Since I missed the last couple of Wednesday Wilco Song Spotlights, I’m presenting two tracks this week, but they are ones that many fans think are the same song. “Red-Eyed And Blue” and “I Got You (At the End of the Century),” from Wilco's 1996 double record Being There are usually attached especially as “Red-Eyed” often seques into “I Got You.” But they have been played separately as I discuss below.
“Red-Eyed And Blue”
(Jeff Tweedy)
“I Got You (At
The End Of The Century)” had been played over two dozen times before it gained
the song that would that would function as its prologue for most of its
subsequent live airings. Like many of the songs on Being There, both songs were
road-tested at numerous gigs during the band’s heavy touring phase in the
mid-90s.
“Red-Eyed And
Blue” seemingly details the mindset of a broken-down musician who’s drugged up
and frustrated in the studio because he can’t quite capture how much he misses
his absent lover on tape. Or at least that’s one interpretation, being that
there are only twelve somewhat vague lines in the song, but the music fills in
the real story between those lines. It ends with a piano figure that is
repeated as a guitar riff in the opening of “I Got You,” then built upon as the
song explodes into being.
A live version
of the song, performed by Tweedy and Bennett at C’Est What in Toronto, Canada,
on November 20, 1996, appears on Alpha Mike Foxtrot, but there it doesn’t lead
into “I Got You,” even though it did at the show in question. ‘I Got You” appears on another disc in the four-CD set, in all its All Over The Place
glory, proving that the two songs can stand alone.
“I Got You (At
the End of the Century)” (Jeff Tweedy)
This harmonized
rocker, which could be taken as a call out for love amid fears about the
impending Y2K, appears on the first disc of the double-CD edition of Being
There (or side two of the album on vinyl) in an effective segue from the
slow-burner ‘Red-Eyed And Blue.” But although the two songs have also been
paired together hundreds of times in performance since 1996, ‘I Got You” made
its live debut a year before ‘Red-Eyed And Blue,” at Mississippi Nights in St.
Louis, Missouri, on April 28, 1995.
Apart from its
appearance on Being There, ‘I Got You” is also on the 1996 promo-only ten-inch
EP All Over The Place (pictured below) What the liner notes refer to as the ‘Shakey’s Pizza” version was recorded live to DAT on July 9 at the Lounge Ax in Chicago. This
same version also appears on Alpha Mike Foxtrot.
In 2012, Wilco
recorded a new, stripped-down version of ‘I Got You,” very similar to the All
Over The Place cut, for the soundtrack of Judd Apatow’s autobiographical comedy
This Is 40. A few years later, the bonus disc of outtakes included with Being
There (Deluxe Edition) offered two further versions of ‘I Got You.” The first
is an interestingly orchestrated alternate take; the second is labeled ‘Dobro
Mix Warzone.” This take has a rawer feel and a very loose structure but somehow
holds together.
Daniel Cook Johnson’s Wilcopedia: A Comprehensive Guide to the Music of America’s Best Band is available for order here.
More later...
