Pretty Fly for a Dead Guy

Whenever a dead guy releases a “new” album, I think people have a moral duty to heap upon it every ounce of skepticism they can muster. Honestly, for me, posthumous releases are met with immediate scorn and derision and they have to work their way past that before I can enjoy them. Why? Because, even if a posthumous release contains “Never before heard” material, you may not be hearing the songs exactly how the artist wanted to present them. Maybe their surviving family and friends have a fair idea what the artist was going for, but you can’t be 100% sure. Now, only getting 85ish percent of an artist’s vision isn’t going to keep me from checking out a posthumous release, but it’s a strike against them. The biggest concern I have with the postmortem album is  that, by purchasing an album after the artist is dead, I am basically tossing money into the yacht fund for unscrupulous family members, former bandmates, or both.

On the other hand, who doesn’t want more music from their favorite dead artist? I mean, I’ll be honest with you, if you release tapes of Joe Strummer singing folk songs in his living room, I’ll snap them up like they cure impotence. Which they probably will.

Which brings us, more or less, to the “new” Jimi Hendrix album, Valleys of Neptune, which has been meticulously packaged by his little sister Janie, with help from John McDermott (who wrote extensive liner notes) and Eddie Kramer. To her credit, Janie Hendrix has done an admirable job over the years removing hackneyed posthumous Jimi Hendrix albums from the marketplace. On the day Valleys of Neptune dropped, her Experience Hendrix company reissued the four studio albums Hendrix authorized during his brief life. So Valleys comes from a reasonably solid place of credibility and, while it contains songs you’ve heard before, they are versions that have never been released and are, mostly, taken from sessions that Hendrix was using to retool and improve some of his older songs (although the version of “Red House” that appears on Valleys of Neptune is, to my ears, vastly inferior to the version that appears on Are You Experienced?).

In fact, Valleys of Neptune does a really excellent job of shining light on Jimi Hendrix as a creative studio musician. Towards the end of his life, Hendrix booked studio time in many of the cities in which he was playing and used that time both to develop new songs and tweak old ones more to his liking. This, of course, means there may be reels and reels of stuff yet to come from Experience Hendrix and that, of course, may have diminishing returns.

But the key question with any album by any artist, living or dead, is “Is it a compelling listen?” Well, if you never liked Jimi Hendrix before, Valleys of Neptune won’t win you over. And if you did like Jimi Hendrix before, like I did, Valleys of Neptune will prove a fairly enjoyable listen (although I get antsy by the time “Red House” rolls around) and, if nothing else, it will make you want to hit John Mayer in the face with a shovel (as if any thinking person needs another reason to want to hit John Mayer in the face with a shovel). Why? Because Valleys of Neptune will remind you just how amazing a guitar player Jimi Hendrix was – it even casts a shadow on my enjoyment of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s music (only a little) because it illustrates the large debt Vaughan owed to Hendrix. And if you connect the dots, you see that Mayer is a watered down imitator of Stevie Ray, who was something of a Hendrix impersonator (though a fairly superb one. And, before SRV fans send the hate mail, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out the debt that both Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan owe to slide guitarist Elmore James). This is not to cast derision on Stevie Ray Vaughan, but to cast it on John Mayer. In light of Jimi Hendrix’s recorded output, one should see Mayer on the level of a bad Elvis impersonator – he is to music what Kirsten Dunst is to acting (and if you think Kirsten Dunst is a great actress, I want whatever drugs you’re taking).

Among the Hendrix songs I’ve never heard before, my two favorites on Valleys of Neptune are the title track and the scorching “Hear My Train A-Comin’”, which is a stunning, visceral blues number on a par with the version of “Red House” that doesn’t appear on this album.

I have, really, only two complaints about Valleys of Neptune, neither one of which could be addressed by Janie Hendrix, unless she has a time machine that I don’t know about. The first is, as I believe I’ve mentioned, the inferior version of “Red House” and the second is that Hendrix recorded Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love” as an instrumental track. It is evident that Jimi Hendrix was probably the best guitar player ever (your Satrianis and Vais and whatnot are not even in the same league, shredders. Henrdrix had soul. “Here My Train A-Comin’” blows every Joe Satriani track ever straight out of the water. Period.), but I have long lobbied to have him remembered as a really great singer. Listen to “Little Wing,” which is – again, obviously – a stellar guitar track, but his vocal performance on that song is really beautiful. No one is going to say that Hendrix doesn’t hit “Sunshine of Your Love” out of the park musically, but I would have loved to hear a recording of him singing the song as well.

In the end, you may be helping Janie Hendrix send her kids to college by purchasing Valleys of Neptune, but it remains a posthumous release that actually manages a lot of dignity and lacks any whiff of cynical exploitation. The woman seems genuinely concerned about preserving her brother’s legacy as a musician, and I’m saying that as a guy who derided the existence of this album from the first moment I heard about it.

