Last summer, Reprise Records was so unhappy with Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot that one executive reportedly called it a "career-ending" album. Less than a year later, the Chicago band's fourth album, now being hailed as a classic, has been released by Nonesuch Records -- ironically, a label owned by the same company as Reprise, AOL Time Warner. "There's a bit of a rock & roll swindle to the whole thing, in that the same parent company paid for our record twice," says Wilco singer Jeff Tweedy.

How and why Reprise let Wilco get away illustrates the widening chasm between record-company executives focused on quarterly profits and radio hits, and rock & roll bands determined to make great albums oblivious to commercial trends. In this case, Wilco not only got their record back for free from a label anxious to quell a potential public-relations disaster, they got Nonesuch to pay for it and a second album.

The man who let Wilco walk is David Kahne, then-chief talent scout at Warner Bros. "This record is different than I thought it would be, but it wasn't a piece of shit," says Kahne, who no longer works at the label. What the record lacked, he says, was a single.

Consolidation in the music industry has forced executives to think even more about instant success and less about long-term growth. Patience for artists to develop was running thin at Reprise. The label had been folded into the AOL Time Warner empire, which was cutting overhead in recent years, laying off more than 600 employees and dropping bands that weren't selling. Kahne, a veteran producer who has worked with Sublime, Romeo Void and Paul McCartney, considered each act song by song rather than taking the long-term view. "Records with songs on the radio sell better as a rule," he says. "The flavor of the record company has a lot to do with its heritage, but at the same time it's a changing company." And that means hits, now.

Wilco had already accommodated Reprise's desire for a single once before, returning to the studio with Kahne to record an additional song for the 1999 album Summerteeth. But that song, "Can't Stand It," was never promoted to modern-rock radio stations though Reprise told the band it would be, and it received only minor airplay. That experience left Wilco more determined to put out Foxtrot as is. "We realized we just weren't interested in making records like the ones they're trying to sell," Tweedy says. When Kahne agreed to the idea of Wilco leaving the label with Foxtrot in hand, "it felt like Christmas," the singer says.

Tweedy and the band -- bassist John Stirratt, keyboardist Leroy Bach and drummer Glenn Kotche -- knew they had made a great album. The cost was steep: By the time the twenty-one-month recording process was done, two longtime band members -- drummer Ken Coomer and multi-instrumentalist Jay Bennett -- were gone. But the result is a doorway into a new world. Imagine the Band's second album if it had been produced by Brian Eno -- a bold merger of blue-eyed-soul songcraft and avant-garde experimentation, the dreamlike cadence of Tweedy's voice melding with otherworldly keyboards and exotic rhythms.

Reprise didn't see that as a formula for radio hits, but Wilco were still selling out clubs and theaters nationwide, making records relatively inexpensively (Foxtrot cost less than $300,000) and recouping most of their recording costs with steady album sales of 350,000 worldwide. "They were one of the lowest-maintenance acts on the label as far as monetary bullshit is concerned," says Gary Briggs, Reprise's former VP of artist development. "But Reprise was looking for Wilco to be the next Wallflowers."

Nonesuch has released Foxtrot's "Heavy Metal Drummer" as a single, and the song was immediately added to the playlists of more than twenty adult alternative stations across the country. There's also a documentary on the making of Foxtrot, expected in theaters this summer. And a new Wilco recording session yielded eight songs that may emerge as part of yet another album next year.

"Everything feels so good in the band right now," Tweedy says. "We want to do as much as possible."

[From Issue 896 — May 23, 2002]

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