Wilco’s Not Over or Out

Jeff Tweedy is standing outside a small studio at radio station KCRW-FM in Santa Monica, waiting to lead his band Wilco through its paces, when somebody waves what might be a red flag in front of him--a newspaper article on Ryan Adams.

Will this reminder of his presumed rival’s celebrity plunge Tweedy into a spell of his famous melancholy? The singer just glances at the page and flashes a half-smile.

“It’s funny,” he says. “We have the same lawyer in New York, and I went into his office and saw this picture on his wall. I said ‘Hey, I don’t remember doing that show.’”

Tweedy can afford to joke about the rivalry that isn’t. For one thing, Wilco’s music has roamed to a place far from Adams’ turf--the folk-based, roots-conscious alt-country that Tweedy helped plant in the pop landscape in the late ‘80s. For another, his band’s rocky path over the past year has looked to be the dead opposite of Adams’ smooth sailing.

Artistically, things are fine. Wilco’s “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” was even cited by some critics as one of the best albums of 2001. The trouble was, it didn’t come out in 2001. It was scheduled to be released last September by Reprise Records, the group’s home for six years. But then the label got a listen to the evocative but off-center mix of folk, pop, ambient and abstract elements that Wilco had cooked up in its Chicago studio.

“They said that they didn’t like it, it’s career-ending, if we really thought that was a record that could be released then we should consider going somewhere else,” Tweedy recalls.

Wilco did go somewhere else--to Nonesuch Records, a cutting-edge classical label (Philip Glass, Kronos Quartet) that is now becoming a haven for such pop-world exiles as Emmylou Harris, Randy Newman and Magnetic Fields.

When the New York company releases “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” on April 23, it will close the door on one of the most public artist-label conflicts of recent years. It’s one that illustrates how the recent wave of consolidation in the record business is more than a distant, boardroom abstraction. It’s something whose repercussions can affect the artist-label relationship at its most basic level--getting the record out.

Standoffs between artist and the artists and repertoire department--the division responsible for signing and developing acts--aren’t a rarity, but they’re usually ironed out, often with guidance from the label’s higher management.

But with instability and executive turnover increasingly common in the wake of mergers, falling sales and rising costs, that higher management isn’t always there. That was the case at Reprise, the Burbank-based sister label of Warner Bros. Records, as Wilco put its fourth album in the mail.

Parent company AOL Time Warner had initiated a huge reorganization at the labels in March 2001, leading to Reprise chief Howie Klein’s resignation in June. Warner Bros. President Phil Quartararo was running a combined Warner/Reprise operation in the aftermath, but his powers were limited by heavy staff cuts and the fact that Tom Whalley, a highly respected Interscope executive who had agreed to become chairman, was scheduled to take over in January 2002.

So “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” was dropped into a churning sea.

“At the time Warners was in a transition. I was a little confused as to what was going on or what I was supposed to do,” says David Kahne, then head of the A&R; department and the man who’s been blamed in most accounts for the Wilco falling-out. “If Tom [Whalley] had been there, he might have said no, we have to put this record out, or he might have said no we shouldn’t ... it was a confusing time.”

Though Kahne, who left the label after Whalley took power earlier this year, disputes the widespread portrayal of Reprise as art-be-damned product-pushers, there’s no question that after a final phone conversation in July between the executive and Wilco’s manager, the label and the band started filling out the divorce papers.

Says Tweedy, “I’ve never seen a legal department work that fast in my life. That was weird. They really wanted us out of there.”

The Wilco situation could have been just an instructive footnote in Music Business 101, but as the episode unfolded it started getting extensive coverage in music trade publications and in Chicago newspapers, which covered their hometown heroes’ woes the way they did Michael Jordan’s rift with the Bulls. The story assumed symbolic terms, a contest between art and commerce, with valiant heroes and dastardly villains.

“There’s always a tendency in these situations to want to paint it in black-and-white,” cautions Wilco’s manager, Tony Margherita. “I don’t think that’s really the case.”

Why such a lather over a modest-selling, mild-mannered cult band? Credit the unusual degree of fan loyalty and critical currency invested in Wilco, which has reached the threshold of that promised land--being regarded as a “great American band,” in the tradition of R.E.M., the Band and others with a grounding in root musical forms and the ambition to somehow plumb the national spirit.

“Yankee Hotel Foxtrot,” which was mixed by leading Chicago avant-rock figure Jim O’Rourke, might not be an easy sell for the promotion department, but by any measure it’s a rich, intriguing work.

