Yankee Hotel Foxtrot: Art Rock

Involving Cold War spy recordings, drug addiction and music industry landmarks, Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot has been called a fable and a masterpiece. One of Wilco's best albums, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot has uncanny connections to 9/11, a landmark Internet-first release; Reprise Records' then-president David Kahne listening to one of the most critically lauded albums of the 2000s and deciding Wilco should start again from scratch; Jay Bennett counting out tons of pills he'd had FedExed to the studio before the rest of the band arrived. Or perhaps it would be best to start further back: Jeff Tweedy perusing CDs in a record store and coming across one titled The Conet Project: Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations: encoded spy transmissions made over shortwave radio. "The voices were so eerie,' Jeff Tweedy wrote, explaining the attraction, 'like a long dead ghost trying one more time to make contact.' On one section, against a storm of hiss, a woman's voice pronounced the same letters from the phonetic alphabet: 'Yankee, hotel, foxtrot'. There was no response."

Jay Bennett left the band during its making, and tragically died of an overdose eight years later, and Reprise Records rejected the finished record, only for it to be hailed as a masterpiece. The first element had all the ingredients of a cautionary tale; the second became something of a fable for the record industry as it began the 21st century. The Conet Project recordings made sense in the darkest corners of Jeff Tweedy's psyche. 'These solitudes exist so apart from each other in this sea of white noise and information,' he told Wilco biographer Greg Kot, 'and the beautiful thing is they keep transmitting to each other in the hope that somebody is going to find them.' The description seems to predict the America of today, a country atomised by the internet, but back then, for Jeff Tweedy, The Conet Project recordings described something more personal. 'The way people communicated or ultimately failed to communicate in The Conet Project,' he explained, 'it's not all that different to me than my own efforts to communicate.' Those recordings, full of crackling static, might also have pointed Tweedy towards the album's experimental soundscapes. 

The band had been in transition from punk-adjacent alt-country rockers to studio nerd wizards for some time. Jay Bennett, an accomplished multi-instrumentalist, joined the band in time for Being There. Glenn Kotche, a drummer and percussionist with an eye for detail, who had been briefly tutored by The Velvet Underground's Maureen Tucker, replaced ex-Uncle Tupelo drummer Ken Coomer. Following the use of the sample from the Conet Project (a voice repeating: ‘yankee, hotel, foxtrot’) on the song ‘Poor Places’, Irdial-Discs successfully sued the band for copyright infringement. In our current age of carefully edited music documentaries, in which every moment of vulnerability feels carefully calculated, I Am Trying to Break Your Heart: A Film About Wilco feels genuine and edgy. It is a fascinating warts-and-all document, but it also appears to have warped the process it observed. Jeff Tweedy never got used to having the cameras around, out-nerding Kurt Cobain. 'Maybe the camera is like a fly on the wall but it's a type of fly that you always know is there and you can't stop thinking about it,' he later reflected. But YHF would eventually reach its reward: Rolling Stone ranked the album at number 225 on its updated "500 Greatest Albums of All Time" list in 2020.

What followed was a well-documented comedy of errors and misjudgments. Then-President of Reprise David Kahne and A&R Mio Vukovic listened to the finished album, decided it had no hits and gave the band an ultimatum: start again or be dropped. One wonders how closely they really listened to the record, and how much they were influenced by the opener 'I Am Trying to Break Your Heart'. Despite Jim O'Rourke's new mix, that track probably remained the album's most experimental. Foreshadowing the music industry to come, Wilco streamed the whole thing online ahead of its physical release. Finally landing on record store shelves, somehow miraculously coherent and complete given its tangled production subplots, the album was critically acclaimed. Uncut said it was the Americana equivalent of Radiohead's Kid A, and Pitchfork called it a 'masterpiece' giving it a perfect 10. Given the album was unlikely to return much profit, there appeared little choice for Wilco but to leave Reprise with the masters: 'It was a choice of making a record we didn't like and not making any money,' Tweedy wrote later, 'or making a record that we loved and not making any money'. At the time, the band had a substantial fanbase and were darlings of the music press. Streaming Yankee Hotel Foxtrot fed both, driving sales of tour tickets, creating a buzzworthy story and giving the album considerable underground lustre.

There is an alternative history to the YHF album. Had Reprise Records loved the record, then it would have been put out on its original release date: 11th of September 2001, available in record stores at almost exactly the same time American Airlines Flight 11 hit the World Trade Centre's North Tower. The fact the album had duplicated towers on the cover (Chicago's so-called Corn Cob Towers), contained the lyrics 'tall buildings shake' and a song called 'Ashes of American Flags' would have lent the album a creepily prophetic quality. Jeff Tweedy has said the original 9/11 release date would have probably resulted in the album being pulled from shelves. Randomness also played a role in Jay Bennett's story. What he and Jeff Tweedy had found together was that rare friction that created very bright sparks. After he left the band, Sam Jones's documentary features a brief scene of Bennett playing in a small club. Eight years after he had departed Wilco, after several solo albums that failed to break through, Jay died of a fentanyl overdose. 'It was hard to be surprised, but that didn't make it any less heartbreaking,' Jeff Tweedy said, adding: 'I wouldn't have been surprised to see him onstage with Jackson Browne for instance. Jay would have made almost any band better if he'd been able to get help'.

According to critic Robert Christgau in The Village Voice: "The way Jeff Tweedy's tunes seep through shifting strata of complication recalls Beck's in Odelay, but Odelay was a lot jollier than Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Jeff Tweedy with Wilco makes a virtue of their entanglement in disconnected sound, their depressive inability to control an encroaching environment--a defeatism familiar enough from slacker days, only slackers were more chill or at least ironic about it. Wilco and Jeff Tweedy's integrity comes down to a stubborn determination--distinctly American in its folksy affect and go-it-alone-ism--to tell the world how very ineffective they feel." Sam Jones (December 12, 2000): "I have had many discussions with Tony Margherita, Wilco’s manager, and although he assures me the band is excited about the idea of a documentary, I can’t get Jeff Tweedy to return my phone calls." Of course, Tweedy returned his wife Sue's call even during the rehearsal of 'Reservations', although he seemed distressed. According to the rival Son Volt's fan base, the marriage of Tweedy and Susan Miller might have been on the rocks at that time, but it's difficult to imagine there were serious problems in their relationship after all the eulogies that Tweedy has offered to her doting wife.

Sam Jones (January 13, 2001): "Christy (the producer), Roger (soundman) and I flew to Chicago. We arrived in the evening, and were met by Margherita. As he drove us from the airport to Wilco’s loft, I realized that he was a huge fan of the band, and that he had a very persistent habit of singing along with the stereo. We were let into the loft by none other than Jeff Tweedy himself. The rest of the band was sitting around a card table having Chinese food. I was introduced to Jay, John and Leroy. The mood was strangely silent and somber, and I felt very awkward as Christy and I tried to make conversation. And poor Glenn Kotche (Wilco’s new drummer). The band didn’t even tell him that a documentary was being made. He was about to find out. I just finished watching the Nine Inch Nails documentary, and I realize it is everything I don't want the Wilco film to be. It was full of quick edits in time to the music, with every visual medium ever invented mixed randomly. Although it is probably quite effective for the NIN audience, to me it is like watching moths darting around a porch light. After 30 minutes I decided that it was the antithesis of what I want my film to look like. I would rather a scene from my film be mistaken for “Harold and Maude” than it be mistaken for a music video. I don’t feel like the movie has to look like MTV to feel musical. And I decided right then and there that I do not want a music video editor to cut this film. Sources: stateofsound.com, gloriousnoise.com and medium.com