dir. Sam Jones
Opens Fri Sept 6 at the Uptown and Big Picture.
In 2001, the band Wilco made an album called Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and delivered it to Reprise Records, a subsidiary of Warner Brothers. Reprise asked the band to change the record to make it more commercial. When the band declined, the label rejected the record, and released the band from its contract. A few months and several thousand words of outraged music journalism later, Wilco signed to Nonesuch, another Warner imprint, which released Yankee Hotel Foxtrot last April to massive critical praise and the best sales and chart action of the band's seven-year career.
The story has become a revenge anthem for people who view the music industry as the enemy of Art, and though it's hard to deny the thrilling irony of the album's success, the coverage of Wilco's saga has always had a slightly disingenuous ring.
The angle went like this: Heroic band makes genius record and evil corporation rejects it because there's no obvious single--therefore, the world is an unjust place. Depending on your admiration for the music, the premise may be perfectly true. The conclusion, however, smacks of wishful logic.
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is a very good record by a very good band. But in addition to being very good, it's also fucking weird. It's full of strange noises, idiosyncratic deconstructions, and experimental extra- polations. It's pop, but it's not immediate or easy to enter. Even under the best conditions, it's not the kind of record you could imagine millions of people embracing. And major labels are not in the business of not selling millions of records. So the question is not, "Why did the evil, stupid, corporate major label reject the work of these innovators?" Nor is it, "What were these innovators doing on the evil corporate major label in the first place?" The question is, why is anyone pretending to be surprised?
Which brings us to I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, a documentary shot during the recording of Foxtrot and the tumultuous process of securing its release. Though the film doesn't address any of the above questions directly, the timing of its production couldn't have been more fortuitous for demonstrating that the work of being in an honest, dignified, grown-up rock band involves a hell of a lot more than writing, arranging, and performing songs; it's a harrowing emotional drama, even when things are going well. The film is also an object lesson in how the business of making music and the business of selling music have become mutually exclusive endeavors.
The scenes that find the band hunkered down in the studio--hunched over key- boards and guitars, smoking millions of cigarettes--capture the simultaneous boredom and wonder that inform the recording process. The musicians are enigmatic and scruffy, but undeniably alive to the experience of giving form to something that exists only in their heads. When they talk about the work in progress, their relative ineloquence seems downright eloquent; it reveals the pre-verbal quality of making music--if you could describe it, you wouldn't have to make it.
Likewise, when they argue (particularly when "they" is Jay Bennett, the multi-instrumentalist founding member who gets fired from the band during filming, for reasons that will be obvious to anyone who has ever been in a band with an arguer), the arguments begin rationally, but soon spin out into meta-arguments about word choices and the failure to express or understand, while the $1,000-a-day mixing board sits idle. The mounting exasperation--which culminates in frontman Jeff Tweedy quietly going off to vomit in the studio toilet--is a testament to the idea that most problems, band-related and otherwise, boil down to language.
This notion drives the film's definitive scene. With Foxtrot nearing completion, Tweedy has just finished a solo acoustic set at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, and is meeting and greeting distribution representatives from his label. With greedy, insidious smiles, they shake hands and ask if the new record will be more "like" A.M. or more "like" Summerteeth. Looking like the Pillsbury Doughboy with a 10-day beard and a hangover, Tweedy tries to explain that the new record isn't really "like" either of those records. He fumbles for words, and though he's obviously proud of the work, he can't find a way to translate the pride into hype. The creepy smiles wither into bafflement, and the band's fate seems sealed. "Music is my savior," Tweedy tells an interviewer. With associates like these, it's not hard to see why.
By the time the happy ending comes around, we already know that when the talk has been exhausted, all that will remain is the music. And, in this case, a brilliant, beautiful film about how it got made.
