Uncle who? Wilco drift farther from their alt-country roots on A Ghost Is Born BY MATT ASHARE

Getting dropped by Reprise may have been the best thing that happened to Jeff Tweedy and his band Wilco when the major label refused to release the experimental album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. The irony, of course, is that in 2002 the album came out on Nonesuch, a smaller division of the same company (Warner) that owns Reprise. But that’s beside the point. Because just when it seemed that Wilco had hit an artistic plateau of sorts — a comfortable musical space where, for years and years, Tweedy could have gone on evolving as a songwriter with a lot of heart and not a whole lot of fans — they took a chance, threw a curveball, and found themselves a cause célèbre among music fans who love to hate major labels for their lack of vision. For all its quirks and Jim O’Rourke–aided studio deconstructions, Yankee Foxtrot Hotel ended up topping the Village Voice’s annual "Pazz and Jop" poll and earning a place in history as an "important" rock album.

Or maybe the best thing that happened to Jeff Tweedy was the decision of Jay Farrar, his partner in the band Uncle Tupelo, to move on in 1994. After all, that’s what compelled Tweedy, who’d always been the junior member of the Tupelo songwriting partnership, to take charge of his own career and develop as a songwriter. After the Uncle Tupelo break-up, the good money was on Farrar, with his deep, resonant voice and knack for carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders and then dumping it into his songs. No one knew at the time that Farrar’s own quirks — his issues with major labels and his general ornery attitude toward the world at large — would keep his Son Volt from ever reaching a mass audience. No, Farrar was built to be the cult artist that Tweedy has been striving not to be. (David Weininger’s review of Farrar’s new Stone, Steel & Bright Lights is in "Off the Record," on page 25.)

There’ve been other fortunate happenings in the life of Tweedy, and they’re all chronicled in Chicago Tribune music critic Greg Kot’s new book Wilco: Learning How To Die (Broadway Books). The involvement of multi-instrumentalist Jay Bennett — from the tour supporting the band’s 1995 debut, A.M., through 1996’s more cohesive, rock-based Being There and the more adventurous tuneful explorations of 1999’s Summerteeth (all Reprise) before he was unceremoniously dismissed during the sessions for Yankee Hotel Foxtrot — gave Tweedy the musical muscle to make the leap from the alt-country ghetto to a richer pop universe. And Chicago avant-rock guru Jim O’Rourke has since taken over, not just as Tweedy’s main musical foil but as a savior of sorts — an idea guy who’s brought to a willing Wilco what Brian Eno delivered to a restless U2 in the early ’90s: the tools to throw another curveball at their audience with both the deconstructions of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and the haunted new A Ghost Is Born (also Nonesuch).

Along the way, a good deal of Tweedy’s dysfunction was brought to light in the 2002 rockumentary I Am Trying To Break Your Heart, which found him tossing his cookies in a studio bathroom and giving Bennett his walking papers without so much as a friendly hug, even though the multi-instrumentalist had already helped write much of Yankee Foxtrot Hotel. And earlier this year, Tweedy had to cancel a European promotional tour for A Ghost Is Born so he could check into a rehab facility for the painkillers he’d become addicted to after years of fighting migraine headaches. It’s a story with all the makings of a VH1 Behind the Music special, only without the big breakout single or any of the usual rock-and-rock shenanigans. As did Uncle Tupelo, Wilco make serious music for serious music fans. They’ve been heralded as a band who deserve — no, demand — to be taken seriously. As one friend of mine put it, it’s reached a point where you’re either a fan of Wilco or an enemy of art, such is the high regard in which the cult of Tweedy has come to hold him.

"I am conscious of it," he says over a cell phone from a rest stop on his way home to St. Louis from a family vacation with his wife and two kids in the log cabin he owns on the Michigan/Indiana border. "But I don’t know if there’s anything I can really do about it. I had the same experience with Uncle Tupelo: there was a lot of mythmaking that went on with that band. I’ve just learned to take it as a sign that people have a lot of free time on their hands. But I honestly don’t feel it myself. I just hang out with my wife and kids and play in my band."