Wilco Film Captures Inner Big Star
Wilco are a rare bird in our current music industry climate, caught
deep in the no man’s land between platinum success and grassroots
cultishness. That is one of several reasons that Sam Jones’
documentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, which opens
in New York City today and Los Angeles and Chicago on August 2nd,
is such a fascinating feature film.
Wilco have moved deeper into the solar system than other
creatures of their ilk. Since the mid-Seventies, numerous rock
& roll-minded bands that don’t subscribe to genre or subgenre
(i.e. punk, New Wave, etc.) have had one goal in mind, to become a
Big(ger) Star, rather than a Bad(der)finger, burning brighter than
the former without flaming out like the latter. It’s an unofficial
credo for indie rock, and with those bands as guide posts, as
opposed to more culturally commercial paths taken by (or forced
upon) the Rolling Stones and Beatles, independent-minded rock has
fared better of late when it steers clear of The Man and his
machinery.
Much has been made of Jones’ serendipitous capture of Wilco’s
tumultuous year. He planned to be a camera-toting fly on the wall
for a month or so, while the album was recorded. He missed the
departure of a founding member (drummer Ken Coomer), but arrived to
capture band tiffs, the departure of a second key member
(multi-instrumentalist Jay Bennett), a split with their label,
signing with a new label and everything getting back on track . . .
roger wilco. Unlike music films of yesteryear, there is, in that
thumbnail sketch, a strong narrative drive in Jones’ film. From a
Greek theater-y sense of foreboding early on — Bennett marvels at
the group’s perfect relationship with Reprise, scoring $80,000 to
record in its own loft with nary a label hawk peering in from
overhead — to a particularly uncomfortable mixing dispute between
Bennett and frontman Jeff Tweedy, Jones captures the drama amid the
creativity.
In the end, that drama is tempered with elements of a Marx
Brothers farce, captured lovingly in black and white, as Warner
Bros. — the villain, for our purposes — infamously pays twice for
the same record. That corporate gaffe will likely be the core of
film’s lasting legacy, with comments of bemusement from Tweedy, the
band’s manager Tony Margherita, and departed Warner/Reprise bigwig
Howie Klein (who states that the band never would have
been dropped under his lead). But there are other, more
interesting, comments upon music found in the film. Earlier this
year, Jones explained his inspiration for shooting it. “I’ve been a
music film fan for a long time and I just started thinking about
the idea of being around when seminal albums were being made,” he
told Rolling Stone. “I saw a film about The Joshua
Tree, where some filmmakers talked about the making of the
record. It was really kind of boring, because it was after the
fact, and everyone had all this hindsight that it was a great
record. So I thought, ‘What would it have been like during the
making of Exile on Main Street or Pet Sounds?’
And I wanted to find a band that fit the traditional real
band, rather than something that was put together — a
corporate act or solo act or something. And Wilco just struck me as
like that. They had the spirit of The Basement Tapes — a
band that has it going in an honest sense.”
The corporate battle is the absurdity in the forefront, but
perhaps more interesting is how Yankee Hotel Foxtrot fits
into today’s musical landscape. While Exile and Pet
Sounds were hardly best-sellers for the Rolling Stones and
Beach Boys, respectively, they were still the Stones and
the Beach Boys. Both had safety net of those identities
upon which to fall back, should creative indulgences cause them to
teeter. Wilco’s Wilconess is born from the band’s underdog nature
(after the Uncle Tupelo break, most placed their bets on Jay Farrar
and Son Volt as having the brighter future), Tweedy’s left-field
charisma and the band’s ability to play chicken with their fans,
daring to alienate them (read: challenging them) with each album.
It’s captured in backstage footage of a man asking if the new
record will sound more like the mid-tempo pop-country of
A.M. or the psychedelic washes of Summer Teeth;
his voice gives away his preference for the former, Tweedy’s
uncomfortable response is that it will sound like neither. And it’s
captured in crowd footage of fans singing Yankee tracks,
despite the fact that the album won’t be released for another eight
months.
In a way, I Am Trying to Break Your Heart doesn’t lend
itself to comparisons to other rock and roll films. The film’s
voyeuristic element is almost strictly creative, leaving little
garbage-rooting for Tweedy obsessives, other than his penchant for
gargantuan quantities of Diet Coke and cigarettes. The film is
closer in spirit to Hans Namuth’s series of photographs of Jackson
Pollack at work, revealing the bare bones of a creation and the
myriad layers of creativity that are gradually incorporated onto
that frame. And this is the film’s true heart, not so much the
bottling of lightning, but rather tracing it back to the
electricity discharged between clouds.
A New York Times story several years ago posed the
possibility that Namuth’s photographs were an unintentional
catalyst in Pollack’ destruction. Suggesting that the magic of the
creation was the final product, not the sweat, muscle and medium
that fused to make it be, these extraneous elements left the artist
feeling over-exposed, feeding his self-destructive tendencies. Who
knows whether or not a film capturing all of the good and bad that
went into the birth of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot will influence
Wilco’s future direction, perhaps making them over-think the
process of making music. The band has arguably improved upon each
previous album and, unlike numerous non-mainstream forbears (R.E.M.
with Murmur or Pavement with Slanted and
Enchanted), there isn’t a sense among their listeners that
their first work will always be the yardstick. Which presents a
separate, but related, challenge. “When you make a Wilco record,
for some reason the vibe is always in the air that this just has to
be our masterpiece,” Bennett said earlier this year. “There were
times in the studio when the history of the band and the history of
the evolution of the band’s sound weighed heavy. Like, ‘We can’t do
that, we’ve done that before.'”
Those pressures are present in the collaboration between Tweedy,
Bennett and bassist John Stirratt, keyboardist/guitarist LeRoy Bach
and drummer Glenn Kotche, and the tension sparked by these
collaborations. But interaction aside, it’s always Tweedy that
serves as the film’s multi-faceted hero: one moment warm, patting
out “Heavy Metal Drummer” on a bus accompanied by his son, another
seemingly cold, claiming he’s “ecstatic” after Bennett’s departure.
And a stunned Bennett, after his dismissal, perhaps puts it best,
saying “a circle can only have one center.”
I Am Trying . . . does a nice job writing myth before
it becomes so. It’s a fascinating companion piece to one of the
year’s most talked about records. And it asks a lot of viewers: to
ignore thirty years and accept that an album is a classic without
the benefit of the 20/20 hindsight that has made too-late legends
of the Nick Drakes, Velvet Undergrounds and Big Stars of rock
history.