Concert Recap: Jeff Tweedy at Uptown Theater Plus Our Top Seven Favorite Jeff Tweedy Responses to the Drunken Fan Down Front

In between bouts of a ninety-minute debate with a drunken, chatty, occasionally nonsensical, irrhythmic clapper of a fan, Jeff Tweedy managed to play a gorgeous solo set for a nearly full house at the Uptown last night (while the rest of KC spent an evening up the street with Yeezus at the Sprint Center).

 "Most of these songs usually live in a very different world, so some of them are gonna suck tonight," Tweedy warned, but the truth is that, with songwriting this good, the songs still work even when Wilco's increasingly ornate arrangements and scorching guitar wizardry are stripped away (not that the evening was entirely Wilco-focused: we even got some Golden Smog and Loose Fur material).  By the end of the evening, Tweedy even embraced the trend so popular among today's folk and bluegrass shows by abandoning amplification entirely and playing Tupelo's "Acuff-Rose" at the foot of the stage:  "Name me a song that everybody knows / And I'll bet you it belongs to Acuff-Rose." 

Name us a better lyric than that?  At that line, the wolf-whistle from the guy three rows back of us was fucking deafening.

Here's a top-seven list of Tweedy's responses and retorts to the drunk guy down front (paraphrased but not far off]:

"Your clapping is like something sparking in a microwave."

"Your clapping is like a shoe rattling around in a dryer."

"Why don't you try sitting on your hands?"

"I don't wanna piss you off...but I don't wanna make you happy either."

"Really, this evening is not all about you."

"You're doing better now. I don't want to call you out ONLY when you're misbehaving."

Fifteen or twenty minutes into the set: "Kanye would have been outta here by now if he had to deal with this."


Thanks for making KC the first step on the short solo jaunt, Tweedy!