Wilco (The Album) and a Mixed Bag of Sports Metaphors

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that it’s 2002 and your band records one of the best albums of this decade (which means, at this point in time, you would be in the running for one of the best albums of the century and millennium so far – nice work). Your label rejects it, you tell them to get fucked, they drop you, and a few months later, one of their subsidiaries picks you up and releases your album to widespread critical acclaim. Your album helps me through a romantic rocky patch in my life and, along with the album you made before that and everything Tom Waits has ever done, your new album is part of a little musical cavern into which I would periodically crawl to lick my emotional wounds.

Congratulations, you’re Wilco, and the album in question is Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Well done. Now let’s say you’re reading a Bollocks! review in 2009 and I’m talking about the new Wilco album, conveniently named Wilco (The Album). It’s easy to say that because – surprise! – that’s exactly what’s happening right now.

Wilco has entered what I’ll call the Can’t Win phase of their career. Since Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Wilco’s been trapped in a critical Catch-22 by people who thought YHF was an “experimental” masterpiece (masterpiece, yes, but it’s basically a Beatles album). They wanted more of that, please and thank you, but when Jeff Tweedy cranked up the guitars on A Ghost is Born, the critical panties grew a bit bunched. Not guitars, they said. They wanted blips and bleeps. So when Wilco released Sky Blue Sky, admittedly a great grower album (I owned it for a year before I realized, on a lazy drive back from the Bay Area, that it’s a gorgeous album in its own quiet way), the critics brought out the big guns – “dad rock,” they called it. How dare Wilco try to make 70s rock records? Those don’t have our beloved bleeps and blips. So now we have Wilco (The Album) and the critics seem to want to like it, though Pitchfork said it lacked the audacity of their other records (A.M. and Sky Blue Sky don’t strike me as particularly audacious, but maybe that’s because I know what “audacious” means. Of course, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was their most audacious album, but that’s because everyone thought they were a country-rock band and they wanted to be an awesome-rock band. Point goes to Wilco on that one) and the Onion A.V. Club dropped this critical turd nugget on the band, saying they’re capable of So Much More. They didn’t say what, exactly, that meant, which is irritating to me. I don’t know if I’ve ever used that phrase in a Bollocks! review, but if I do in the future, please call me on it. It’s lazy to say something like that without qualifying it. Saying a band is capable of So Much More isn’t saying you don’t like them – I don’t think you need to give a reason for simply not liking something (some people think you do, and I say “Fuck you” is reason enough. Sometimes you just know you don’t like something), but if you say a band is capable of more than what they’ve done on a given record, you’re implying knowledge of something they could’ve done and didn’t do. You fucking know-it-all.

Now, when I listen to an album, my primary concern is: does it consist of good songs? Wilco (The Album) consists not only of some good tunes but a few great ones. It’s a melting pot of everywhere Wilco has musically been in their career; “You Never Know” is worthy of Being There, “Sonny Feeling,” sounds like Summerteeth, “Country Disappeared” and “Deeper Down,” wouldn’t be out of place on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Maybe that’s the problem the critics have with Wilco (The Album), but I look it more like so: Wilco is capable of doing pretty much anything at this point and, with Wilco (The Album), they do a little of everything. And it sounds great. The more I listen to this album, the more I like it.

It opens, naturally, with “Wilco (The Song)” which is a literal love letter to the listener (“a sonic shoulder for your to cry on,” Tweedy sings before adding, in case you were unsure, that “Wilco will love you, baby”) and is one of the catchiest tunes Wilco has done since “The Late Greats.” “Wilco (The Song)” is followed by one of the two most beautiful tracks on the album, “Deeper Down,” (the song features a reference to triremes – you don’t hear a lot of people singing about Greco-Roman warships much these days. And, for all you critics out there, they didn’t fucking do that on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot). The other super-beautiful track, perhaps the most beautiful on the album, is “Country Disappeared,” an  aching tune that has Tweedy singing, “every evening/ we can watch from above/ crushed cities like a bug”, describing the televised destruction of a once-great nation.

In 2006, I was discussing The Flaming Lips’ At War with the Mystics and I pointed out that the Lips got unfairly shit on for that record because their previous two albums were home runs and suddenly everyone was mad that they hit a triple. Most bands, it should be noted, don’t make it to first base much (for instance, bands like Nickelback dive in front of a pitch to get on base. You get the idea). I feel the same way about Wilco (The Album). Wilco has hit a couple of big home-runs in their career (their names are Summerteeth and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot), and they usually manage at least a ground-rule double (I’ll quit with the baseball metaphors in a minute – I am talking about baseball, right?). Oh, and let’s not forget their 10th inning, 2 guys out, buzzer-beating grand slam collaboration with Billy Bragg, Mermaid Avenue.

Sure, Wilco (The Album) isn’t perfect, but perfect albums are hard to come by. Sgt. Pepper’s is perfect, London Calling is perfect, Ziggy Stardust is perfect – you see how stiff the competition is there. But who cares? I don’t only listen to perfect albums. YHF might be perfect (hell, I’m not finding much wrong on Summerteeth either) or it might not, but with Wilco (The Album), Jeff Tweedy and company have most certainly punted a double-bogie hat trick right over the net and out of the fucking park.

