RIDESHARE - Jeff Tweedy 02.25.2006

well, hello there.  it's been about thirty-five years since the last rideshare...exam-writing has intervened, and lindsey has been going to tri-cities with me often lately, which means that 35-minute "tweezer" jams don't go over as well as when it's just me in an empty car.

these reviews are actually from about a week and a half ago, and so much has happened since then, i don't really remember the content of the shows that well, or even what a "CD" is, really.  nonetheless, i'm going to take my best shot at reviewing mr. tweedy's show at mandel hall in chicago, for which the setlist can be found here.

i'm getting to be really fond of starting out these cold, cloudy, morning drives with a mellow wilco or tweedy show, then following it up with a blistering early phish set on my drive back out of the canyon of heat-induced despair otherwise known as tri-cities (despair only because the temperature is like 20 degrees higher there than in pullman due to elevation droppage).  anyway, this tweedy show really hit the spot.

it was a great soundboard, and the songs were a great mix of the ones that you can hear in similar incarnation on the sunken treasure dvd (which you should buy if you're a wilco fan at all) and a lot of songs from a ghost is born.  hearing really clean, precise solo acoustic versions of tunes like "muzzle of bees", "spiders" and "theologians" was a treat.  there were even some surprises among the expected, more "folky" choices in the set: "one by one", "(was i) in your dreams", "bob dylan's 49th beard".

though the third set followed the usual procedure for this particular tour: usually nels and/or glenn joining tweedy onstage for a few songs, the songs for this particular show were a bit of a surprise.  getting to hear rearranged versions of "in a future age" and "dash 7" was maybe the highlight of the whole show.

overall, a great combination of a unique setlist, solid sound, and of course a solid performance makes this, for my money, almost as good as the aforementioned sunken treasure audio companion for a collection of solo tweedy tunes.

ye olde recordings have finally be re-upped!

though my hunt for an easy website design tool and time to make an AWESOME personal/professional website continue to fall through (it's been what, 2 years now?), i've finally found a convenient and non-stupid way to re-up all of my old sessions and records for download.

all hail mediafire!

okay, now i seriously have to go write my exams.

mint medley session available for free download and consumption!

so in defiance of my coming exams, i found myself staying home saturday afternoon and setting up a recording space in my bathroom.  i'd been toying with the idea of using the bathroom to record any guitar-based songs lindsey would want to put on her album, but i'd never actually tested the room to see what it sounded like.  so, i decided to take an hour or three and see what a song or two of mine sounded like in there, sung from different parts of the room, sung with the mics shifted around, with the shower curtain open or closed, etc.

by 8pm i had recorded 14 songs.

so, i thought it would be fitting to post them online as a soundcloud session before i disappear into the abyss for three weeks.  there aren't any new songs here (i'm mostly working on poems right now, and usually those flesh out into songs eventually, but none have yet), but there are a lot of new covers.  here's the whole setlist:

1. Angel From Montgomery (John Prine cover)
2. Damn Sam (I Love a Woman That Rains) (Ryan Adams cover)
3. Dusty Roads
4. The Melody
5. Albuquerque (Neil Young cover)
6. Bob Dylan's 49th Beard (Jeff Tweedy cover)
7. Palace
8. Ripple (Grateful Dead cover)
9. Forget the Flowers (Wilco cover)
10. Hey Sue
11. Sample in a Jar (Phish cover)
12. Box Full of Letters (Wilco cover)
13. Better to Be Loved > Jam > Millie > Shelter From the Storm (Bob Dylan) > Millie
14. Via Chicago (Wilco cover)

and here's the soundcloud widget:
 Mint Medley Session by lazyblazers

i accidentally wrote my biography

so today i was responding to a student's email, trying to dispense sage advice about professionalization, when i realized i'd just written basically my entire life story of the last five years.  so i just thought i'd post it here in case anyone cared.  it's not especially interestingly written (or interesting in content), but ctrl + v is so easy, why not?
----------------------

As far as the professional stuff goes, I actually got my MA here at WSU (in Pullman).  I started my Bachelor's at Kent State University in Ohio, which is about an hour from where I grew up, and I was a computer science and programming major for a few years.  It's sort of a cliche story, but basically what ended up happening was that I realized I didn't like my major and all of my elective classes that I had to take to graduate ended up being English classes, as I realized more and more that those were the classes I really liked.  That was a bit surprising to me, since I had actually been a terrible English student in high school.  

Anyway, I changed my major and graduated with a BA in English and a really crappy book that I had had to write for my undergrad thesis.   

As everybody says, there's not a whole lot that you can do with a BA in English (there are some things, but I didn't want to do any of them), so I quit school for a few years and just worked normal minimum-wage type jobs  before applying to grad school and ending up at WSU.  I picked WSU because they give assistantships to all of their incoming English graduate students.  Basically it's a deal where they pay your tuition and you teach introductory writing classes for them while you get your degree.  I really liked the idea of getting to work while going to grad school instead of just sitting around reading books all day (ironic, considering what I'm doing right now), so I came here.

