Wilco’s sold-out show Tuesday at the Auditorium Theatre was originally set to coincide with the release of the band’s first live album, the two-disc Kicking Television (Nonesuch), but a manufacturing snag has pushed the release date back to November 15. Front man Jeff Tweedy says the live record, which is culled from a four-night stand at the Vic in May, is long overdue. “It’d been about ten years since Wilco started, and it seemed like this might be a nice way to have some sort of retrospective–kinda take a moment to look back, ’cause we really haven’t done a whole lot of that,” he says. “But in the end I don’t think that’s what it ended up being at all. It ends up sounding like the first record of the new lineup with [multi-instrumentalist] Pat [Sansone] and [guitarist] Nels Cline, and that’s what I’m most excited about.”
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The 23-song track list for Kicking Television is weighted heavily toward 2002’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and last year’s A Ghost Is Born. (“As a live band we’ve kind of designed ourselves around those last two records,” Tweedy says.) But there are also reworked, fuller, and often improved versions of older tunes like “Misunderstood” and “Via Chicago,” as well as a plaintive cover of “Comment (If All Men Are Truly Brothers),” a 70s funk track by Charles Wright. Sam Jones, who shot the band for the 2002 documentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, filmed the Vic shows for a proposed companion DVD, but that plan was eventually scuttled. “It just didn’t come out the way we wanted,” Tweedy says. “Some of the reasons were technical, some of it had to do with the way it was shot. The footage ended up being really claustrophobic. Basically, it gets down to my feeling that the audience should be a part of any live document. You should get a sense of the audience, a sense of the time and place. And the footage didn’t do that.”
The band’s lineup, however, has finally stabilized. Tweedy says the group’s current incarnation–Sansone, Cline, bassist John Stirratt, drummer Glenn Kotche, and keyboardist Mikael Jorgensen–will remain intact for the foreseeable future. “There are lots of reasons for that,” says Tweedy. “I’m probably more comfortable with myself than I’ve ever been, which has a lot to do with it. But as a band I don’t ever remember having this level of comfort. The level of collaboration is more intense and involved. It feels like there’s a lot more investment in the group.”
Tweedy hits the road a few days after the show to begin his solo tour in Madison, and Wilco will be in the studio through December. “After that we’ll probably be taking it slow through the rest of the winter, with some more recording here and there,” Tweedy says. “Ideally, we want to have the record done and out next year.”
