to bed ourselves. But Mom wasn't interested. "Turn that shit down!" he'd scream from behind the bedroom wall. "Put a pillow over your head," my mom would shout back, and we'd both giggle like preteen bullies. I think my dad genuinely loved my mom. And she loved him, too, but maybe not as much. When I was a kid, I thought that she wasn't getting what she needed emotionally from him. But in hindsight, it was probably the other way around. It was my dad who had no chance. She wasn't going to trust a man with her happiness. Not after her father made it so abundantly clear what could happen when you trusted a man. She trusted me, but I was her perennial baby, fostered to be her bringer of happiness. But with her husband, they were roommates, at best. She wasn't going to leave him, but she wasn't going to let him get too close, either. While I was never groomed for the railroad, my brothers did end up going into the family business. Greg was in track maintenance, and Steve was a brakeman. I also had several uncles and cousins who worked on the railroad. Anytime I would express an openness to the idea of working around trains, my mother would say firmly, 'You're never going to go work on the goddamn railroad.' She was hell-bent against it. I don't know if she just wanted better for me, or if she worried it was too dangerous. I never quite figured out why it was okay for my brothers but not for me. Maybe it wasnÕt, but she knew she had already lost those battles and wasnÕt focusing on their futures anymore. Just mine. Excerpted from Let's Go (So We Can Get Back): A Memoir of Recording and Discording with Wilco, Etc. by Jeff Tweedy All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
| Introduction | p. 1 |
| 1 The World's Longest Main Street | p. 11 |
| 2 Galoshes | p. 39 |
| 3 Shrink-Wrap | p. 67 |
| 4 How It Ends | p. 101 |
| 5 Paper Products | p. 125 |
| 6 More Ketchup than you can Imagine | p. 149 |
| 7 The Flowers of Romance | p. 163 |
| 8 Gr-Ood | p. 179 |
| 9 Toby in a Glass Jar | p. 201 |
| 10 Sukierae | p. 227 |
| 11 On and on and on | p. 251 |
| Epilogue | p. 273 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 289 |
