The Weather Report
June 1, 2004
Column by Brandon Copple

Roger, Wilco

The Weather: Partly cloudy 61°. Humidity 78%. Winds NNE at 10mph.

Spring is a battlefield; in April and May Winter makes a stand against the onslaught of Summer. In the Midwest it’s a violent conflict, an explosive mix of windstorms and thunderstorms and fidgety thermometers. Happily, Summer always wins, and what we get is June. In June the sun comes out and stretches, turns the city green, the sky so blue it aches. If you need me I’ll be down by the grill, sucking on a High Life and soaking up a late sunset.

~ ~ ~

The Month of Wilco

June has always been one of my favorite months, for the reasons described above. But this year it’s not just about the weather.

It’s also about Wilco. The ding-dong damndest band in rock-n-roll. My favorite band.

This month, June 2004, will be The Month of Wilco. On June 5 I will see Wilco perform at the Vic Theater, a few blocks from my apartment. On June 15 a book about the band, Wilco: Learning How to Die, will hit bookstore shelves (on a short trip to used-bookstore shelves, I’m sure). And on June 22 the band will release their new album, A Ghost is Born.

Some might consider this a little too much Wilco. Especially the book. “Didn’t they already make a movie about these guys?” some might ask. “Why the hell do we need a book?”

Answers: They did. We don’t. We don’t need a book about Wilco any more than we need a book about, say, the White Stripes. What we need is a fucking book about Townes Van Zandt.

But be that as it may, I plan to buy this Wilco book, and read it, even it’s pointless or boring. This is, after all, my favorite band.

I’ve been thinking about what makes Wilco my favorite band. Other than the music, of course. Obviously, the music. Wilco songs are cool and fun and intense and challenging. Wilco records don’t hook you on the first listen. But by listen number five, they’ve crawled into your ear and laid eggs.

And every record is different. Which is another great thing about Wilco…I’ve been with them since before the beginning, when part of them were part of Uncle Tupelo. I’ve seen the music evolve from rudimentary country-rock to orchestral pop to a kind of spacey alt-rock. I’ve watched Jeff Tweedy’s writing grow more sophisticated, less literal with each new release.

Thus has Wilco been my own musical Galapagos, the place where I go to see an artist’s evolution with my own eyes.

The new record, Ghost, is another change of direction. Fewer sound effects, less overdubbing. Pretty much straight-up pop-rock. Once again, the songwriting is mysterious and beautiful.

I know this because I’ve listened to the Ghost a dozen times already. Which leads me to something else I like about Wilco.

I like Wilco because they put their records on their website months before they’re officially released. They understand what most record companies do not: make a good record and people will buy it even if they’ve already streamed it, downloaded it, burned it, listened to it a dozen times.

Wilco put their last record, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, on the web two months before its release, which didn’t stop it from debuting at number 13 on Billboard – pretty good for a band that has never and will never get played on mainstream radio.

There’s more. In March, before Wilco put the Ghost on their site, it leaked out on to the Internet. Soon it was available for free illegal download on half-a-dozen websites, including some hard-core Wilco fan sites. The band discovered this, of course, but rather than crying to their lawyers or running to the copyright cops at the RIAA, Wilco proposed a deal: ask everybody who downloads the record to make a donation to charity.

As of May 21, Wilco fans had raised $10,237 for Doctors Without Borders.

And you know what? Every one of those donor-downloaders will buy the new record when it comes out. And they’ll fork over $30 to see Wilco play live this summer (another reason to love Wilco: epic shows).

It’s a novel strategy – show your fans some respect and they’ll reciprocate with financial support.

Somebody should write a book about these guys.

~ ~ ~

If you read last month’s WR (and judging by the response it generated, you didn’t), you may have noticed a parallel in recent news to the story of the Turk.

Briefly, the Turk was a Kanza Indian who in 1540 bamboozled some greedy Spanish Conquistadors into escorting him from northern New Mexico to his former home in Kansas.

Now think about this whole Ahmad Chalabi fiasco. Think of the Turk and Chalabi, an Iraqi exile looking for a way to get back home. Think of the Spaniards and the Neo-Conservatives in the Pentagon, hungry for evidence that would prove what they already believed: Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and the Iraqi people wanted us to invade, overthrow Saddam and institute secular democracy.

Now think of how Donny Rum and the boys at the Pentagon must’ve felt when it turned out there were no WMDs and Iraqis not only didn’t want us there, but they also didn’t particularly give a fuck for secular democracy.

Compared to the Turk’s fate, I’d say Chalabi got off easy with having his office ransacked.

~ ~ ~

The List

In planning our honeymoon we wanted to go someplace neither of us had visited and might not otherwise get to visit. In the process I realized how vast is the universe of places I haven’t been. That made me feel like shit, so I decided to make a quick list of things I haven’t done. Turns out it’s mostly either stuff I hope to do or stuff I am proud I never did. You can guess which is which.

Some Things I’ve Never Done:
• Been to a hockey game
• Been to a bullfight
• Been to a World Series game
• Drank a whiskey sour
• Slept on a boat
• Driven coast-to-coast
• Owned a pickup
• Purchased real estate
• Killed an animal
• Read Proust
• Hard drugs

(Brandon Copple is a volunteer staff writer for 2Walls Webzine.)