Photo Credit: Jack Rice
"Hey! Can you turn it down a little?”
It is not unusual to hear a request at a concert but Jeff Tweedy was at the mic, asking for a little consideration from a nearby stage as he strapped on an acoustic guitar.
For Tweedy’s band Wilco, it has long been about the journey. The Chicago-based group’s sprawling, messy history has been documented on film and in books. Friday night, headlining Summerfest’s Miller Lite Oasis Stage, Wilco demonstrated if you wanted to assemble a mail-order band, this would be a prime example of near perfection.
With a world-class drummer in Glenn Kotche and an other-worldly guitarist (Nels Cline), a solid bassist who contributes harmony vocals (founding member John Stirratt) and a pair of utility instrumentalists—Mikael Jorgensen and Pat Sansone—Tweedy has assembled a group of collaborators whose mantra has become “The sky’s the limit.”
Early in the set the band ramped up to a song’s finale that found Kotche and Tweedy levitating musically, with a dialogue volleying back and forth. Wilco followed with a tune that began quietly that was met the aforementioned noisy assault from a nearby stage. Ah, the beauty of outdoor festivals. “Maybe we can get them to coincide our ballads?” Tweedy suggested.
While visually Wilco may not be much to look at, for gearheads in attendance, the band’s collection of vintage and oddball instruments added up to a small museum of guitar porn onstage.
Wilco variously alternated acoustic-based balladry with conventional rock that invited audience singalongs with tunes that served as launch pads for extended improvised solos. The 20-song set ran the gamut from the folky “Box Full of Letters,” from the 1995 debut album A.M. to the epic “Impossible Germany,” which ended in musical conflagration, with Cline offering a masterclass on blurring the lines between chaos and melody.
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“That was the last song of our set, now we are back,” Tweedy said—without the band ever leaving the stage for the presumptive pause for an encore that ended with “California Stars.”
Homeboy Trapper Schoepp had the warmup slot. With an expanded six-piece lineup, he rallied the audience namechecking landmarks the Astor Hotel and Bay Beach Amusement Park in Green Bay. Schoepp’s 2019 album Primetime Illusion was produced by Wilco’s Pat Sansone.
