On a brisk morning this past March, Jeff Tweedy took a walk through the park near his house on the northwest side. He shuffled through the grass, past the swings and across the baseball diamond, retracing his steps over and over again before slumping onto a cold iron bench.
But his migraines and panic attacks were becoming stronger and tougher to deal with. Tweedy had become anxious about taking painkillers, scared that he was becoming an addict. A few weeks earlier he’d quit everything cold. Now he was paying the price.
The first time all the members of the new Wilco–Tweedy, bassist John Stirratt, drummer Glenn Kotche, keyboardist Mikael Jorgensen, and recent additions Pat Sansone and Nels Cline–were all in this space together was three days ago. It’s less than 72 hours before their first shows, a pair of warm-up gigs at a small club in DeKalb, and they’ve been trying to work through a set list of 60-plus songs. Tweedy, thinner and shaggier than he’s been in years, takes off his mirrored aviator sunglasses and flops face-first onto a futon in the corner.
The mid-to-late 90s were a particularly druggy period for Tweedy. He and guitarist Jay Bennett spent endless hours in the loft studio, tinkering with tracks and popping pills. “We did go through a period of trying everything, certainly every antidepressant under the sun,” Bennett says.
Often affected by seasonal changes, Tweedy was swept into another bad cycle of migraines and depression in the fall of 2002. “It culminated in me taking painkillers again, and a doctor convinced me it was OK even though I said I was an addict,” Tweedy says. “He was like, ‘Look, you’re in pain and you’ve gotta take something.’”
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After the sessions in November and December, Tweedy returned home to Chicago convinced he had to stop using once and for all. “I recognized it was more serious than I ever really let myself believe. But I resisted going to treatment because I thought, ‘I can quit. I can do this. I’ve done it before.’”
“That,” he says, “was a big mistake.”
