The King Of Feedback
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

In 1985 I saw Adrian Belew – “stunt guitarist” for Frank Zappa, David Bowie, the Talking Heads, King Crimson, et al – play his guitar with a fork in Laurie Anderson’s “Home of the Brave.” In 1992, or roundabout, I saw Craig Weldron of Shudder ToThink play his guitar with a vibrator. (Great audience conversation: “Is that,um …,””I think that he’s playing with a … ,” etc.) And now, I’ve seen Nels Cline play guitar with a whisk.
On Wednesday night, Cline, a recent Wilco addition, opened solo for frontman Jeff Tweedy under the auspices of the Wall Street Rising series at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center. Cline, whom Tweedy later called “one of the best things that ever happened to me,” has an illustrious musical history of his own stretching back to 1979. He’s worked with punk luminaries Mike Watt and Thurston Moore, as well as numerous jazz outfits and his own Nels Cline Trio.
Cline solo is a great, weird show. Tall and thin, he rocks back and forth, lockkneed, noodling noise better than anyone.When Cline blows some kind of plastic voice box into the pickups of a little Danelectro electric longhorn mandolin, the result is beyond shoegazing music,by an inch: It’s stomp-box-gazing music.
Kicking off his set with a Mooger Fooger jam via Buster Keaton, Cline set up a loop on an old delay box; over that came screeches, whistles, and trills of melody. He played two pieces by Car la Bley that sounded almost Moorish, like some kind of Spanish soundtrack to Daniel Lanois’s dreams.
In fact, the four pieces Cline played could have been movements of a single, crazy opus. The mode varied from frantic and screeching to calming and echoing; riffs filled in for melody, and the resolutions to the constantly expanding theme usually came as a surprise. It felt at times as if the whole of George Martin’s studio witchery was being channeled into Cline’s white Fender Jazzmaster.There were pulses and rushes, cascades and thumps, walls of roaring static punctuated by blips. Nels Cline is the king of the feedback fugue.
Cline has had plenty of time recently to make feedback with Wilco. His own description of the tone he’s trying to achieve is “everything all the way up.” And everything has been all the way up: Wilco’s latest issue, “Kicking Television” (Nonesuch), is a two-disc live recording that pushes the band further into the realm of rock stardom. It incorporates the various influences Tweedy & co. have tapped into over the years – alt-country, Brian Wilson-style lush pop, Sonic Youth – but establishes Wilco as a new thing, a full-on rock ‘n’ roll jam band.This is big music for big stages.
But Wednesday night was an intimate occasion. Tweedy stood on stage alone with an acoustic guitar (well, actually, six guitars: It was like a showroom). His stage presence is so personal that acoustic shows are a great fit for him.Tweedy presented himself as weak and vulnerable. After tuning up one of the guitars, he shakily asked, “Is everything okay?” Then he laughed at himself and said,”That’s my version of ‘How You Doing Out There!'” before ducking away from the microphone, coming back, and squeaking, extra shaky this time, “Is everything Okay?”
Tweedy’s audience rapport is wonderful – he’ll run a gag, act bitchy, and all the while have the whole room in the palm of his hand. After a funny, funky song (from the new album by his side project, Loose Fur) that recounts Jesus Christ’s return and subsequent drug use,Tweedy said: “That song is what we call a showstopper. All of my maudlin singer-songwriter stuff doesn’t sound so good to me. I don’t wanna cry anymore.”
The audience certainly wasn’t crying. He played 15 songs, and came back for three encore sets after standing ovations, with Cline joining on dobro for one of them. But they – okay, Tweedy – immediately blew it by playing the wrong chord on “Dash 7,” off Wilco’s first record. So they stopped and started over, with Tweedy interjecting, “This is how it’s supposed to go.”Very charming.
Tweedy morphed the squawky rocker “I’m the Man Who Loves You” into a very hot and speedy Drop-D folk blues by way of acoustic Jimmy Page. It was a masterful delivery of a song with many parts and layers, changed enough to make it fresh but maintaining enough to keep it familiar. Tweedy’s playing, especially on “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart” and “(Was I) in Your Dreams,” was sharp: He ran up and down the neck with arpeggios and chord inversions that carried the piano, slide guitar, and bass parts of the latter song perfectly.
But what shined was Tweedy’s voice. His distorted smoker’s harmonic is hitting just the right timbre. It’s a throaty, raspy,shaky thing, a little like early John Lennon. It perfectly suits the nervousness of the man alone with his guitar.