Wilco becomes America’s band with new DVD

In theaters Wednesday: Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, Public Enemies

New on DVD/Blu-ray: Two Lovers, Twelve Rounds

There is a song on Wilco (The Album), the band’s new record released yesterday that goes “I’ll fight, I’ll fight, I’ll fight, I’ll fight for you/ I’ll die, I’ll die, I’ll die, I’ll die for you/ I will, I will, I will.” It’s not one of the greatest lyrics in the Wilco songbook or even a standout cut on the new album, but when bandleader Jeff Tweedy sings those words, perhaps more than I would any other singer today, I believe him.

For a band that hasn’t made a music video since 1995, Wilco has produced four essential documentary films: Man in the Sand, I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, Sunken Treasure, and now Ashes of American Flags, and each shows a different side of the band that notoriously prickly The Guardian is calling the best live rock band (other than Radiohead) in the world right now.

Man in the Sand details how Woody Guthrie’s daughter, Nora, bequeathed her father’s unsung lyrics to British folkie Billy Bragg and Chicago rock band Wilco, artists that dully wrote and recorded new music for Guthrie’s long lost words. The stunning results were Mermaid Avenue volumes I and II, required listening for anyone claiming to be a fan of indigenous American music.

I Am Trying to Break Your Heart is Sam Jones’ ridiculously rich 16mm black-and-white verite look at the recording of Wilco’s watershed deconstructionist album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and the falling out of bandleader Jeff Tweedy with his songwriting partner Jay Bennett. The story of this film and album put Wilco on the cultural map. The gorgeous, fractured songs tapped into everything the country was feeling in the months following 9/11. Footage of Yankee being rejected by Reprise Records (who paid the band an advance to record it) only to be bought and distributed by Nonesuch, a subsidiary of the same parent company, was a uniquely modern slice of American irony. The same multinational paid for the album twice, and it became a huge hit! I Am Trying to Break Your Heart is quite simply one of the greatest rock documentaries ever made.

Sunken Treasure follows Tweedy on an acoustic tour of the Northwest, and the rich hues of the film not only contrast with the starkness of I Am Trying to Break Your Heart but also the somber, rain-soaked mists of that part of the country. It’s an intimate look at the quieter side of Tweedy, but one more exposed as he attempts to both connect with and disconnect from his growing audience.

And now we have Ashes of American Flags, a tour film that follows the band’s 2008 southern trek, including two nights at Tipitina’s Uptown in New Orleans. My friends and I attended one of those magnificent shows, and before the band even took stage with its exuberant horn section and blistering guitars, I was awestruck by the concert poster: an ink black background highlighted by the white-lined, crescent-shaped city grid of New Orleans stained with a curving brush stroke of red where the Mighty Mississippi should be. The red could represent paint and art and the whole of creativity cresting up through the Marigny into South Louisiana. It could represent blood. There’s been that, too.

Former Fugazi drummer Brendan Canty, a consummate musician who when I interviewed him in New York City in 2003, showed an uncommon commitment to social issues, directs Ashes with a close-up elegance. It’s a worthy—but not too wordy—travelogue about the faded glory of folk and the subcultures that spawn unique music, a lament to the passing of small town America in the wake of Army Wal-Mart. The messages are subtle, but they make enough connections with me, and I assume 20-somethings across the country, to signal some form of zeitgeist for the band.

Ashes shows Wilco guitarist Pat Sansome scavenging bombed out, abandoned downtowns for William Eggleston-esque photo ops. He uses a Polaroid camera, an obsolete technology, to capture traces of these obsolete corners of America. I have a friend who does the same thing. Meanwhile, Tweedy muses about the origins and purpose of music and how modern American culture and ethos affect both the medium and the message of his craft. These are issues my friends and I talk about all the time. Representative art and storytelling versus abstraction and cynicism. Who wins? Should either win? And, what does it all mean?

“We feel like we’re home,” Tweedy announced at the start of the band’s recent Jazz Fest set. “Well, John is.” Bassist John Stiratt, the only remaining original member of the band along with Tweedy, grew up in New Orleans and Mandeville where he witnessed white flight, cultural integration and segregation, jazz, blues and Wings, all of which inform some portion of Wilco’s music. In the pre-concert interview with Rolling Stone editor David Fricke I attended, Stiratt praised his music-laden NOLA upbringing (though for the record, he did say he chose Ole Miss over LSU because Baton Rouge didn’t “smell right.”) and coyly previewed Wilco (The Album) by describing it as the band’s attempt to improve on 1999’s Summerteeth. Who among us doesn’t want another shot, a do-over?

Unfortunately Tweedy will never get the chance to mend his relationship with Jay Bennett. On May 24, the former Wilco multi-instrumentalist died of an overdose of painkillers on the eve of having a complicated hip surgery. With Bennett’s unfortunate passing, Wilco made another, more sobering connection with both celebrity and Main Street America—the band is even dying like everyone else.

Through it all, though, Tweedy & Co. should be commended not only for releasing charity singles like a cover of Guthrie’s still-timely “The Jolly Banker” during this recession, but for time and again opening themselves up to the type of scrutiny these documentary films invite, and the criticism of a sure-to-be-divisive new album. Perhaps showing its age more than any post-Bennett laurel resting, Wilco has been derided by some lately as purveyors of “Dad rock.”

But when Tweedy sings: “Are you being attacked? This is a fact you need to know: Wilco will love you, baby,” on “Wilco (the Song),” a sparkling new composition the band debuted on The Colbert Report, where Tweedy talked about his old Chicago friend—and current U.S. President—Barack Obama, it is never ironic or patronizing. It is, simply put, a band stepping up to represent us and our concerns, and to remind us with a wink that putting headphones and listening to music never hurts. So if Wilco doesn’t literally fight for its fans, then at least the band has offered us three minutes of comfort in turbulent times. Maybe that’s what dads do best.