{"id":20309,"date":"2021-02-05T05:30:41","date_gmt":"2021-02-05T10:30:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=20309"},"modified":"2020-12-08T16:37:30","modified_gmt":"2020-12-08T21:37:30","slug":"the-making-of-wilcos-summerteeth-part-2-of-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2021\/02\/05\/the-making-of-wilcos-summerteeth-part-2-of-2\/","title":{"rendered":"The Making of Wilco\u2019s ‘Summerteeth’ (Part 2 of 2)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Continued from <\/em>Part One<\/em><\/a>…<\/p>\n

Jay Bennett had bought a classic Mellotron, Stirratt remembers. The band first came into direct contact with the Chamberlin \u2013 a close mechanical relative of the fabled (and temperamental) Mellotron \u2013 sometime earlier, when they were visiting famed producer Mitch Easter (R.E.M, Game Theory, Velvet Crush) at his Drive-In Studio outside of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. \u201cWe were still recording on the road a little bit in that era,\u201d he says. Played by Jay Bennett, the Mellotron would feature prominently on Summerteeth<\/i>. The wobbly \u201cohhh\u201d vocal chorus from the keyboard can be heard on the finished recording of \u201cCandyfloss.\u201d<\/p>\n

Stirratt says that Tweedy and Bennett were doing more and more of the work outside of the official, scheduled band sessions. \u201cIt just became clear that they weren\u2019t adhering to this idea of \u2018all the work will happen in the session,\u2019\u201d he says. Realizing that it was important to be close to where things were happening, Stirratt relocated to Chicago. \u201cI decided, \u2018I need to get there so I can be [available] every day and not have to fly in,\u2019\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The bassist emphasizes that it wasn\u2019t a case of Tweedy and Bennett wanting to exclude him and Coomer from the project. \u201cThey were just excited and ready to work, whenever,\u201d he says, while admitting that communication among the band members was \u201cnot always the best\u201d at the time. But he and the drummer made it clear that they wanted to be involved. \u201cSo it was like, \u2018Hey, you\u2019re still working? We want to be a part of it,\u2019\u201d Stirratt recalls. \u201cAnd then that sort of became the new norm.\u201d<\/p>\n

And Stirratt has warm memories of those sessions. He recalls in particular the making of \u201cNothing’severgonnastandinmyway(Again),\u201d one of only three Summerteeth<\/i> songs to have a Stirratt co-credit (with Tweedy and Bennett). \u201cSome of the best memories I have of the record are playing the acoustic guitar,\u201d he says, \u201ctracking with Ken on drums, and me, Jeff, and Jay on acoustic guitars.\u201d Stirratt gives special mention to the song\u2019s arrangement. \u201cWorking on that \u2013 trying to get the percussive acoustics working together \u2013 is one of the most distinct memories I have of that session,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Another song he co-wrote, \u201cA Shot in the Arm,\u201d came together quite differently. \u201cKen had a death in the family and had to take off,\u201d Stirratt recalls. \u201cWe had a really limited amount of time to work on that session. I remember Jay doing drums on that.\u201d His favorite part of the song is what he characterizes as call-and-response. \u201cThe bass part is like a response to the vocal,\u201d he says. \u201cIt was wonderfully collaborative in terms of how fast the parts came together.\u201d He\u2019s pretty sure that upon returning, Coomer quickly replaced Bennett\u2019s drum part with his own. \u201cIt all flowed pretty fast,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

The sound and character of Summerteeth<\/i> reflects in part the influences of Wilco\u2019s members. Jay Bennett, for instance, \u201chad a really focused musical lexicon to work with,\u201d Stirratt recalls. \u201cHe was a massive [Elvis] Costello freak, and he loved The Clash. It was a pretty interesting, but slightly narrow time period of music that he was really into.\u201d But the album\u2019s extensive use of vintage musical tools like the Maestro Rover and the Mellotron grew out of the other members\u2019 love of \u201860s pop.<\/p>\n

\"\"

The vinyl version of Wilco’s expanded ‘Summerteeth’<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cI remember The Beatles\u2019 Anthology<\/i> coming out, and [listening to] that on the road a lot in \u201895 and \u201896,\u201d Stirratt says. The band also spent time listening to The Left Banke, The Zombies\u2019 1968 Odessey and Oracle<\/i>, and similarly orchestrated, light-classics-oriented recordings of the era. \u201cI think that kind of \u2018ork-pop\u2019 had a lot of influence on the [album\u2019s] vocal arrangements,\u201d he suggests.<\/p>\n

Summerteeth<\/i> was completed by November 1998, and the album was released the following March. Wilco\u2019s third album was greeted with near-unanimous critical praise. By February \u201899 \u2013 even before the album\u2019s official release \u2013 Wilco was back on the road; that year the band would play 97 shows in 75 cities in Europe, Canada and the U.S. Two of the four discs in the CD version of Summerteeth Expanded Edition<\/i> document a November 1 show at the Boulder Theater. The 5LP vinyl version doesn\u2019t include that performance; instead it features An Unmitigated Disaster<\/i>, a recording of Wilco playing at Tower Records for Chicago\u2019s WXRT-FM on March 11, 1999.<\/p>\n

The four-piece Wilco expanded for that tour. \u201cLeroy Bach [was] brought in to cover keyboard parts, and to [play] piano when Jay was on the Mellotron,\u201d Stirratt points out. And there was a learning curve for performing the music live, too: he says that initially, \u201cit was just hard to cover all of [Summerteeth<\/i>\u2019s sounds]. I remember thinking, \u2018Ah, I wish we could make this part come through live.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

For Wilco\u2019s \u201899 tour, loading a cumbersome and fragile vintage Mellotron onto the stage was never seriously discussed, and today Stirratt laughs heartily at the idea. \u201cCan you imagine the tech support? Oh my god, what a nightmare driving over highways [with a Mellotron] in the back of a semi!\u201d Though today modern and relatively compact digital-age Mellotrons have solved that problem, at the tail end of the \u201890s, keyboards hadn\u2019t yet risen to the task of re-creating its signature sounds. \u201cI think that we didn\u2019t really have a [proper] Mellotron sound on stage until 2000 or 2001,\u201d Stirratt says.<\/p>\n

He concedes that when Summerteeth<\/i> was being made, little thought was given to the mechanics of how the songs would eventually be played live onstage. \u201cIt does sort of cross our minds when we\u2019re in the latter parts of the tracking,\u201d Stirratt says. \u201cThere is thought put into it, but I don\u2019t think there was a slavish idea to cover everything.\u201d He points out that for Wilco, the pace of creating moves so quickly that there\u2019s rarely time for such considerations.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were just making records so fast,\u201d the bassist says. \u201cWe were doing the best we could at the time.\u201d And as Summerteeth<\/i> \u2013 both in its original configuration and on the new expanded set \u2013 makes plain, the group did quite well. Naming the album as a personal favorite, Stirratt sums up Wilco\u2019s Summerteeth<\/i> succinctly: \u201cWhen you go into the studio confidently like [we did], things tend to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Continued from Part One… Jay Bennett had bought a classic Mellotron, Stirratt remembers. The band first came into direct contact with the Chamberlin \u2013 a close mechanical relative of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20310,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,62,64],"tags":[4410,2370],"class_list":["post-20309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interview","category-rawk","category-reissue","tag-summerteeth","tag-wilco","cat-41-id","cat-62-id","cat-64-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20309"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20309\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20313,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20309\/revisions\/20313"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}