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.” (Part of Radiohead’s enduring mystery might be that even the other guys in the band don’t fully understand what Yorke’s lyrics are trying to convey.) Yet the songs are all about the same thing, really: learning how to understand a new kind of world.And while this isn’t always simple, it’s not necessarily depressing.In fact, it might be why Yorke still claims that Hail to the Thief is a record “for shagging,” which is what he told the press months before the record was released.Apparently, we’re all supposed to listen to “Myxomatosis” and get laid.“I think this is a sexy record,” Yorke says, and there is at least a 50 percent chance that he’s serious.“The rhythms are very sexy.It’s where the beats fall.It has its own sexy pulse.”Hoping for clarification, I ask him to name the sexiest record he owns.“That’s a good question,” he says.“Public Enemy was pretty sexy.‘911 Is a Joke’ was a sexy song.”And I find myself thinking, I must be missing something.1.O’Brien apparently doesn’t like 1978’s Some Girls, which is crazy.2.This would be 2006’s Eraser.It’s interesting to note that even though the other members of Radiohead don’t necessarily understand Yorke, they’re remarkably good at speculating about his behavior.3.Unfortunately.4.Here’s a detail about Michael Stipe I couldn’t jam into the article, mostly because I thought the sentiment would be distracting: when we spoke on the phone, my first question was directly about Yorke’s cultural position, and Stipe said, “Well, Thom has entered that rarefied class of songwriter—these are people like Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and myself.The things he says now take on a different kind of significance.” This, I suppose, is completely true—but what a fucked-up thing to say about oneself! Were those the only three people he could think of?THE AMERICAN RADIOHEADThis story created an interesting problem, and I don’t think I ever truly resolved it.I interviewed Wilco’s Jeff tweedy on a Friday afternoon, and it went extraordinarily well.I went back to New York the following week and wrote the piece for SPIN.And then—a few days after I gave the story to my editor—we found out that tweedy had entered rehab the day after I spoke with him.Obviously, that complicated things, because I wasn’t sure how much this revelation impacted the story.You could argue that it changed absolutely everything, or you could argue that it changed nothing.I ultimately reinterviewed Tweedy over the phone and added about four hundred words for contextual purposes, but I still wonder if I should have traveled back to Chicago and rereported the entire thing.There were two things that didn’t make the story (and which I later wrote about in an essay for Minneapolis City Pages).At one point, Tweedy and I were standing in the pantry of his home in northwest Chicago (he was looking for his stocking cap), and he started talking about how his eight-year-old son was the drummer in a grade-school rock band that played Jet songs.Now, nearly everybody I know thinks Jet is ridiculous; they’ve become the band hipsters are legally required to hate.So I made some joke (and I have no idea why) about how Jet was terrible and that it was somehow predictable that the only people who would want to cover Jet songs would be second graders.Tweedy didn’t understand why I would say something like that.He looked at me like I had just made fun of a quadriplegic and asked, “Well, don’t you like rock music?” And then I felt stupid, because I realized that (a) Jet plays rock music, and that (b) I like rock music, and that (c) I actually liked Jet, both tangibly and intangibly.So that was something I realized about Jeff Tweedy: musically, he remembers what is obvious.After about five minutes, Jeff Tweedy found his stocking cap.We got into his car and started driving to the studio where Wilco makes music (we were listening to demos of the song “Humming-bird,” as I recall, and the demos were—oddly—on cassette).We were waiting at a red light, and I asked him if there would ever be an Uncle Tupelo reunion with Jay Farrar.Surprisingly (and without much hesitation), he said, “Maybe.” This shocked me, because Tweedy hasn’t really spoken with Farrar in roughly ten years.I asked him what would be the biggest hurdle in making this reunion a reality.He said something I could never have anticipated: “I don’t know if I could play those songs anymore,” Tweedy said.“The bass parts on some of those songs are really fast.I don’t think I can play bass that fast anymore.” This, obviously, is crazy; this is like saying you’re considering reuniting with your estranged wife after a ten-year separation, and you’re mostly nervous that she might have rearranged the living room furniture.Yet—somehow—this sentiment struck me as remarkably insightful; it was the kind of highly important detail that normal people never consider when they expect artists to unconditionally satisfy their dreams.So this was the other thing I realized about Jeff Tweedy: musically, he notices what is not so obvious.GHOST STORY(JULY 2004)Jeff Tweedy didn’t vomit today.He vomited yesterday, but not today.We are on the second floor of Tweedy’s home in northwest Chicago, a pale green residence that could just as easily be owned by an employee for the Illinois Highway Department.There is a sign in the bathroom that reminds me to brush my teeth.Tweedy is lying on a bed designed for a child, thinking about smoking an American Spirit cigarette and quite possibly having a panic attack.His four-year-old son Sam is running around the house completely naked, incessantly repeating the phrase “Thank you!” while he sprints from room to room.Tweedy’s eight-year-old son Spencer is playing drums in the basement, and he’s remarkably advanced; he’s already in a band called the Blisters, fronted by a fifth-grade vocalist (they cover Jet songs).Tweedy’s wife Sue keeps apologizing because the house is overrun with teacups and plastic soldiers; Tweedy can’t remember if his wife’s name is spelled “Suzy” or “Susie,” so he begs me to refer to her simply as “Sue” if I mention her in this article (apparently, he’s gotten in trouble for this before).At the moment, I can’t tell if Jeff Tweedy is completely relaxed or desperately nervous, because he always seems to act exactly the same; it’s just that he tends to puke more than most frontmen.“Here’s the scoop—I’m nuts,” Tweedy says.He smiles, but he does not laugh.“I need to get on the first floor, I think, or maybe we should go outside.Have you ever swam out into the ocean and suddenly realized you’ve gone too far out? Sometimes being outside feels like the shore to me.It’s hard to explain.It’s sort of like getting so high that you’re afraid you’ll never be able to get back inside your body and you’ll never be normal again, except I’m obviously not high right now.”Retrospectively, Tweedy’s last statement might raise a few eyebrows [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]