Every once in awhile here at Pencil Storm, one of our contributor’s blogs will kick up such a storm of memories/joy/indignation that we feel a follow-up blog is warranted.
Jeremy’s Saturday Night Special on the recently-released Jay Bennett (of Wilco, among others) doumentary was one of those blogs.
Jeremy’s piece IMMEDIATELY jolted me back to a Wilco show I was lucky enough to witness at a defunct Columbus venue - Ludlow’s - back in 1996. I had previously seen Wilco forerunner Uncle Tupelo in the late 1980’s at another defunct Columbus venue - Stache’s - and I’m pretty sure I also saw the AM-era Wilco there in 1994 or so. (Stache’s capacity - by the way - was 83 patrons, just to show you the kind of drawing power Uncle Tupelo/early-Wilco commanded in those long-ago birth-of-van-touring-alternative-rock days.)
To be kind, the less said about Uncle Tupelo and Wilco’s pre-Jay Bennet rock & roll prowess the better. They were kind of weak & weepy. (Oddly, those are the same two adjectives I nowadays find myself employing to describe post-Yankee Hotel Foxtrot-era Wilco.) So when I walked into Ludlow’s that night in 1996 I was pretty much expecting more of the same. What I got, however, was a full-blown ROCK & ROLL SHOW. I couldn’t believe my eyes & ears. Wilco - who just a year earlier had been an acoustic-based alt-country band - were now out-Replacementicizing The Replacements, and that’s not a band description or a compliment I throw around lightly.
They BLAZED through a set I couldn’t have conceived of just an hour earlier.
And to what do I attribute that incendiary display of rock & roll power? Put most simply, I attribute it to Jay Bennett.
After I read Jeremy’s piece I reached out to Colin to see if he was at that long-ago Ludlow’s show and he confirmed my memory of JUST HOW GOOD that show was. In fact, I think I’m just gonna turn over this over to Colin, via a link to a 2011 blog from his pre-Pencil Storm journal he sent me. It pretty much says it all, WAY better than I could.
When Wilco Stopped Being A Band And Became a Brand / Colin Gawel
WILCO / “CASINO QUEEN” / 1996
(Jay Bennett, guitarist to the left side of screen from Jeff Tweedy)