Wednesday Wilco Song Spotlight: “Casino Queen”

This week, the Song Spotlight shines on a song from Wilco’s 1995 debut A.M., which is definitely one of their rowdier tunes:

“Casino Queen” (Jeff Tweedy)

Jeff Tweedy: vocals, acoustic guitar

John Stirratt: bass, vocals

Max Johnston: fiddle, vocals

Ken Coomer: drums, vocals

Brian Henneman: guitars, vocals

Daniel Corrigan: vocals

“My dad asked me to write a song about it,” Tweedy told Josh Terry of the Chicago Tribune in 2016. “It’s a real riverboat casino. I took my dad to go to the casino one time, and he said, This could be something you could write a song about. He basically forced me to do it.”

From its dirty licks to its drunken chorus, this track has a distinct Rolling Stones vibe, and could’ve easily fit on one of the band’s classic run of albums from the late ’60s to the early 70s. It’s not hard to imagine Mick Jagger spitting out such lines as “My wife that I just met is looking like a wreck,” and “I’ve been gambling like a fiend on your tables so green.” 

Adding to the song’s boozy, barroom aura, the sounds of bottles clinking together can be heard throughout the second half of the track, notably at the end, as the screams and woos die down. Guest guitarist Brian Henneman, who was brokenhearted at the time, reportedly drunkenly clinked two beer bottles together on the track. “That’s totally contrived,” Tweedy said of Henneman’s contribution to the song to Steve Hyden in 2017. “But those bottles definitely were emptied by him.” 

“Casino Queen,” which was one of Wilco’s first batch of demos, was played at their first official gig, at Cicero’s in St. Louis, Missouri, in late 1994. There, Jay Bennett, who doesn’t appear on A.M., put his stamp on the lead guitar lines originally played by Henneman, who by now was back with his band The Bottle Rockets. Since then, the rowdy song has long been a live staple that Wilco have performed—usually during encores—well over three hundred times.

Robert (Bob) Tweedy passed away on August 4, 2017. At the first show that Jeff played after his father’s death, at the Velorama Festival in Denver, Colorado, on August 11, Wilco performed ‘Casino Queen’ as a tribute. Jeff introduced it by saying, ‘This was the first song that my dad liked that I wrote ... and I think it might be the last song that he liked that I wrote.’

A rousing live version of “Casino Queen,” recorded at the Fox Theater in Boulder, Colorado, on May 5, 1995, appears on the CD single for “Box Full of Letters,” and was later re-released on Alpha Mike Foxtrot.

This is an edited excerpt of Wilcopedia by Daniel Cook Johnson, published by Jawbone Press (www.jawbonepress.com). Order your copy here.

More later...