Price of Being Classics Conscious

One fan appreciated Wilco’s show Sunday night so much he tried to press some cash into bandleader Jeff Tweedy’s jeans as the singer ended the concert by strolling along one of the long tables at the Coach House, singing a heartbreak ballad by Carole King.

Tweedy pushed away the greenback, not wanting to earn tips the way strippers do. In any case, the gift this 29-year-old product of small-town Illinois really needs is beyond anyone’s power to give: a birth date in the mid-1940s instead of the mid-1960s.

Tweedy plus a time machine equals hall-of-fame greatness. With his gift for earthy, feeling-filled, memorably tuneful countrified rock, plus a stage presence that’s both dynamic and unforced, a backward leap of 20 years would make him a worthy peer to Gram Parsons, to the warm and folksy early Rod Stewart, to Neil Young’s throb-and-twang take on country and to the Rolling Stones’ bashing their way through “Sticky Fingers” and “Exile on Main Street.”

Instead, he’s here in the ‘90s, exiled on Belated Street, where a listener so inclined can hear “been there, done that” echoing in the overtones of every song he and his Chicago-based band play.

Tweedy knows this, and it galls him.

So after “I Got You (At the End of the Century),” the first of several Stonesy bashers better than anything the Stones themselves have bashed out in half a generation, Wilco veered into “Someone Else’s Song,” in which Tweedy confronts his predicament:

I keep on singin’, your eyes they just roll.

It sounds like someone else’s song from a long time ago.

Instead of delivering it as the gentle, almost-defeated lament heard on Wilco’s new album-of-the-year contender, “Being There,” Tweedy sang it with defiance-spitting ire, roaring through a maelstrom of feedback and dissonance.

The other major departure from a recorded song arrangement came during “Kingpin,” a shuffling, hop-along country-beat number that playfully pokes fun at rock-star ambitions. Framed around a boinging clavinet sound that keyboards player Jay Bennett lifted from the Band’s Garth Hudson, the number stretched out with wry improvisations. Then it gathered force and Wilco rocked through a driven, accelerating passage. Tweedy kept hollering, in a desperate, gargling voice, “I wanna be a bigwig. . . . I just try too hard”--no longer mocking, but seriously exploring the warping, destructive side of rock-star ambitions.

So rock makes Tweedy fear he’s a copycat and a man harmfully obsessed--a man “lamed . . . maimed . . . tamed by rock ‘n’ roll,” as he sang in another song that wonders whether rock’s worth is too meager, the costs of devotion to it too great.

Faced with these questions, Tweedy and Wilco came up with the same, resounding answer as their forebears: What can a poor boy do, ‘cept sing for a rock ‘n’ roll band?

Wilco’s 85-minute performance had those charging, cranking, deliciously barnstorming Stones moments. It had three sturdy, well-chosen, die-hard-fan-pleasing numbers dating from Tweedy’s productive early-’90s hitch with the band Uncle Tupelo. It had comfortably twanging country songs. It had plenty of sad ballads that were lovely and persuasively aching, with Bennett, who doubled as a skilled lead guitarist, bringing a Nicky Hopkins-like piano gleam to “Sunken Treasure” and new member Bob Egan adding pedal-steel cries as plaintive as an abandoned kitten’s meow. Rolling out number after wistful and winsome soft number, Wilco embodied what Neil Young pined for once in a song: “the sound of some openhearted people goin’ down.”

After writing and singing well about broken romance on Wilco’s strong 1995 debut album, “A.M.,” Tweedy has extended his reach on “Being There” by raising questions about what rock means to those who play it, and to those who listen. He began the encore with “The Lonely 1,” a beautiful ballad about a fan’s feeling of connection to a favorite singer. He ended, several songs later, out on the table, engulfed by fans, as he sang King’s “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?”

It seemed less a pro forma excursion to create an illusion of intimate contact with an audience than a way of testing the reality and unreality of performance, as explored in “The Lonely 1.” Tweedy tried becoming “the lonely one,” the star who pours out his loneliness in sweetly winning ways. The move did connect; but, as that evidently well-meant gift of cash pressed on Tweedy showed, the connection isn’t always reliable or pure.

Raising such self-reflective questions about rock is one way of keeping the form interesting now that its fund of original invention is pretty much spent, with innovation consisting mainly of stitching together old styles in new combinations, a la Beck.

Another way to keep rock interesting is to fire up the old, classic forms with enthusiasm, skill and a passion for using them to grapple with enduring human concerns. Wilco’s music may be open to the scoffer’s “been there, done that,” but music fans convinced that classic rock is classic for good reason should make a point of putting this too-late-but-still-pretty-great band on their itinerary.

The Handsome Family, a band of fellow Chicagoans touring as Wilco’s designated opener, kept an ironical distance from country and folk sources.

Like David Lynch conducting biopsies of middle-class suburban culture and finding malignancy, the band’s lyricist, bass player Rennie Sparks, introduces funny but sick elements into country tunes written by her singing husband, Brett. The method doesn’t parody country and folk songs so much as distort them with strange imagery and subject matter.

Sometimes the band’s ironic stance turned into an arch and deeply dislikable sense of superiority to tradition--mainly in Rennie’s absurdist song introductions and mockery of hick mannerisms. But overall, the set registered a valid point: The world has always had a weird, frightening side embodied in many a traditional song; therefore, hand-me-down country and folk strains are well-suited to expressing the odd and scary side of today.