There was so much rock ‘n’ roll nerdery on display at the Palace Theatre this past weekend. And yet it turned into one of the coolest live music events of the year.
A band too old to care if it’s cool anymore — but not too old to still push itself, in ways younger bands should try more of — Wilco performed 95 songs over the course of three sold-out nights in St. Paul. Not one song was repeated; not even “Heavy Metal Drummer” and “California Stars,” which were used as encore fodder on Friday and Sunday nights, respectively, but not heard again all weekend.
Even if you don’t like Wilco — if you make Dad Rock jokes about them, compare them to musical wallpaper or turn the radio dial the umpteenth time the Current plays them — you have to admit this was a mighty impressive feat. Unprecedented, really.
Metallica offered a no-repeat weekend in August, but it lasted only two nights with a breather night off in between. The Grateful Dead played no-repeaters back in the day, but those amounted to about 33 songs total what with all the baked-in soloing. Wilco played 31-33 songs per night Friday-Sunday in St. Paul.
Chicago’s experimental twang-rock sextet relied on just about every song off its best-loved albums, as well as deep cuts from lesser-known LPs and a lot of tunes with quirky titles that suggest they were always meant to be B-sides: “Bob Dylan’s 49th Beard,” “A Magazine Called Sunset,” “Laminated Cat.”
Each night was split up into two sets with an intermission. Each night, both the band and the acoustics in the room sounded precise. All weekend, the ringleader of this musical circus, singer/guitarist Jeff Tweedy — 57 and proudly sober for 20 years now — was in strong voice and showed encyclopedic familiarity with the lyrics. His most noticeable gaffe, in fact, was putting his guitar capo on the wrong fret for Sunday’s opening song, “Via Chicago” (ironically one of their most-played tunes).
For those who do like Wilco, witnessing the group stretch out like this was unquestionably fun, quirky and clever, although if you didn’t make it to all three shows you invariably missed hearing a few of the band’s core tunes.
“You’re going to hear all these songs you don’t ever hear because of these people,” Tweedy advised newcomers on Sunday night, after asking the three-night attendees to raise their hands.