His initial post-Wilco release -- a collaboration with Edward Burch, called The Palace at 4 A.M. -- showed signs of promise, although it was by no means perfect. But it had some decent songs and interesting arrangements: it delivered the goods. Despite the fact that Bennett was understandably shocked and probably angry in the wake of his public dust-up with Jeff Tweedy -- preserved in Sam Jones's astonishingly deceptive act of filmic Tweedy-sycophancy I Am Trying to Break Your Heart -- at the time, it seemed to me and to others that someone as talented as Bennett, despite the shake-up, was going to carve out a niche for himself as an idiosyncratic sonic architect.
It's a shame that Bennett didn't find himself in the position where he could build something on the promise of his Burch collaboration. I don't know much of anything about the circumstances of Bennett's all-too-short personal life, but based upon his disappointing subsequent musical output alone, it was clear that something just wasn't working out quite right. That's too bad, because, given the right circumstances and collaborators, he could have spearheaded the development of the aesthetic he helped to invent (especially in Wilco's last couple of albums before he left), an aesthetic that captured the imaginations of lots of listeners and which went on to be unknowingly appropriated by numberless flash-in-the-pan trust-fund dilettantes, all of whom were based in Brooklyn.
After all, he obviously was a whiz in the studio, and so what if he wasn't going to make tons of money putting out records on small labels and producing country-twanged punk bands no one's ever heard of? In terms of money, it's not as though any members of Wilco, past or present, manage to actually get rich and famous off of it. It's a steady gig, but from what I have heard, Tweedy hangs on to the lion's share of the profits. So getting kicked out of Wilco could in the end be a lot like leaving your 9:00 to 5:00 to become a freelancer: an opportunity to start over, to wipe the slate clean and approach things from a different angle.
Although the press tended to cast Bennett as the 'dreadlocked obsessive-compulsive heavy-handed pop craftsman genius' and Tweedy as the 'anxious, indecisive vomiting, genre-shifting charismatic scruff-muffin genius', it was Bennett, more so than Tweedy, who scented the Wilco brand with the musty perfume of esoterica, without which -- I admit -- I probably never would have paid the band any attention in the first place.
Sam Jones's Stalinistically edited exercise in sepia-toned hagiography makes it seem as though Bennett basically wanted to hold Wilco back, for it to remain forever a "bar band" that stomped out predictable, chunky rawk, whereas Tweedy had already read through that particular "box full of letters" one too many times and was ready to move on to unforeseen sonic and poetic vistas. It tries to make Tweedy look -- you know -- deep, man. Turns out he was just on painkillers, idem quod Paula Abdul.I would argue that the only area in which Tweedy is genuinely an exceptional talent is in matters of taste. And that isn't quite hitting the mark. He sure didn't come out of the "box" that way. I think he is -- or anyway, was at one point -- really good at reading and anticipating the -- can't believe I'm putting it this way -- Zeitgeist. I think that, if he is an artist, his artistry has to do in part with this sort of radar for the direction in which things are going. A sense of how not to end up stranded or out on a limb, left for dead in a kind of musical ghetto. If he is an artist, his ability to filter something through the right cultural grills is the closest we can come to identifying his brush and canvass.
In direct contradistinction to the binary of "Bennett-artless/Tweedy-subtle" that the film tries to propose on a certain conscious level, there is a shadowy subconscious logic that is an equally powerful component. The movie makes it clear that, as a musician, Tweedy is a babe in the woods. Without the Glen Kotches, the Jim O'Rourkes, the Jay Bennetts, the Jay Farrars, he has no material to work with. The apex of Bennett's and Tweedy's collaboration was indubitably 1999's Summerteeth -- about which, more in a second.
(I believe 2002's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot -- whose success is due in large part to the Bennett-Tweedy writing and arranging collaboration -- to be superior to Summerteeth. However, this success is due equally to the outstanding contributions of Jim O'Rourke as a producer, mixer and editer. There were a lot of cooks working on that broth; astonishingly, it didn't spoil. God, that was a lame way of putting it. But you know what I mean, etc., etc.)
Summerteeth is the album that, as I mentioned above, put Wilco on the map for much of the record-buying cognoscenti, belying the false dichotomy of Jones's film. The album quotes old styles, but it does so in the manner of self-conscious and unapologetically gorgeous pastiche. It's an album that is saturated with Jay Bennett, and an album on which Bennett's multifarious, megalomaniacal compositional, alchemical, intellectual and instrumental energies come close to eclipsing Tweedy entirely. But Sounds of the Seventies it ain't.
