Unlock my body, move myself to dance...

TWEEDY!

"Make some coffee, hold me up,

Try and talk me out of giving up..."

-Jeff Tweedy

My father is a huge Beatles fan. I mean huge. By the time I was 12 I knew the lyrics to every Beatles song, I knew where John and Paul met, Ringo's real name and all manner of other useless Beatles trivia. And so of course I learned to love the Beatles. Which in turn led to a love of music that has served me well my entire life.

I was an odd kid. Throughout all of elementary and middle school I would only listen to music from the sixities and early seventies. Everything else was, in my opinion, crap. In the 8th grade my friend Danny brought a cd to band class. He said, "You've got to hear this, it's like nothing I've heard before." So we sat in a corner and put it on. It was mind-blowing, stange, funky and completely unique. The cd was Beck's groundbreaking "Mellow Gold". Something in me broke loose, I became, in an instant, a less narrow-minded music snob.

However, my walls were still covered with Beatles posters, my cd collection still consisted almost entirely of the Beatles, Dylan, The Byrds, The Doors and The Beach Boys, but there was now a slim copy of "Mellow Gold" on the end. After hearing it highlighted on NPR I went out and bought Radiohead's "Pablo Honey". I think I may have been the first kid in my highschool to own it. I was hooked, I was looking for any great new band. For the first time in my life I was beginning to think that there was decent music made after 1972. However, at the end of the grunge period there wasn't a whole lot for me. I didn't have the resources or the friends to find out about great indie bands. I was stuck with occaisonally coming across something decent.

I moved to New York City, got a job in a cd store and whammo! Here was more great music than I could shake a stick at. I fell in love with "The Buena Vista Social Club", I got interested in blue grass, jazz and electronica. And then one day I helped a nice man find a Mickey Hart cd. He was so impressed that I new who Mickey Hart was that we ended up talking for an hour. A week later my boss called me into his office. "Rachel, a package came for you. I don't know what it might be." When I opened it up 10 cds fell out, Ry Cooder, Ibrahim Ferrar, Golden Smog, Manu Chao and several others. There was a note attached from the man I had helped. His name was John. He worked for Rykodisc. I had been so helpful and seemed so excited that he had sent me some of their cds. He hoped I liked them, he wished me well and he congratulated me on loving music. It was one of the first instances in my life of someone (other than my dad) actively trying to help me develop an ear for all kinds of music.

So now I was an accomplished music listener. I would give anything a whirl. But the one thing I wanted I had yet to find. I wanted a band I could love the way my father loved the Beatles. I wanted a current band that could make me feel the way he did when Abbey Road came out. I wanted a Beatles for my generation.

Inevitably it was David who introduced me to this band. David and I had met at the Oldies station where I worked in highschool. We had become geek buddies. When I moved back from NYC he played an album called "Summerteeth" for me. Maybe he doesn't remember it, but I do. Sitting in the dark on the couch, listening to this lyrically brilliant, genre twisting, jumping, hopping album. Hearing the song, "We're Just Friends" for the first time. In two hours I had fallen in love twice, with a band called Wilco and a boy named David. And the two were connected forever.

Wilco was and is my Beatles. I know their entire catalogue, I own bootlegs and rareties, every time they come anywhere close to Columbia we go to see them. We've converted our friends to the Wilcoholism. When David and I saw Wilco together the first time it was like a scene from a good romance movie. David had his arms about my waist, his head on my shoulder and Jeff Tweedy was singing "California Stars". And I thought, now this is perfect.

The Lonely One

"After the show you walked right past,

Arms reached out for your autograph.

And as you flashed your backstage pass,

I caught your eye with a camera's flash.

When the band came out they stood behind you,

Cymbals crashed, the lights went blue,

You stood alone in the halo's haze,

Shiny guitar hung on gold lamé.

And you, you were the lonely one.

You were the lonely one."