For my money, the best concert in Bend over the past four years was Wilco’s mind-blowing, marathon performance at Les Schwab Amphitheater in 2008. (Read my review of that show here.) So when I saw that Jeff Tweedy and the boys were playing in an entirely different kind of venue last week — a historic theater in downtown Portland — I was really curious about what kind of show it would be. At the last minute (like, minutes before the show started) I asked Ethan Maffey of Bend — a live-music fanatic who’ll detail what it was like to see 100 live bands in 2009 at Ignite Bend later this month — if he’d write a review for Frequency. He agreed. Click below for his thorough report and a video of the band playing a Neil Young cover at the show.

A beautifully rare sunny and wintry evening in downtown Portland leapt at the chance to welcome America’s hardest working and possibly most underrated rock band, Wilco, to the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall last Tuesday night. Relaxed and ready, Wilco multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone was found prior to the show in the adjoining Heathman Hotel restaurant, surrounded by friends and willing to autograph tickets to past Wilco shows for fans. Ninety minutes later, he would be found contributing clichéd rock star poses and adding solid depth to the six-member group as they rocked Portland’s former movie house.

Opening the show and hailing from Wilco’s hometown of Chicago was the experimental band Califone, which nearly stole the show with their Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young meets Animal Collective sound. A bit awkward when addressing the crowd verbally, they quickly righted the ship by nearly lulling the crowd into a trance with the wildly epic canvas of “Giving Away the Bride.” Two drummers and an array of smaller, lesser known instruments set them apart from any standard, safe opening act.

Following a 30-minute intermission, at 9 p.m. on the dot, the stage came alive with Wilco. Actually, that’s a little misleading. While all six members were on the stage, the first three songs of the night were practically Jeff Tweedy solo efforts. “Sunken Treasure,” “Remember the Mountain Bed,” and “Hell Is Chrome” took a full 20 minutes to perform, and reminded everyone why Tweedy is the genius behind some of the best songs of his generation. By the end of “Hell Is Chrome,” though, the rest of the band had announced their presence. Yet even after a powerfully stirring rendition of “Bull Black Nova,” the evening’s fifth song, “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart,” began with the crowd still largely planted in their seats. Halfway through that song, however, most had either had enough of sitting while witnessing one of their favorite bands, or something finally switched on in the heads of those new to the Wilco experience that said, “It’s okay to enjoy this as if it were a real rock show”.

What followed was a perfect dissection of that real rock show. Each song was big and bold enough to have been the possible finale prior to an inevitable encore. Predictable crowd participation on “Jesus, Etc.,” hands clapping on “Kingpin,” witty conversation by Tweedy and, of course, his million-and-one guitar changes all added the nuance that made it a true Wilco show. That may have been the only problem with the night. It was a solid presentation, but a little too much like listening to a record rather than watching a live performance. There were definitely nice distinctions between this Wilco show and others — superb stage lighting that created fun shadows on the ornate architecture of the concert hall, Tweedy channeling a bit of Mayer Hawthorne on “Hate It Here,” and just the grand nature of the venue itself — but it still lacked enough to give it an edge over past shows. Even a noticeably absent performance of “Spiders (Kidsmoke)” would have gone a long way to bolstering the experience on sheer guitar playing alone.

Still, it was a routinely brilliant night from Wilco, including a five-song encore that featured the moody, multi-act Buffalo Springfield song “Broken Arrow,” members of R.E.M. and The Minus 5 (Peter Buck and Scott McCaughey) assisting on “California Stars,” and the raucous triumphs of “Heavy Metal Drummer” and “I’m A Wheel,” which kept the attendees on their feet till the very end. When all was said and done, the band performed only four songs from their 2009 release “Wilco (The Album),” and it was very evident they are no longer touring in support of that album, but that it has merely become a part of the library from which to draw from.

Last fall, Wilco sponsored a contest in which they invited fans to write haikus based on a live experience. I entered two and didn’t win. But if that contest were held today, a winning entry from last week’s show might go something like this:

How grand the hall is
Tweedy doesn’t hate it here
And I’m a wheel, too

From Portland, Wilco headed toward Canada and a performance at the Olympics as part of their never-ending effort to prove “Wilco loves you baby!”

Here’s pretty great video of Wilco doing “Broken Arrow” in Portland, shot by YouTube user BrendanShepherd:

Tags: Wilco

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 17th, 2010 at 11:23 pm and is filed under guest posts, live review, out of town. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.