Culture

Jay Bennett’s Summerteeth

Clayton Trutor

When I read this May that former Wilco guitarist Jay Bennett had died, I went for a drive with Summerteeth. It’s been my favorite Wilco record since I first popped it in my Sanyo in March of ‘99. It’s also the album of theirs I associate most strongly with Bennett. Repeated listenings of Summerteeth reveal a band that has amalgamated its finest qualities into a single album. Summerteeth builds on the twang of their debut A.M., the fire-in-the belly of their sophomore album Being There, and the majestic tune-smithing of their collaborations with Billy Bragg on the Mermaid Avenue records. The first time I listened to Summerteeth, it sounded like my Rubber Soul. It was complex yet accessible popular music.

Making popular music was quite the shift for Wilco, a group with profoundly under the radar roots in alt-country pioneers Uncle Tupelo, a group nobody knew about until they’d already broken up. Wilco created Summerteeth in the hopes that they could expand their audience by crafting an album of shimmering, accessible three minute songs. It didn’t work out that way. The album sold more slowly than its predecessor Being There and none of the singles gained much traction on the radio. Wilco’s audience didn’t grow until the record company hoopla surrounding their next album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, brought them to the attention of a broader listening public.

Like Rubber Soul, Summerteeth is the product of musicians who were excited by the idea that lots of people might hear their record. A lot more heard Rubber Soul, but Summerteeth shares the sense of urgency which can be heard in songs like Lennon’s “Girl” or McCartney’s “You Won’t See Me.” Summerteeth employs its dense arrangements on behalf of a collection of emphatic, anthemic sing-along songs. The cinematic quality of a tune like “She’s a Jar” or the lyrical dexterity that frontman Jeff Tweedy displays in a song as a bouncy as “Shot in the Arm” demonstrate the band’s ability to write simultaneously catchy and poignant songs.

The idea that Summerteeth was created for a large audience struck me as I drove around that unseasonably chilly May evening, initially listening to the album to try to wring every nuance out of Bennett’s multi-instrumental work. My desire to pick out his parts on the record soon waned. I just listened to the album the way I had hundreds of times before, as the work of an entire band at a particular moment in their career.

I blazed a trail through the back roads of northern Vermont, windows down, forcing the few cars I passed to take a hit from the wall of sound Wilco created in the winter of 1998. I got a few tracks into the record before putting “Pieholden Suite” on repeat. There’s this moment two and a half minutes into the song when Wilco’s whole cacophony of sound comes together in a way that would make Brian Wilson blush. I gave the title track the same treatment. “Summerteeth” comes toward the end of the album, so I headed back to the main road when I heard the song’s opening twang. Like “Pieholden Suite,” the power of Pro Tools brings the band’s entire instrumental might together for a brief moment on “Summerteeth,” quite an accomplishment for a tune that could pass for a Hank Williams’ toe-tapper. All this repeating turned the fifty minute album into a ninety minute, four gallon of gas affair. I pulled into my driveway midway through “In a Future Age,” the album’s closing track. I sat idling and rubbing warmth back into my arms until I heard “Candyfloss,” the secret song buried a few minutes after the album’s closing track.

Jay Bennett and Wilco parted ways after the tumultuous Yankee Hotel Foxtrot sessions, back when Wilco fans feared that this weird new record we kept hearing about would never get released. I Am Trying To Break Your Heart, the Sam Jones’ documentary about the making of YHF, shows Bennett struggling to maintain his creative turf in a band obviously dominated by Jeff Tweedy. Bennett’s departure, which came soon after drummer Ken Coomer’s exit during the YHF sessions, rendered Wilco a profoundly different band than the one that recorded Summerteeth. The creative tension that shaped Summerteeth was gone. Tweedy’s tendency to tinker has gone unchallenged without Bennett’s competing baroque sensibilities in the band.

Wilco took a victory lap around the world in 2002 after the triumphant Yankee Hotel Foxtrot with new members Glenn Kotche and Leroy Bach. They have followed up Yankee Hotel Foxtrot with several more successful albums, including the recently released Wilco (The Album). Their more recent output dabbles, with great success, in a number of different sounds, but none of their newer records make me want to jump in the car and ramble around the countryside like Summerteeth does.