I finished the MA in 2007 and missed getting in the Ph.D program by one person, so I stayed on and taught as a faculty instructor for a year and then started the Ph.D program two years ago.  So, yeah, I've been an English major all the way through, which in some ways is a really good thing, but also can be a bad thing, I think, especially as doing interdisciplinary work gets more popular.

I actually did my MA thesis on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales...up until about 2007 I was obsessed with pretty much anything written in English before 1500 or so.  Then, I think I just got sick of it.  I'd been working on the same topic for about five years at that point and I think it just got old.  Fortunately, around that time I took a great class here at WSU from two fantastic professors.  The class was about the history of travel writing, and it really got me thinking about a lot of things, but primarily it got me thinking about how literary theory and all the wordplay and academic argument that goes with higher education in English literature can actually be paired with real-world concerns.  I mean, the stereotypical idea of the English professor is someone who spends all their time reading a bunch of made-up stories by dead white guys and writing articles that explain what those dead white guys meant to say.  Now, I'd be lying if I said that I don't enjoy doing that from time to time, but what drove me away from Chaucer in the end was the fact that I couldn't really see how studying it mattered to anyone other than me.  I guess ending up at ecocriticism was just a logical progression from there.  

I really love ecocriticism because it's so innately connected to real-world concerns, and politics, and policies, and how real people and real cities and real countries live their lives.  You can look at something like Carson's Silent Spring and see really easily how that book mattered to our society in really obvious ways, and from there it's easy to see how studying that impact as a graduate student can be important.

Of course, all of that isn't to say that studying something like Chaucer or Shakespeare is worthless; I still think a lot of that stuff is fascinating.  That travel writing class I took ended in a class backpacking trip to the Selway river that was (instead of just a fun way to end the semester) a really logical extension of the books we'd been reading and all the stuff we'd been studying.  When I realized that I could still study lit theory and actually back up that study not with the words of dead white guys but by writing about my own experiences in the woods and in cities and during cross-country trips and that kind of thing, it wasn't a hard decision to switch my focus :)

RIDESHARE: Wilco 02.01.1997

this one got off to a less-than-auspicious start.  i had chosen the disc because it was marked "07.02.01" (i mark CDs in euro-style dating for ease of sorting), and i wanted to hear an '07 show because i love the rawer versions of the sky blue sky songs.

so imagine my surprise when i popped the first disc in and it started in the midst of "misunderstood", then continued through five more being there-era songs.  it took about that long for me to realize that i must have forgotten to put the leg on that first "0", making it "97" instead of "07".

so here's the set i got.

much like the phish show i just reviewed, this one taught me the error of my ways, in a sense.  i generally don't like bennett-era wilco that much, and have never understood why so many wilco fans insist that the late 90s were the peak of the band.  this might be because i really just don't like jay bennett's playing (which is a rant for another day), but for whatever reason, while i occasionally like to put on early, "raw" wilco, i come away with the impression that, for as fun as they are, they really aren't that good.

this show was good.

like i said above, for some reason "misunderstood" cuts in about 2 minutes into the song, and actually the first few songs are a bit unlistenable because someone keeps fiddling (either the sound dude or the taper) with the volume levels and tweedy's voice is nearly inaudible.  however, things pick up.

this show's version of "that's not the issue" is one of those versions where it literally sounds to me like all the members of the band are stoned out of their minds and banging on their instruments erratically and totally failing at staying in any time signature or scale; yet, at the same time i'm a little afraid that they're just playing in a scale or something that i'm not familiar with and i'm not cool enough to get it.  anyway, this song was sort of a disaster.

everything else is pure being there wilco.  loud, clashing guitars, wild alternation between screamed and whispered lyrics, and more feedback than you can shake your pickups at.

things really start to get off the chain when the band finishes "passenger side", only to launch immediately into a "punk" version of the same song.  after that, madness ensues, including two versions of "box full of letters", three uncle tupelo songs ("we've been had", "gun", and "the long cut"), which oddly sound like three of the most well-rehearsed songs of the night.  the last few songs, including the final "dreamer in my dreams" run around 10 minutes apiece simply because the band never stops banging on guitars, drums, and piano long enough to stop the song and move on to the next one.

this show had an undeniable energy to it, and underneath that the band showed a real ability to not just devolve into screaming and strumming - the nuances of the songs often still come through despite the volume and the reverb.  the focus here is being there; if you love that record, you'll love this show.  i actually want to go back and listen to the record this weekend now, thanks to this show.  though i doubt i'll ever think than any wilco is better than '06 - present wilco, i see the appeal of this kind of show now.  i might grab another one from this era to review for next week.