As my upcoming book, Wilcopedia: A Comprehensive Guide To The Music Of America's Best Band (pre-order it here!), contains a lot of material about the covers Wilco has played over the years, I thought I’d feature an excerpt about one of the coolest covers they’ve ever done.
That would be:
“Marquee Moon” (Tom Verlaine)
Because of their penchant for lengthy, arty jams, many critics have labeled the New York band Television, ‘the punk Grateful Dead.’ That analogy is best displayed in Television’s 10-minute guitar epic, “Marquee Moon,” from their 1977 album of the same name.
Wilco front man Jeff Tweedy, a big fan of the band, was given by his wife, Sue, the gift of a guitar lesson from Television’s former member, Richard Lloyd on his thirty-fourth birthday in 2001. The lesson helped Tweedy, who was the sole guitarist in Wilco after the ousting of Jay Bennett, to gain more confidence on the instrument.
The comparisons to Television grew after guitarist Nels Cline joined Wilco in 2004, along with multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone. Cline, who took over as lead guitarist, had experience playing Television songs like “See No Evil” and “Little Johnny Jewel” during his stint in bassist Mike Watt’s band, and the influence was strongly felt on his first album with Wilco, 2006’s Sky Blue Sky.
In reviews of Sky Blue Sky, Rolling Stone’s Robb Sheffield, wrote that Cline was ‘reinventing Television circa Adventure [their second album]’ on ‘Impossible Germany,’ The Observer’s Graeme Thomson said that the same track ‘sounds like a duel between Thin Lizzy and Television,’ and the Guardian’s Dorian Lynsky noted about the album’s ‘flaring guitar passages redolent of Neil Young or Television.’
So it made a lot of sense that fans would request for Wilco to cover a Television song at the all request covers show at Solid Sound in 2013 * (where they also covered Thin Lizzy and Neil Young), and “Marquee Moon” was the obvious but glorious choice for the event.
The Solid Sound version of “Marquee Moon” was given a three guitar attack as Cline, Sansone, and Tweedy dueled on the intertwined, chiming riffs that took the audience on a nearly 14 minute sonic journey.
In an interview with Jim Beaugez posted on guitarplayer.com (Nels Cline’s Musical Life in Five Riffs, January 17, 2018), Nels Cline offered that “‘Marquee Moon’ is a veritable feast of memorable and influential guitar riffs. Tom Verlaine’s long guitar solo ends in one of the most memorable examples of a mixolydian scale in its most rudimentary form, and it sounds like absolute poetry. Then, there’s this beautiful, John Cipollina-influenced thing he plays with his finger, but I do it with the bar. That’s where I get my penchant for the wiggle - which I use all over songs like Wilco’s ‘Impossible Germany.’”
So far, “Marquee Moon” has only been played by Wilco once for a special occasion, but such a feast, as Cline called it, is much too tasty to be just a one-off. Here’s hoping they’ll serve it up again someday.
In contrast, check out the most recent version of Television play “Marquee Moon” at the Hopscotch Festival in 2016:
It's pretty good until it sloppily breaks down in its second half. The Wilco take crushes it better than the original artists' for sure.
In reviews of Sky Blue Sky, Rolling Stone’s Robb Sheffield, wrote that Cline was ‘reinventing Television circa Adventure [their second album]’ on ‘Impossible Germany,’ The Observer’s Graeme Thomson said that the same track ‘sounds like a duel between Thin Lizzy and Television,’ and the Guardian’s Dorian Lynsky noted about the album’s ‘flaring guitar passages redolent of Neil Young or Television.’
So it made a lot of sense that fans would request for Wilco to cover a Television song at the all request covers show at Solid Sound in 2013 * (where they also covered Thin Lizzy and Neil Young), and “Marquee Moon” was the obvious but glorious choice for the event.
The Solid Sound version of “Marquee Moon” was given a three guitar attack as Cline, Sansone, and Tweedy dueled on the intertwined, chiming riffs that took the audience on a nearly 14 minute sonic journey.
Listen to it here:
In an interview with Jim Beaugez posted on guitarplayer.com (Nels Cline’s Musical Life in Five Riffs, January 17, 2018), Nels Cline offered that “‘Marquee Moon’ is a veritable feast of memorable and influential guitar riffs. Tom Verlaine’s long guitar solo ends in one of the most memorable examples of a mixolydian scale in its most rudimentary form, and it sounds like absolute poetry. Then, there’s this beautiful, John Cipollina-influenced thing he plays with his finger, but I do it with the bar. That’s where I get my penchant for the wiggle - which I use all over songs like Wilco’s ‘Impossible Germany.’”
So far, “Marquee Moon” has only been played by Wilco once for a special occasion, but such a feast, as Cline called it, is much too tasty to be just a one-off. Here’s hoping they’ll serve it up again someday.
In contrast, check out the most recent version of Television play “Marquee Moon” at the Hopscotch Festival in 2016:
It's pretty good until it sloppily breaks down in its second half. The Wilco take crushes it better than the original artists' for sure.
More later...
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