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Having opened in 1889, the Auditorium Theatre is a National Historic Landmark, featuring many technological advancements for its time such as impressive acoustics, air conditioning, and hydraulic lifts that could raise and lower sections of the stage. Today, the theater showcases a variety of dance performances, speakers, and music. UChicago students receive discounted tickets with the ArtsPass!

20 Years of Wilco’s Most Enduring Statement

BY JORDAN MAINZER

The version of Wilco that made Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was vastly different from the band that came both before and after it, and not just in lineup or even aesthetic. Wilco’s approach to the album, which is now celebrating its 20th anniversary of retail release, was deliberate, yet inventive, yielding what remains their most sonically and lyrically sophisticated work to date.

If you’re unaware of the record’s context, Sam Jones’ 2002 documentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart: A Film About Wilco details the lore and history behind it. Early on in its recording, Wilco replaced drummer Ken Coomer with Glenn Kotche. Jeff Tweedy and the late Jay Bennett were clashing, famously arguing over small elements in the album, like what should constitute the 10-second transition between “Ashes of American Flags” and “Heavy Metal Drummer”. Tweedy was suffering from migraines. And eventually, the band’s record label at the time, Reprise, a division of Warner Music Group, heard the record and thought it would be career killing, subsequently dropping Wilco. Of course, Wilco--eerily originally supposed to release the album, which contained a different set of twin towers on its cover, on 9/11--would stream the album for free on their website a week later and eventually get picked up by another Warner subsidiary, Nonesuch.

This month, in celebration of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’s 20th anniversary, Wilco played five nights at New York’s United Palace Theatre and three at Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre. Each night’s schedule was purportedly pretty similar: a string quartet introducing the show, a full album play with that quartet and a horn section, followed by an encore of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot-era rarities and some older fan favorites. Friday night in Chicago, after the quartet--The Magnificent Strings as opposed to the Aizuri Quartet in NYC--played lines from “Reservations”, “War on War”, “Pot Kettle Black”, and “Poor Places”, Tweedy came from behind the curtain to turn on an old radio. It was an immediate reference to the album’s backstory: the title Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was taken from a series of letters in the phonetic alphabet Tweedy heard on The Conet Project: Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations, and a sample of the spoken title is prominently featured in “Poor Places”. (To add to Wilco’s YHF-related woes, The Conet Project’s record label, Irdial-Discs, would sue Wilco for copyright infringement, which reached an out-of-court settlement.) The curtain lifted to reveal upside-down, minimal columns resembling the Marina City towers. The band launched into “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart”, all of the studio album’s pristine effects in hand, even the high-pitched note that led into “Kamera”.

Everything, from the effects to the actual acoustic playing of the songs, was on point, faithful to the album. “Kamera”, which has seen bouncier, power-chord heavy arrangements in recent years, was the sly, subdued version from the record. Tweedy’s rolling acoustic guitars and Kotche’s military march drums popped up on “Radio Cure”. That infamous chopped piano and drum machine from “Ashes of American Flags” into “Heavy Metal Drummer” made its way into the performance, as did the stop-start lawnmower guitars of “I’m The Man Who Loves You” and the coda of “Reservations”. And yes, just like on Colbert the other night, during “Poor Places”, Tweedy pumped his fist with every stab of feedback, as the words “yankee hotel foxtrot” repeated.

Let’s talk about the remarkable “Reservations”, one of the only times I’ve ever seen Tweedy on stage not accompanied by an instrument. Of all the lines on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, “I’ve got reservations about so many things / But not about you,” is, to me, the most resonant, applicable when directed to a loving partner or practiced craft, moving as long as we continue to occupy the hell world that surrounds us. In between verses, a guitar-less Tweedy awkwardly stood and swayed, those reservations showing. But as always, he’s as sure as ever about art and music.

It’s this sureness that allows Tweedy the strength to revisit an album that’s a classic but that also is inseparable from a fraught time in Tweedy’s, Wilco’s, and American history. He thanked the crowd for “being that quiet for that long on a Friday night”, The Magnificent Strings, the horn section, and album mixer Jim O’ Rourke by covering a song the band learned from his record collection, Bill Fay’s “Be Not So Fearful”. But hearing Tweedy acknowledge Bennett’s influence on the band so publicly was the olive branch everyone was waiting for, and Wilco truly did it by performing their favorite songs they wrote with him in the band. Summerteeth’s wonderfully epic “Pieholden Suite”--a multitudinous Bennett-influenced tune if there ever was one, with everything from banjo to synthesizers--was a clear precursor to the complex arrangements of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. They played a few deep cuts, “Cars Can’t Escape” and “The Good Part”, (which first surfaced on 2014 rarities compilation Alpha Mike Foxtrot), and More Like the Moon’s cha cha “A Magazine Called Sunset”. In introducing “The Good Part”, Tweedy said, “This is one of the songs we sent Warner Bros., and their response was, “It gets worse every time.” The beloved A Ghost Is Born tune “Hummingbird”, a Yankee Hotel Foxtrot outtake, was one of three “regulars” in the encore, along with rousing Being There jams “Monday” and “Outtasite (Outta Mind)”, the part of the night that was more a celebration than anything.

In September, Wilco will release 7 special reissues of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, the most in-depth a Super Deluxe version with a remaster, outtakes and demos, the band’s full interview on Sound Opinions a week after 9/11, and a live concert. I won’t give too much away, but I’ll say this: It’s not going to change your opinion about how great the original album is, and that’s a good thing. While the reissue doesn’t necessarily contain essential alternative versions of the songs, it further illuminates the band’s creative process in ways Jones’ documentary doesn’t. For an album as deep as Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, that’s more than you can ask for. When Jeff Tweedy joked, “See you in 20 years!” towards the end of the band’s Friday set, I thought to myself that the idea isn’t as ludicrous as it sounds. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot will provoke and inspire, and while its history will stay the same, its story will always grow along with us.