The album introduces new drummer Glenn Kotche (part of a somewhat rancorous personnel turnover), whose unusual kit includes found objects, homemade items and a bank of crotales tuned cymbals that chime infinitely into the music’s vast spaces.

Exploring a sort of folk-pop minimalism, Tweedy offers melodic reveries whose gamelan-like delicacy is regularly disrupted by squalls of static (the album’s title comes from a phrase spoken in a spurt of shortwave radio transmission). His lyrics capture loss with directness and economy, though a few eerie-in-retrospect lines are likely to draw the most attention--”Tall buildings shake/voices escape singing sad sad songs.... Voices whine/skyscrapers are scraping together.”

Musically, it’s not where you might have predicted Wilco would arrive when Tweedy, a native of Belleville, Ill., started the band after the 1993 breakup of his group Uncle Tupelo. Tupelo’s four albums sparked the alternative country movement, a youthful reinvention of folk and country music that has evolved into a thriving genre, producing critically acclaimed artists (including Tweedy’s former Uncle Tupelo partner Jay Farrar) and an active support network of fans, labels and publications.

Wilco (whose reputation was enhanced by the two “Mermaid Avenue” albums, in which it teamed with singer-songwriter Billy Bragg to write music for and record unpublished lyrics by folk icon Woody Guthrie) remains an alt-country touchstone, even as its music has followed Tweedy’s eclectic interests into experimental pop territory over the course of its Reprise albums, “A.M.,” “Being There” and “Summerteeth,” and now “Foxtrot.”

“It felt like this stuff makes sense,” says Tweedy, 34, sitting at a table in a small studio at the radio station. “I really feel passionately like it belongs there. I’m just excited by it.”

The record company was less excited, Wilco surmised, when the band didn’t get any response after sending in the record last June. When Wilco finally made contact with the label, it got word of the company’s disappointment.

“It was like a stranger punching you in the stomach or something, or being cut off on the highway,” Tweedy says. “You can have your feelings hurt by that sometimes, but it doesn’t resonate very long usually.... It didn’t shake us at all beyond that initial shock.”

In fact, the band bounced back quickly, playing a scheduled tour of sold-out shows after letting fans become familiar with “Foxtrot” by streaming the album on its Web site. And the band seems a perfect fit for Nonesuch, whose success with “Buena Vista Social Club” has reinforced its reputation for finding audiences for unlikely music. Margherita says he’ll be disappointed if “Foxtrot” doesn’t sell more than the 162,000 logged by “Summerteeth.”

Meanwhile, Kahne, the former Reprise executive whose credits as a producer range from the Bangles to Tony Bennett to the recent Paul McCartney album, feels stung by being demonized in the press as an enemy of artistry.

“My reservations were not, ‘This music sucks,’” Kahne says. “I never said it was ‘career ending.’ There were some really funny songs and clever songs. Whether or not it was something that would get on the radio and help [Wilco] was something else.

“There seemed to be a kind of decline in the sales [of ‘Summerteeth’]. I’m always looking for something to help in that place. I’ve noticed that the bands that get on the radio are the ones that do the best, and that doesn’t mean they’ve sold out. The Sublime record I did, ‘What I Got,’ got all over the radio and really helped that band, and they didn’t lose any credibility at all.... I wanted to make sure there’s a track on here that will do that.”

Without that track, says Kahne, the likely scenario was that the album would not find much support in the marketing and promotion departments. But if Wilco had wanted to stay, he adds, the label would have put out the record.

Not exactly a ringing invitation.

“I have no bad feelings about Reprise or David,” Margherita says. “We just sort of chose to disagree. The fact of the matter, though, is the reason that what came down came down was that they showed no enthusiasm for the record.”

Some observers see Reprise as the ultimate loser. “You just don’t let a Wilco go,” says a source close to the group. “They’d be the perfect band for the label now that Warners is selling some records again. They’d be in the perfect place now, a label with clout having a band like Wilco to promote.”

Amid the uncertainty at the label at the time, even the president took a limited role.

“[Phil] Quartararo came to me once it became clear that we were on our way out,” the manager says. “He was supportive, he wanted to make sure what was happening was what the band wanted to see happen. He called several times and inquired as to what we were thinking.” (Quartararo could not be reached for comment.)

What Wilco was thinking was, basically, “Oh boy!”

“They got paid to leave Warners,” Kahne notes, “they have no debt, they’re on a label that’s smaller that’s looking to market them more. So I didn’t see what the beef was. It seemed like as artists it might have ended up better for them.”

No argument there from Wilco.

“There were definitely times that it was difficult and stressful for everyone involved,” the group’s manager says. “But we got what we wanted.”

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Richard Cromelin is a Times staff writer.