The fact is that without Tweedy to sell the thing, no one would ever have heard Summerteeth. It is Tweedy's very continual presence in the band -- even more than stewardship of it (if that makes sense) -- that makes the band seem like it's progressive, like it's got one eyeball pressed to the horizon. Without the constancy of the Tweedy myth in the hurricane's eye, nobody would have bought the idea of Summerteeth as "breaking new ground." It would have seemed merely to be evidence of a band that is unfocused, mercurial and even fickle. Tweedy provides the necessary continuity through the agility of his personality. His influence upon the music itself tends to lie somewhere between unremarkable and non-existent. Instead, he is the spokesman. His moods, whims and preoccupations are like a weather vein around which the ever-changing band lineup swarms, siphoning off attitudinal and spiritual direction.
Lest we become tempted to go on a Tweedy-bashing spree, let us admit that it's a rock movie and all rock movies are about myths. And all rock 'n' roll is about myths. Some critiques of the movie focus on how embarrassing it is to see musicians (grown men) cultivating and buying into their self-mythologies. I see what these critiques mean, and they probably account for why I could never imagine sitting around watching the thing on DVD as I had once, as a younger man, had the stomach to do on rainy Sunday afternoons.
The movie I was seeing then is no different than the one that I choose not to see now. It's just that in the old days I was interested in a certain kind of rock 'n' roll mythology. I'm sure that I'm still into rock 'n' roll mythology, but just not the sepia-toned, vomiting-into-toilets kind. In any case, my point is that, although the film is a bit of a hatchet-job on Bennett, it simultaneously captures the perils -- and the rewards -- of living out one's self-mythology.
Bennett had joined Wilco after its first album, A.M. I'm fond of A.M., but had the band continued in that springtime, acoustic country mold, I probably would never have really gotten around to listening to Wilco. It would have ended up a slightly tone-deaf version of the Jayhawks -- a band that's good in theory, but that has not inspired me to listen closely or frequently.
Jeff Tweedy is Wilco's sole permanent member -- with the exception of bass player and back-up singer John Stirratt. The founding of the band resulted from Reprise Records having handed Tweedy, on a silver platter, a recording contract, after the demise of the supposedly legendary Uncle Tupelo, in which Tweedy had played second fiddle (figuratively) to the husky baritone Jay Farrar (who himself was handed a contract on silver platter, leading to the formation of Son Volt, whose first album, Trace, is quite fantastic and whose subsequent albums are all retreads of the first).
After Wilco cut A.M. with a cast of ringers, Bennnett was recruited as the band's permanent lead guitarist. In this role, he excelled, but he turned out to be much more than that. Beginning with the 1996 album Being There, Bennett's facility with electric, acoustic and pedal-steel guitar , his piano and keyboard work, his arranging, his enormous supply of instruments and gizmos, and his wizardry as a producer and engineer all played a crucial role in putting Wilco on the map. I'm not sure what map, exactly, because the band has never become as popular as, say the Rolling Stones. But its following as a performance attraction expanded exponentially, and it was held in higher and higher esteem among record buyers and aesthetes.I'm not one of those assholes who ran my college radio station, but I have long been a member of the (now dwindling) record-buying set. It was 1999's Summerteeth that first managed to make me interested in the band. It must have been not too long after its release that a college friend of mine -- I think that I had just broken up with my girlfriend and he had just gotten dropped by his, so it was kind of a shitty phase for both of us, and we were probably conspiring on a nightly basis to keep one another drunk -- insisted that I listen to the album with him. He was into songwriting and lyrics and stuff, something that I had not really latched onto yet (with the exception of probably Bob Dylan).
I was into notes, melodies, chords, bass lines and production and soundscapes. And the sort of bleary-eyed, mid tempo, grainy lushness of Summerteeth really impressed me. I think this was just before a period during which tons of bands -- like the Flaming Lips (also to good effect) -- kind of discovered a similar echo-y, Mellotron-ish sound. This production technique and these arrangements came pretty much entirely from the mad-scientist brain/soul of Jay Bennett.
In fact: not only did Bennett dream up this unique and provocative sound, but, beginning with the previous Wilco project -- the first of two collaborations with the English folk/punk singer/songwriter Billy Bragg called Mermaid Ave in which unused Woody Guthrie lyrics were set to original music -- that Jay Bennett became Tweedy's full songwriting partner. This songwriting collaboration continued through Summerteeth and up to and including 2002's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.The collaboration yielded, without question, the very finest compositions that the band has recorded. Summerteeth's beautiful "My Darling" was written entirely by Jay Bennett, as were massive amounts of other great music on that album, YHT and the Mermaid Ave. albums. His natural melodic sense (something that, let's not kid ourselves, Tweedy just doesn't have and has never had), combined with his penchant for sonic alchemy, contributed to Bennett's massive gift for composing memorable accompaniments and adventurous contrapuntal lines.
