WILl COmply

Preface

according to Wikipedia, Wilco's name means "will comply," and if i had known this fifteen years ago, there is no telling what direction my life might have taken. the following story is a parable in one act, elucidating the dangers that arise when we allow the dialects of our youth to impinge upon the opportunities of the moment.

Act One

i first started not listening to Wilco in college. at that time music critics threatened Chapel Hill with "becoming the next Seattle," and innumerable up and comers made their way through town. i was knee-deep in spending my misspent youth, listening to punk rock, going to school, and playing in two and a half bands.

unfortunately, any artist who held even the slightest whiff of instrumental competence was subject to my disdain and, as a result of my ignorance, each time i saw a flyer for "Wilco" i immediately jumped to the conclusion that the band had taken its name from
a chain of gas stations which ran throughout the South at the time:

picture of a Wilco in Georgia

it wasn't until the summer of 2007, sitting in a lousy chain bakery of all places, that i finally heard Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. at the time i was without internet service, and i ventured with some regularity to Panera Bread to use their free WiFi. a burnt cup of coffee and cinnamon bagel often accompanied the process, not unlike the coffee and stale pastries of those Wilco(s/es?) from my youth. this particular occasion occurred sometime in September, after my flirtation with Mardou had come to an end, but before i knew it.

i sat listening, for the first time, to "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart:"



when the song reached its climax amidst the broken sounds and disjointed melodies of the things that might have been, my life shifted in a way that i can only compare to the first time i heard the lonely bassoon that opens Stravinsky's Le sacre du printemps:

Stravinsky's lonely basson

a (still-ongoing) period of obsession followed, and last night the process reached some manner of consummation when my yin and i went to see Wilco in Miami:

the city

the venue

the band

the singer

by the time the concert ended, three hours, two sets, and one encore had elapsed. in my experience, only two other bands (Radiohead in 2008 and Fugazi in 1999) have been able to surpass their recorded accomplishments in performance. Wilco did this, pushing further and further, stretching each song right up until the point of disintegration before allowing it to collapse back into its underlying rhythmic and harmonic structures. two people came to mind.

the first was Saylor, whom i called and left a message during the intermission. the collective ghost of he and Tarah is always evoked by such excursions, and i fondly remember the night we drove back from Miami listening to Brian Eno, berating semiotics, and throwing banana peels out the window. we ended up in an all-night diner sometime before sunrise, and as far as i remember, that was the last night three of us spent together before he left for Kerouac's mythical West.

in homage, my yin and i stopped at a Denny's, got a table, and left without ordering. one might call it a modified "dine and dash," which provided all the thrill of the dash without the moral consequences of dining.

the second was Mardou, whose presence and absence are forever intertwined with my memory of the summer. ironically, Wilco released Sky Blue Sky that same year, whose opening track provided closure to the wound opened by Yankee Hotel Foxtrot:

Epilogue

both Saylor and Mardou live in San Francisco now, and my yin and i plan to make a pilgrimage sometime before year's end.