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

by Jeff Tweedy

“Rich Kelly & Friendship” and “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.”

Watching the Clash perform, Bangs wrote, was like wishing for a night we can “pretend is the rest of [our] lives.” It’s about the power of personal liberation, and even if tomorrow you go back to your boring existence, at least you had that one night when “you were blasted outside of yourself and the monotony which defines most life anywhere at any time . . . when you supped on lightning and nothing else in the realms of the living or dead mattered at all.”

That’s what I assume happens when someone is radicalized and joins a militia or some cult. Your life feels empty and worthless and small, and then you find this thing that feels special, and it speaks to you in ways nothing else has, and it becomes a way forward.

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.

Pretending you could be Joe Strummer was like

daydreaming about being John Glenn. A perfectly respectable role model, but there’s no way I was ever fucking walking on the moon. But being an average-looking dude who wrote super-short indie rock screeds with a proletarian ethos before dying in a van accident at twenty-seven? That seemed doable.

And I do believe whole towns can be collectively depressed psychologically like it’s a local dialect. If you have a fairly isolated community, and people maladapt to their internal psychological stress by drinking or willfully numbing themselves in other ways, porn or gambling or whatever, and there’s a dwindling supply of hope, people get swept along, and they wake up and they’re old and the world has passed them by. And most of the time their kids never see anyone get better, so they grow up with no idea how it happens or what it looks like.

It may even mark the beginning of the first identifiable pattern of depression in my life. When you’re prone to depression, this is the kind of catalyst that can bring it on and turn something upsetting into something debilitating and seemingly insurmountable.

Alcohol was a pretty safe refuge from his fear of finding out that he’s not as special as he thinks he is. No one is.

Because I think that artists create in spite of suffering, not because of suffering. I just don’t buy it. Everyone suffers by degrees and I believe everyone has the capacity to create, but I think you’re one of the lucky ones if you’ve found an outlet for your discomfort or a way to cope through art.

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.

Everything else, well, there’s such a fine line between saying to somebody,

“The Cubs are doing pretty well this season, huh?” and making uninterrupted eye contact while informing them in a blank-faced monotone, “I AM A NORMAL MALE HUMAN, I AM A NORMAL MALE HUMAN.”

I like to believe most people’s natural state is to be creative. It

lot.

I think just making stuff is important. It doesn’t have to be art. Making something out of your imagination that wasn’t there before you thought it up and plopped it out in your notebook or your tape recorder puts you squarely on the side of creation. You are closer to “god,” or at the very least the concept of a creator.

I also kind of believe that even the greatest works of art ever created mean almost nothing individually. If a work of art inspires another work of art, I think it has fulfilled its highest duty. People look for inspiration and hope, and if you have it you share it. Not for your own glory, but because it’s the best thing you can do. It doesn’t belong to just you.

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.” If the songs Bob Dylan wrote aren’t sacred, then nobody’s songs are sacred. Nobody’s. No one has ever laid on their deathbed thinking, “Thank god I didn’t make that song. Thank god I didn’t make that piece of art. Thank god I avoided the embarrassment of putting a bad poem into the world.”

Life is short and you should wake up in the morning feeling excited about what you do. And if you don’t and you can afford to stop, you should stop. Even if it makes some people angry.

And I think that’s huge for people to be able to live in an environment where they believe that they can accomplish things. That it’s not strange to accomplish things. I

end. “Life is happy and sad and it hurts” is what he told us. Try and sum it up better than that—I can’t.

DOLLY PARTON ONCE said that her advice to anyone wanting to be an artist was to “Find out who you are and then be that on purpose.”