Tulip Frenzy: John Buckley's Top 10 List

"A Ghost Is Born" is not a left-field classic, but only because "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" moved the field.  That album was more daring, and through brilliant press manipulation and a bit of kismet enhanced by the incompetence of some Reprise Records A&R guy who made them heroes, it became an alt.hit.  Ironically, they're now in a position where they could get away with something more radical and instead, and perhaps to their credit, produced something more conventional, though beautiful it is.

There are revelations, Tweedy's guitar playing for one. A song like "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" would have fit in just fine on the Velvet Underground's "White Light" album -- and it's not just because of the long and looping John Cale pop structure, but because Tweedy grabs hold of his guitar like he's strangling a cobra. The bonus track available from the (iTunes) Crack Store sounds like a first take of Pere Ubu's "Life Stinks."  And this from a band that just a few years ago was working a fairly conventional Rolling Stones/Dwight Twilly tent in the center of the circus grounds.

I admire Tweedy, admire someone from Chicago with the balls to start an album, as he did with "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot," with the opening phrase from Saul Bellow's "The Adventures of Augie March."  Though he transformed it, wonderfully, from "I am an American, Chicago born," to, "I am an American aquarium drinker," a little debt like this shows the association Wilco had with Woody Guthrie's unsung canon was no one-off.  But I've always had a bone to pick with Tweedy, and great as "Ghost" is, the issue's still the same.

The album was delayed because Tweedy's in rehab, and the spin is that he became addicted to pain killers, a defense against migraines.  Why then, on earlier albums and projects, as now, does he resort to what can only be construed as heroin chic?  There's nothing romantic, post-1966, about a band writing songs glorifying, as "Ghost" does on "Handshake Drugs," purchasing smack, or as "Being There" and "Summerteeth" did, shooting it up.  Maybe if he were appealing to Saul Bellow's audience, you wouldn't have to worry about some kid admiring him and thinking it's cool.  Or maybe I'm getting too old to countenance this.

It's a great record.  They're a great band.  Tweedy is a great, if anodyne singer, and a surprisingly muscular guitarist.  Within the construct of folk and Americana and Richard Manuel-esque piano, alternating with Big Star/Tweedy real rock 'n' roll, they work in a great tradition of two Canadian cum American entities, Bellow and the Band.  Too bad about the migraines.

|  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this