Let's Go (So We Can Get Back): A Memoir of Recording and Discording with Wilco, Etc.

by Jeff Tweedy

My dad was the same about the music I made. He listened to everything by Uncle Tupelo and Wilco, but he enjoyed certain songs more than others, like his favorite, “Casino Queen.” But that may have only been because I wrote it for him. I’d taken him to one of those riverboat casinos on the Mississippi, and he said, “You should write a song about this.” So I did. I’m glad I wasn’t living at home when he played “Casino Queen” into the ground. I don’t think I would have ever recovered.

Listen

Lester Bangs’s essay about the Clash, “Six Days on the Road to the Promised Land,” which was published in New Musical Express

Read

There are some unhealthy aspects of forming an identity based on the things you buy, but I would argue that at least there is an artistic consciousness on the other end of the bargain you make with a record.

Then a girl on the other side of the classroom introduced a kid named Jay—he was easy not to notice, with his hair always covering his face and his gaze always directed at the floor—and she said, “Jay’s favorite band is the Sex Pistols.” I feel like we might’ve made eye contact at that moment, but it probably wasn’t that cinematically perfect.

I didn’t invent anything, of course, I just discovered it for myself, which is an incredibly empowering way to learn. Years later my wife and I spent a small fortune sending our kids to a Montessori grade school where they were taught how to learn, not what to learn, and I found myself envious.

Learning how to play guitar is the one thing I always look back on with wonderment. I’m reminded of “What ifs?” every time I pick up a guitar. Where would I be? I have sort of a survivor’s guilt about it that makes me want it for everyone. Not the “guitar” exactly, but something like it for everybody. Something that would love them back the more they love it. Something that would remind them of how far they’ve come and provide clear evidence that the future is always unfolding toward some small treasure worth waiting for. At the very least, I wish everyone had a way to kill time without hurting anyone, including themselves. That’s what I wish. That’s what the guitar became for me that summer and is to me still.

How is this not a graduation speech already? I am stealing this.

There’s a YouTube video of us playing on Halloween 1985, performing The Munsters theme while I’m wearing a dress—if you’re into seeing something like that.

Watch

Now, if you’re a fan of mine, then you’ve presumably been enticed to read this book by the hypersexual nature of Wilco’s oeuvre, and you’ve probably been wondering when I’m going to get around to the scintillating details of my sex life and, in particular, how I lost my virginity.

The people who seem the most like geniuses are not geniuses. They’re just more comfortable with failing. They try more and they try harder than other people, and so they stumble onto more songs. It’s pretty simple. People who don’t pick up a pencil never write a poem. People who don’t pick up a guitar and try every day don’t write a whole lot of great songs. If you don’t ask, the answer is always no.

Another bon mot for a graduation speech

“You Are My Sunshine” is the perfect balance to me. I’ve never come close, but that’s the ideal I’m always aspiring to. Most people think of that song as being simple and easily understood, but I don’t know anyone who agrees on exactly what it means.

Oh my goodness yes Jeff Tweedy. The best song ever.

He was bar mitzvahed, and I had a conversion ceremony. It was more involved than I thought it would be on a number of levels, including a level that required a mohel, a storage closet, and a sharp object.

Omg

It’s a little small orchestra put together not just to play A Ghost Is Born, but Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and everything else we’ve done. There’s John and I, who’ve been there since the beginning; Glenn, who came in halfway through Yankee; Mikael, who started during the hazy post-Yankee/pre-Ghost period; and Pat Sansone and Nels Cline.

Wilco members today