(a) Jay Farrar is a shy, quiet, soft-spoken fellow, who seems to be clean, decently nice and has a pretty simple fashion sense. But I would argue that there are several factors working in their favor that often go overlooked. I assume they don’t look at themselves as a “brand” or something corporate like that. And there’s very little name recognition behind the band-well, that is, save their “moment in the critics’ sun,” directly after Trace. Sure, they don’t market as widely as Wilco (they did show up covering the Beatles’ “Hello, Goodbye” on an ESPN ad campaign awhile back) or write long art-rock songs. In fact, I’d argue the opposite: that despite what all the young dudes at Rolling Stone and the Trib‘s Kot will have you believe, Son Volt is actually the better of the two. Now, I’m going to come right out and say that I don’t agree that Wilco is a better band than Son Volt. Maybe he was still getting over the pill addiction he had publicly kicked at that point or maybe that’s just how he is, but I remember thinking, “Well, OK. There was something, well, impersonal about it Tweedy had really little interaction with the audience, and when he did speak to us, it was sort of in a grumpy way. I had been hankering to see the band for a long while, and by golly, I enjoyed the concert but wasn’t blown away. Well, anyway, the show was pretty much tracks from that album, which at the time, I admit, I was really into and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and Being There, two generally fantastic albums. Let’s call it Wilco’s “black period.” Sure, there are some fantastic songs on it that just stand right out (“Muzzle of Bees,” “The Late Greats”), but all in all, it’s one of those albums that I’ve tried hard to enjoy but just can’t. I saw Wilco several years ago at Skidmore College in upstate New York, shortly after the band had put out A Ghost Is Born, one of those albums that you’re not sure whether to love or hate. He’s their historian, their biographer, their friend. In fact, the Chicago Tribune‘s got its own Wilco-ist, Greg Kot, who is like the band’s private critic-who never really ever criticizes the band. Somewhere after A.M., there was this Holy Shit! moment, during which Tweedy put the words “impossible” and “Germany” in the same song title, and by G-d, it’s so weird it’s cool. They’ve got the same artistic clout that a master impressionist painter has with his paintbrush-yet they’re doing it with their guitars and ambient computer sounds and krautrock sensibilities and absurdist lyrics. They headline all the big, cool festivals. And, they say, Wilco markets to a mass audience, and they understand it. (ironically) came the dawn of a new era, that in which Wilco ruled the world, put out records that people cared about (even if their record labels didn’t) and enjoyed that underground success that all but vanished from Son Volt like a rug pulled from under a babe. Promise? There will always be that tug-of-war between Son Volt and Wilco fans, the “who’s better?” argument that seems to have already been solved by the greater media: Son Volt had the potential- Trace was 100 percent better of an album than A.M.-no denying it, but after that, Farrar was led astray and Wilco, as it goes, is better, they say, because after A.M. Son Volt has been around a lot longer than Jay Farrar’s original act, Uncle Tupelo, so I think it’s about time (music) journalists stop namedropping Jeff Tweedy whenever a new Son Volt album finds its way onto record store shelves. Produced by John Agnello, Mark Spencer, Chris Masterson and Jason Hutto
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |