“We’ve tried not to be nostalgic as a band,” Jeff Tweedy told the audience at New York’s United Palace Theatre on Saturday night. Moments earlier, Wilco had finished performing their landmark 2002 album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in full, and apart from a brief wave “hello,” this was the first he’d acknowledged us. Now that the last notes of “Reservations” had faded, the frontman was loose and gabby again, full of jokes and praise for the musicians, seemingly happy that the hard part of the night was over.
The songs on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot are among the band’s most complex compositions, and navigating them before a live audience must be taxing. But Tweedy’s visible relief also summoned the album’s troubled history, which has entered into Wilco-fan mythology. Tweedy was struggling with his addiction to painkillers during recording sessions, all while suffering debilitating migraines and feuding with his musical partner Jay Bennett, whose own addiction was worsening. The album was then rejected by their label, Reprise. Some parts of that story resolve neatly into a happy ending—Nonesuch Records eventually released Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, to universal acclaim—while others do not. Tweedy fired Bennett from the band following the album’s release, and the two never reconciled before Bennett overdosed on Fentanyl and died in 2009.
All of those memories swirled around the stage on Saturday, as if the songs on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot were some kind of hex designed to unlock them when played in order. Tweedy waited until the album was over to pay tribute to Bennett, whose memory inevitably haunts these songs. During the performance, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot still felt like the present—murky, high-stakes, ongoing. Watching the musicians onstage work to summon its sound, I found myself reflecting on what a hard one it is to pin down—simultaneously blurry and clear, meandering and exacting. Twenty years later, it still plays like a dream a rock album is having.
The first performers to walk onstage were the Aizuri Quartet. Most attendees probably weren’t prepared for a mini-chamber music opener, but the string quartet attacked their repertoire with such precise ferocity that they silenced the audience, then elicited whoops and hollers. The set bore no obvious relation to either Wilco or Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but to Tweedy, that was part of the point. He singled out the group twice during the encore, saying they represented “the world of creativity and beauty” the band hoped to join. You could read in his face, obscured by glasses, beard, and wild hair, that he meant it.
Like all full-album performances, where you know what song is coming next, the show had a muted air. But the reverence was the rapt, absorbed kind. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is a headphones album, and there were moments when the show on Saturday, the second in a string of shows in New York and Chicago, felt like a headphones concert. The renditions were verbatim, note-perfect. If there was a glitch lurking somewhere in the right-hand channel of the mix, it was perfectly recreated onstage.
That meant the music never got loose, wild, and alive the way Wilco shows tend to. Even when the band careened through the exhilarating breakdown that closes out “I’m The Man Who Loves You,” it was choreographed chaos—no extra bars, no sloppy licks or drum fills tossed in. It sounded good, but music about falling apart shouldn’t sound this together.
The encore was more relaxed. “Here’s a song that we get requested all the time, but when we play it, nobody cares,” Tweedy deadpanned, before launching into the Yankee-era rarity “Cars Can’t Escape.” Then they slid away from the world of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and the fraught period it represented. They played “Red-Eyed and Blue,” “I Got You (At The End of the Century),” and “Outtasite (Outta Mind),” three classics from their 1996 double LP Being There. That album represented the moment Wilco announced themselves as a world-class rock band. Revisiting these songs, you could feel all the uncertainty and malaise burning off like the sun rising over a river.
Throughout the night, it was fascinating to observe the degree to which this music still tugs at Tweedy. He has a distinctly Muppet-like mien when he is truly enjoying himself, bobbing his head like a young Paul McCartney and glancing around him, smiling. He never smiled during the performance of the album proper, though. He was utterly absorbed, tuned into remote transmissions. Despite the army of musicians surrounding him, it seemed as though the sound simply radiated from out the top of his fuzzy head. This world, elusive as it is, remains personal for him.
