The French Connection

Rip It Up, Issue 237, 1 May 1997, Page 23

The French Connection

An interview with Wilco’s Jay Bennett

Jay Bennett is having a bad day. “Some asshole has been pounding on the wall in the room next door since 8 o’clock this morning,” he moans from his hotel in Paris, France. Renovations, apparently. Doesn’t exactly sound like a high class joint, and to make matters worse, Bennett’s phone stars beeping halfway through the interview. “Oh, great, I’ve got pounding on the wall, and now beeping. I better see what it is, so if I lose you can you call me back?” Sure. The call is disconnected. I phone back. “We’re having trouble with the phones here,” he explains. “Everybody’s doing interviews and everybody keeps running into the hall saying what the fuck is going on. We’re tying up too many lines in the hotel.” And the receptionist is going apeshit — in French. But the show must go on. The phone interviews are part of an orchestrated promotional attempt at lifting Wilco from semi-obscurity. After all, they’ve released one of the great American rock ’n’ roll records of recent times with this year’s Being There. The band are in Paris to kick off a European tour, and the previous week Bennett and front man Jeff Tweedy performed as a duo for record company people and journalists in London. “I get a little bit freaked out as you know they didn’t pay to get in,” laughs

Bennett. “It wasn’t like it was a club — it was more a private party — but the room itself didn’t exactly reek of rock ’n’ roll. But doing these little gigs are so easy, as you just call on a song and play it. You don’t worry about having the ideal mix or the mood in the room.” Tweedy was one of the creative linchpins in Uncle Tupelo — a band who, in four albums, managed to lace country with the energy of Clash-derived punk. Bennett was also in a modestly successful mid-West band, Titanic Love Affair, and he kept bumping into Tweedy and the Tupelos — a connection that was to lead to his inclusion in Wilco. Uncle Tupelo only shifted 40-50,000 units per album; if there’s any justice, Wilco’s Being There should be huge. “Critically, it’s getting a lot of reaction, and I hope it sells better; and if our goal every time out is to do a little better, we’ve done it. But maybe our rock music is too varied for a certain kind of listener to grab onto. Our fans tend to be people with discerning taste, people who like a wide array of music. “The band has the ability to approach each song differently and play in varied styles, so we don’t have any concept of how the band is supposed to sound, and that makes this record not digestible to a lot of people. There’s really no vision as to what the key musical elements to this band really are. Everybody has listened to tons and tons of music, and that makes it really enjoyable as a player, as there’s no limitations musically.”

Tweedy and the band came up with 18 songs for Being There — a prolific output requiring double CD status. And in the best rock ’n’ roll traditions, it was basically done live. “All told, somewhat shy of three weeks of recording in, basically, two sessions,” Bennett explains. “Most of it was done live. We would track a song early in the day, then spend the rest of the day doing a few overdubs, and then mix it at night. The overdubs were done in a live, spontaneous spirit, they weren’t thought out.” Jeff Tweedy is credited with having written all the songs, yet he’s generously agreed to share royalties. “No comment,” quips Bennett. “It’s a touchy subject and it’s too personal to talk about.” Maybe Tweedy himself should be paying royalties to the obvious Westerberg/Clash/Stones influences on the album, and he has said Being There

was a display of the music that inspired the band. “There’s been some misinterpretations of that quote, but as we listen back to the record as opposed to making it, we realised we had worn some of our influences on our sleeve, but it was definitely not a conscious part of making the record. Making the record was just trying to do justice to individual songs. “At the end of the record we spent a whole day listening to what we’d done, then it started dawning on us that we’d been fairly obvious about some of our influences. In that sense we were listening to it as fans, almost, or close to the way a reviewer might listen to it. But that quote’s been twisted around to mean we were trying to make this song sound like this band, and this one like that band, and nothing could be further from the truth.”

GEORGE KAY