Jeff Tweedy

I went with Lester to see Jeff Tweedy (of Wilco) last night at the Commodore Ballroom who was starting the west coast leg of his tour. Glenn Kotche the drummer for Wilco opened the show. I wasn’t sure what to expect of a solo drummer act. He basically had some audio tracks of sound effects/background noise that he played the drums to. It was pretty wild stuff, kind of tribal fusion with Asian/African type feel. I quite enjoyed it.

After Glenn’s set they cleared the stage of his drum and setup for Jeff. They basically made a half circle of acoustic guitars with a microphone in the middle. It was a pretty wild setup. Jeff came out onto the stage playing a guitar and harmonica. After his first song everyone in the crowd was screaming and cheering quite loudly. Jeff told the crowd that tonight he was going to play a lot of singer songwriter type songs, very emotional stuff and that he would like for the crowd to try and be really quite. He said that if you can get that really quietness you can then hopefully feel the magic in the air. He then started into his next song.

His little talk with the crowd didn’t seem to work as after and during the song the crowd was pretty rowdy with lots of woos and cheers. I think he realized quite quickly that this was going to be a loud crowd, not the kind he was looking for. Regardless he got into it and was very vocal with the crowd, talking quite a lot. He joked about the state of the union address by Bush, saying he feels much better about everything. Joking, “Bush told me not to worry because there are no problems anymore, and if there are any problems, he was going to fix them!”.

Later in the show Jeff continued to joke around about Bush’s address, then went on and made a nice joke about us too. “What the fuck happened up here? I mean all of us Americans were going to move up here, but now you fucked that up…”. Funny stuff. At one point some guy threw a CD on stage and screamed “thats for you Jeff.” Jeff jumped back a little shocked, wasn’t sure what it was. Then he went and picked it up and showed it to the crowd. It was a CB with about a half pound bag of weed tapped to it. Jeff then went on to rip that guy saying, “You realize I was like in rehab like a few years ago?”, and “I don’t even smoke weed man, I don’t, I am a square”, and “the last time I smoked weed I was curled up under a coffee table, weed and overly paranoid people is not a good mix.”

Sometime after the first set Glenn came back on stage and played a set with Jeff on drums. That was really awesome, it gave a bit of live back into the crowd after a lot of really emotional slow songs. Heavy Metal Drummer really stands out as being quite good. However I think the best song of the night was Remember the Mountain Bed, wow. Yeah wow, really, amazing.

Jeff ended up playing for a good 1 hour 45 minutes. Quite a long set. I really had a good time, Jeff is an excellent guitar player and one of the best songwriters around, and the Glenn solo stuff was also quite fun.