Scott Galupo, in an obituary contributed to The Washington Times, lays out an interesting analysis, similar in spirit to the more comprehensible of my bloggish ramblings:
It's funny. A couple of years ago, back in the Smallwire days, we played a show out in the Chicago suburbs god-knows-where (it was a great show!), and anyway, Thax Douglas was there, and he needed a ride home. So, I and whomever else was in the car with me (can't remember...maybe Kristin?) had this long long conversation with Thax. One of the things that he mentioned was how much he hated the guys in Wilco. This was after they had flown him out to introduce Wilco at a big show they were playing at Madison Square Garden. This must have been not long after A Ghost Is Born was released. Anyway, he mentioned what a bunch of dicks they were, or in any event, that he decided they were. Apparently, he detected that some in the Wilco organization had begun to adopt a patronizing attitude toward him. I remember thinking, good for him. Who needs those guys, if that's the case?Through [the] distorted lens [of Sam Jones's I Am Trying to Break Your Heart], Mr. Bennett was not the multi-instrumentalist and recording engineer who helped transform the musicians of Wilco from alt-country castoffs into sonic envelope-pushers; rather, he was a pedantic, peevish excrescence who outlived his usefulness to the movie's hero, singer-songwriter Jeff Tweedy
"I think that felt great," Mr. Bennett is heard to say after the band runs down a rowdy, guitar-driven outtake of the track "Kamera," a more subdued version of which eventually was released on Wilco's celebrated LP "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot." Mr. Tweedy replied that the rendition felt "obsolete." In the movie, the word echoes beyond its immediate context and ends up as a kind of scarlet 'O' on Mr. Bennett himself.
In the documentary's loving portrait, Mr. Tweedy is a kind of secular martyr; he suffers physically and spiritually to birth his beautiful art.
I came away with a very different impression of Mr. Tweedy from Chicago rock critic Greg Kot's more sober band biography, "Wilco: Learning How to Die." I would characterize the Jeff Tweedy who emerges from those pages as a ruthless visionary with limited musical ability who needs to outsource innovation and, consequently, sheds friends and band mates with unnerving ease. Mr. Bennett was both the beneficiary and victim of Mr. Tweedy's creative cycle: from chief aide at his peak to marginalized hanger-on at the end.
Though Mr. Tweedy might not put it in such stark terms himself, the astonishing leap Wilco made from its 1994 debut, "A.M.," to 1996's double CD "Being There" was midwifed by Mr. Bennett. Left to his own devices, Mr. Tweedy would have remade "A.M." — not a bad album, to be sure, but hardly remarkable in retrospect.
The heavily overdubbed "Summerteeth" (1999), with its whirl of analog synthesizers, Mellotrons and other keyboards, saw Wilco flee its alt-country origins and embrace more complicated layers of sound and melody — which, again, Mr. Tweedy could not have produced on his own. [...]
Anyway, he also mentioned -- and at the time swore me to secrecy -- that Jay Bennett was planning to take legal action against Tweedy, et al., due to royalty payments he was owed, and other such things. It made sense even then, because he not only played on Wilco's two best albums (four, if you include the Mermaid Ave. albums), but he co-wrote almost all of the songs. And so, if they were not paying what they owed, it seems it would make sense to take them to court.
In any event, it wasn't until after the news of Bennett's passing that I heard that at the beginning of May, formal charges were finally filed on Bennett's behalf. I have no idea how these things work. I read somewhere that, for whatever reason, there was a long period of paperwork-type stuff before a suit was officially filed. But easily more than two years have elapsed between the occasion upon which Thax mentioned this to me and the occasion of the actual court filing.
Who knows. I've heard -- through the proverbial grapevine, not from Thax -- that Bennett had his share of problems with substances, and that this accounted in part for the patchiness of some of his post-Wilco output. But whatever. Making speculations like that is akin to attributing his shocking demise to the sheer psychological blow of getting dropped from a successful medium-sized band, and that's rock 'n' roll mythology. Rock mythology is a complete lie. That's why it's fun. That's also why it's useless in trying to understand something as complex and fragile as human life. We only knew Bennett through his music. Creating great music has the effect of giving people something; in rare cases like Bennett's, that something is a lot. But it's a fraction of a fraction of a human being.
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