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

by Jeff Tweedy

down this book, go to the nearest device with Internet connectivity, direct your browser to YouTube, and search for “Rich Kelly & Friendship” and “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.” Then watch it. In its entirety. But if you’re in a hurry, fast-forward to the 1:35 mark, when the bassist breaks into a happy foot solo.

brother had the musical taste and ambition of a somewhat pretentious yet serious 1970s college pseudointellectual. His records ran the gamut from Harry Chapin to Kraftwerk to Frank Zappa to Amon Düül. I went from not being entirely clear on the difference between the Beatles and the Monkees to spending entire weekends listening to the electronic space music of Isao Tomita and losing my grip on reality to Edgar Froese, Atomic Rooster, and Hawkwind. I would stay up all night listening to Aphrodite’s Child’s 666 (The Apocalypse of John, 13/18), a concept album about the Book of Revelation, and being terrified by it. It was

so over the top and dramatic, and it made me want to crawl under my bed and hide, but I couldn’t stop listening.

Lester Bangs’s essay about the Clash, “Six Days on the Road to the Promised Land,”

How often is the beginning and end of musical ambition a shiny new sadistic dog turd like my first guitar?

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.

an agnostic by nature, but seeing that made me believe in staying close to the notion of a creator. The one we identify with most easily by finding it in ourselves.

I became a songwriter not when I composed that perfect couplet, or experienced the right amount of pain. It’s when I realized that whatever I wrote, even if it meant gutting myself in front of strangers, letting all those raw emotions come flooding out, making a fool of myself with my own words, was exactly what I always wanted to do with my life.

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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.

The Chicago historian Studs Terkel asked Bob Dylan in the sixties about how he went about writing a song and trying to outdo himself, or at least being as good as the last song he wrote, and his response was pretty damn perfect. “I’m content with the same old piece of wood,” he said. “I just want to find another place to pound a nail . . . Music, my writing, is something special, not sacred.”

I had become a Jim O’Rourke fan in 1997 when a CD of his album Bad Timing became a constant traveling companion. It’s such a beautiful album; four songs, no words, just Jim playing acoustic guitar, and then out of nowhere herds of interloping horns or strings charge through. It made a bigger impact on me than anything I’d heard in years. The songs were so simple and unhurried. I was mesmerized by the patience and discipline it took to arrange long meditative songs into performances with the immediacy of a pop song.

Like most addicts, I went through periods where I was clean. “Oh, I’ve figured out a way to do this. I don’t need to go to rehab. I’m not taking anything.” It works for a while, but like they say, quitting isn’t the problem, not starting again is the part that’s hard.

I really tried hard to avoid recording high, so for a lot of the time I spent in the studio, I was in enormous throbbing migraine pain. A lot of material on A Ghost Is Born reflects that fact. “Less Than You Think” has an outro built on glacial electronic drones and slowly evolving repetitive mechanical noises arranged to mimic the isolating alien landscapes migraines often induce when the pain wraps itself so tightly around your skull it starts to warp your perception of light and time.

“Spiders (Kidsmoke)” is another recording where I feel like you can hear my condition pretty clearly. Because of its length, getting a great full take felt unlikely with the window on my ability to remain upright closing fast. So we restructured the song to be as minimal as possible with the fewest number of chord changes. This allowed me to just recite the lyrics and punctuate them with guitar skronks and scribbles to get through the song

without having to concentrate past my headache too much. We attempted two takes and take one is the one on the record. Take two was incomplete.

One time, after a group session, a few of us were in the smoking room and I confided to them, “I feel like I shouldn’t even open my

mouth. I don’t want anyone to get the idea that I think my situation compares.” This big black guy, who towered over me, turned around and started shouting at me. “What the fuck is that shit? Shut the fuck up! We all suffer the same, motherfucker!” “I’m sorry,” I said, backing away. “I didn’t mean—” “Listen to me, motherfucker, listen.” Getting right up in my face. “Mine ain’t about yours. And yours ain’t about mine. We all suffer the same. You don’t get to decide what hurts you. You just hurt. Let me say my shit, and you say your shit, and I’ll be there for you. Okay?”

It set me straight. I still think it’s one of the wisest thin...

you’d play Captain Beefheart for us. What was the CD you put on all the time? Safe As Milk? J: Whatever has “Electricity” on it. S: Such a perfect song.

One of the main goals of recovery—and maybe the only essential goal of any kind of psychological intervention, whether it’s through meditation or talk therapy or even an AA meeting—is to become aware enough of your thoughts and emotions to see when there is a choice to be made. Addicts are compelled to do things by inner thoughts and feelings that are mostly invisible to them. The subconscious can steer the ship for a long time without your conscious mind ever noticing. It was a revelation when I started to be able to see that there were choices to make, and that it was a hell of a lot easier to do the right thing when you’re aware that you have a right thing and a wrong thing to choose between.

These are the kind of moments that can be disastrous for people in recovery. But I had a choice, and the choice was easy to make for the first time in my life. I was grieving. People grieve lost loved ones every day. I realized that I wasn’t being denied something, I was being given something no one gets to avoid. There wasn’t a way back from, or around, the pain of losing my mother. The way out was through it.