Let's Go (So We Can Get Back)

Fifty pages into Jeff Tweedy's 2017 autobiography Let's Go (So We Can Get Back) I felt a kinship with the vocalist/guitarist of the band Wilco.  Not that I have any musical talent - I abandoned piano lessons when I was about ten, though I did sing in church choirs for several years.  Moreso the mindset, the attitude.  The tendency toward introspection, and introversion.  Interspliced with social activity, often due to obligation.  Thankfully I also never shared Tweedy's struggle with addictions to pharmaceuticals. All of the above are transparently expressed in this highly readable tome.

The backstory of Jeff's upbringing was at times uncomfortably honest.  The sketches of his parents were more than cursory psychoanalysis, with some resemblance to the folks who raised me.  Some.  Enough to feel as if someone all those years ago had been hiding in the eaves, observing and documenting.   I also didn't grow up in a small town like Belleville, Illinois, but his descriptions of the town taverns reminded me of my maternal grandfather, who in his final years ill advisedly tended bar.  Another "career alcoholic" like Jeff's grandad. 

I loved reading the genesis of Jeff Tweedy's musical life.  His early exposure.  Absorbing Creem magazine.  How his love of The Clash was a "gateway drug" to punk.  The early gigs.  Driven by the mantra "If you feel exposed when you're singing to someone and each word gives you a distinct terrifying thrill resembling embarrassment, that means you're doing something right." Sort of the flip side of film director Martin Scorsese's line, paraphrased: "If everything is going well while you're shooting, something's wrong." 

Let's Go dives deep into Tweedy's productive but troubled relationships with two men named Jay.  The mercurial Mr. Farrar, in the alt. countryish Uncle Tupelo.  And from the early Wilco years, Mr. Bennett, who possessed "a mathematical approach to music completely foreign to me."  If you ever see the documentary I AM TRYING TO BREAK YOUR HEART, filmed during the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot sessions, you'll get a candid and highly uncomfortable look at the unraveling of a musical collaboration.   These character composites, and really the entire book provide one incisive insight after another.  Just about every line is quotable.

The best thing one can ever say about a biography or a documentary is that even if you have no knowledge or prior interest in the subject, it grabs you.  Tweedy's words almost sound like his therapy session to his shrink.  That would be you, the reader.  And every word rings true and unguarded.