Thing I Learned Watching Wilco’s Ashes of American Flags DVD

There’s no point talking about the songs on Wilco’s live Ashes of American Flags DVD. If you like Wilco, you’ll like the songs. You’ll love the horns they add to “The Late Greats” in New Orleans and so on and so on. Bands put out live things for their fans. So here’s some stuff I thought about while I was watching it.

Nels Cline is a super badass guitar player. I mean, he’s really fucking good. He can do the noodly stuff (what Joe Strummer derisively referred to as “the fiddly bits”) but he an also hold back and just let the song do its thing. He’s like everything I like about Peter Buck and Tad Kubler rolled up into the same guy.

No matter how you feel about a Wilco album, its songs will almost always be better live. Sky Blue Sky is a pretty subtle record, and I like it (it took some time to grow on me, however), but hearing those songs performed live was a real eye-opener. For years, right up through Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Wilco sounded to me like Jeff Tweedy and his backup band (this is, I submit to you, part of the reason Jay Bennett was ousted from the band) for better or worse but over their last couple of studio albums (and their stellar live album, Kicking Television), they’ve really coalesced into a band. Watching their performances of “Impossible Germany” and “You are My Face” got me very excited for their next studio album, and even more excited to see them in June when they come to Los Angeles. I hope they bring the horns with them.

The last time I saw Wilco live was at Bumbershoot in 2003, when they opened for R.E.M. This was between Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost is Born, when Jeff Tweedy was still, apparently, battling some stage fright and migraines. Their performance was fine, but Tweedy himself seemed uneasy. I was blown away by Kicking Television when it came out because of how vibrant it sounded. Tweedy finally sounded like he was having fun, and that continues on Ashes of American Flags. He jokes with the audience at one point that he had to have a steroid shot so he could sing that night, so if that show ended up being one of the greatest shows in rock history, it would have to go into the record books with an asterisk because he’s on performance-enhancing drugs. There’s a sense of humor present in the man and his band that was not always evident in the Jay Bennett era (not taking sides here – I love Summerteeth and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but if you’ve seen I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, you can see a clash of egos brewing between Bennett and Tweedy. Said clash has culminated in Bennett’s recent lawsuit against Tweedy, claiming that Bennett never signed a release for footage of himself to appear in the film. This might have some legal standing if Tweedy was the filmmaker. As it is, Sam Jones is the filmmaker – Bennett should read the subtitle on the DVD box: “A Film About Wilco by Sam Jones.” Might point him in the right direction) and Wilco as a band is better for it.

In fact, now that I think about it, they’re kind of a highly specialized force for musical awesomeness. They have Tweedy, who is obviously  a very talented lyricist (and a good guitarist in his own right); the afore-mentioned Mr. Cline, who is a guitar wizard; Pat Sansone, who is a great multi-instrumentalist (on the DVD, Tweedy praises him as perhaps the only guy in Wilco who actually makes things look easy on stage); Mikael Jorgensen, an excellent keyboardist (and the quietest guy in the band – I don’t think he says ten words on the DVD); John Stirrat is a great bassist, an excellent background vocalist, and, apparently Tweedy’s rock (Tweedy says that, though he wouldn’t want it to, Wilco could probably weather another lineup change, “as long as it’s not John”); and then there’s Glenn Kotche, one of the most underrated drummers in rock. Kotche is not your typical, John Bonhamy, heavy metal skinpounder; he’s much more subtle than that (although he does do some kickass drumming on “Heavy Metal Drummer” and “Monday,” among other tunes). But it’s his subtlety that I find so remarkable. He’s not just a metronome – dude is adding real texture to Wilco’s songs, and beating himself half to death to do it. If you watch Ashes of American Flags, you’ll see Glenn Kotche do more with a few hits of a cymbal than a lot of drummers do in a four minute song. My point here, really, is that Wilco has gone from alt-country rockers on A.M. to a much broader, harder to classify band on their more recent releases. They’re still a rock band, sure, but they’ve expanded their sound on the work of musicians who are phenomenally good at what they do but who also never sacrifice the soul of the song to their technical prowess. A lot of that rests on Tweedy’s lyrical talents and his sonic vision; he’s a guy who knows what he wants to hear. I believe it’s Nels Cline in the video who points out that even when Tweedy seems unsure, Cline (or whoever) is never really convinced that Tweedy is unsure.

So Ashes of Amerian Flags is a big gift to Wilco fans (especially since it includes free downloadables of all the songs on the DVD!) and a nice sort of update to where the band is now compared to where they were the last time we saw them on DVD. In fact, Stirrat, Kotche, and Tweedy are the only guys in the band now who were there for I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, but Ashes shows them as a unit that’s much tighter for the storms they’ve weathered and the three new(ish) members earn their places admirably in one of America’s finest bands.