When Wilco take the stage at Mempho Fest on Sunday, they’ll be returning to a kind of spiritual center for the band. As the band’s multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone reflects, “How can you do what we do and not have a crush on Memphis? Whether you’re pulling from early rock and roll, or from Big Star, or Memphis soul and Stax — whatever it is, there’s gonna be a thread that leads back to Memphis, somehow. I mean the first Wilco record was done at Easley-McCain Studios!”
Wilco’s Mempho appearance will kick off another round of two- to three-week jaunts the band has been making since spring, in an ongoing tour marked by its balance between large halls and smaller rock clubs. “Part of the band’s philosophy is to bring it to the people,” says Sansone. “Just recently we played Red Rocks, and then a week later we played a 1,300 seat rock club in Bozeman, Montana. And that little club show ended up being one of our favorite shows of the year. We try to make it approachable. It’s the nature of our band — we’ve got little pockets all over the place.”
These days, the band will be premiering songs from their latest album, Cruel Country, an album they backed into rather unexpectedly. “As we’ve been working on lots of tracks over the last couple of years, it seemed like we were making two records simultaneously,” Sansone explains. “One batch of songs had a country flavor and was more acoustic, and another batch was more the art pop side of Wilco. We were going to focus more on the art pop, but as we were getting close to our festival we do every two years in North Adams, Massachusetts, the Solid Sound Festival, it occurred to Jeff and to us that we had this country/folky body of work that was not far from being finished, so why not put the finishing touches on it, and offer it to our fans at the festival? Kind of as a gift for coming to the event. But as we started digging into these tracks and putting the finishing touches on them, it became apparent that, ‘Oh, this is our next album!’ This is a significant piece of work for us. So it wasn’t really planned to be the next official Wilco record until just weeks before it was released.”
And as for the live show, Sansone says “we’ve been playing a handful of the new songs in the set. And then a grab bag of stuff over the years. There’s a lot of material to choose from at this point! But we try to represent the different records of the band’s life.”
After their Mempho appearance, the band will make a slight detour: “We’re going to do an afternoon set at the festival,” says Sansone, “and then we’re gonna run over to Crosstown with some guitars and a snare drum and do two or three songs and have a chat on [community radio station] WYXR. I really want to show the rest of the guys what’s happening at Crosstown. I think they’ll be blown away.”
Beyond having his own program on WYXR, 91.7 FM, Sansone has seen Crosstown evolve and blossom since the earliest days of its renovation. “It all started with my friendship with [WYXR executive director] Robby Grant. I was involved in the Mellotron Variations project with him, and spending time at the Crosstown Concourse because of that. And I got to know Winston Eggleston. But I remember before Crosstown was even completed, we were in town for a Wilco show, and Robby picked me up to show me the building as they were developing it. And a couple years later, we performed the Mellotron Variations there. So Robby kept me in the loop as he was developing the ideas for WYXR, and when it became a reality, he asked me if I’d like to do a show, and I said I’d love to. There’s a radio station in Boston that I really love, WUMV, and I turned Robby onto it, and we’d trade other internet radio stuff. So we shared this love of radio as a medium.”
Having a radio show in the Bluff City brings things full circle for Sansone, who’s interest in Memphis far predates Wilco. “I grew up just hours away, in Meridian, Mississippi,” he says, “and I have an aunt and uncle and some cousins in Memphis, so it’s just always been a part of my life. Memphis was the big city. From a very early age, I felt the gravitational musical pull of Memphis. And when I was in my teens, and obsessed with the Beatles, I discovered Big Star and heard those half Southern/half English accents, and realized that this music had been made in Memphis, a place I had actually been to, I was hooked! There was no turning back.”
Wilco will appear at Mempho Fest on Sunday, October 2nd, 4:20 p.m., followed by a live appearance on WYXR 91.7 FM from 7-8 p.m.
Eric Allen 