Jeff Tweedy: Unplugged

"Rock Sta-a-a-rrrr!" The ribbing came as Wilco main man Jeff Tweedy groused about music-industry politics between songs at a sold-out acoustic show, upstairs at the Middle East, a week ago Tuesday.

"Damn right," Tweedy responded without missing a beat. "I worked a long time to be a rock star -- and downed a lot of doughnuts." The crowd laughed, and Tweedy kicked, appropriately enough, into "We've Been Had," a song about false promises he wrote as a member of Uncle Tupelo, the country-punk outfit usually credited as the forerunners of the current alterna-country, or "No Depression," wave (the latter term is even lifted from the title of Uncle Tupelo's first album).

Tweedy may be the equivalent of a rock star in the No Depression scene. But on a larger commercial scale, Wilco (like fellow Tupelo alum Jay Farrar's band Son Volt) remain cult outsiders even though -- or perhaps because -- they draw on American roots idioms and traditions older than their audience's grandparents. Of course, if it weren't for Tweedy and Co.'s marginal commercial status, the audience who packed in shoulder-to-shoulder at the Middle East might never have had this rare chance to see and hear their hero spinning tales and tunes in an environment as cozy as a coffeehouse -- a perfect venue for Tweedy's lived-in lyrics and boyishly ragged voice.

The show, for which Tweedy was joined by Wilco bandmate Jay Bennett, was the last of only three acoustic dates the duo performed on the East Coast. Armed with just an acoustic guitar and an affable, if occasionally irascible, demeanor -- at one point he engaged in a rancorous conversation with an audience member who took exception to his lyric about a woman who "begs me not to hit her" -- Tweedy performed more than two dozen favorites, covers, and curios that spanned the likes of folksinger Dock Boggs and the Beatles to Big Star and his own Uncle Tupelo catalogue. Not surprisingly, "New Madrid" and "Forget the Flowers," both of which were acoustic-based to begin with, ebbed and flowed with a graceful ease. And stripped of electric guitars, the desperate distress of a harder-edged song like "The Long Cut" took on an air of contemplative, inevitable resignation.

But it was Big Star's humbly elegant paean to adolescence, "Thirteen," that simply couldn't have sounded more perfect, more right than it did in this modest setting. And Tweedy's reading of the Beatles' "Yesterday" was completely in keeping with the honesty that informs his most resonant work.

Bennett's tasteful embellishments on banjo, lap steel, and keyboards augmented the material, especially reworked versions of rave-ups like "Box Full of Letters" and "Casino Queen," both from Wilco's debut CD, A.M. (Reprise). The latter, stripped of its mid-tempo bar-band trappings, benefitted greatly from a drawling, Dylan-esque treatment, reminiscent of Highway 61 Revisited.

Most impressive, however, were the handful of quietly dazzling new songs Tweedy and Bennett premiered without fanfare or introduction -- they spoke for themselves with understated charm and poignancy. Like the recurring themes of loneliness and distance -- emotional and otherwise -- that thread through much of Wilco's last album, the two-disc Being There (Reprise), Tweedy's new songs are about searching for a way to hold on to the elusive things that give one's life meaning. As he nodded to his past and cast his eyes toward the future -- with empathy, humor, and clarity -- Tweedy's grip appeared stronger than ever.

-- Jonathan Perry