Wednesday Wilco Song(s) Spotlight: “Red-Eyed And Blue” & “I Got You”

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...