Ambivalent Rock Star Dreams # 5: Wilco

Every now and then, I have a vivid and comically surreal dream featuring a musician or band – almost like a little mini-series going on in my sleeping mind. Oddly, given the unhealthy proportion of my waking thought that is dedicated to music, these dreams are never about musicians I actually like, or indeed musicians I actively dislike. They are always about people whose work I am entirely ambivalent about. For instance, I have previously had dreams featuring The Hives, Nick Cave, Kyuss and Scott Walker (ok, obviously I do like Scott Walker a lot, but the dream presented him in his contemporary ‘reclusive genius’ mode, which I enjoy a lot less than his ‘60s pomp, so I’ll still count him as “ambivalent”).

I used to enjoy blearily recounting these dreams on forums (fora? – whatever), but since I’ve given up posting on forums, I might as well annoy everybody by doing it here instead.

Last night I dreamed I was a new member of Wilco. Wilco in this dream didn’t resemble the real life Wilco though – in fact they were just two guys, who looked like they might have been in The Faces in the ‘70s or something, and me. We were sitting in a beautiful, ornamental Chinese garden, and the lead Wilco guy was explaining to me that, despite the fact that everyone always assumes they put a hell of a lot of work into their records, they actually just record any old crap that comes into their heads as quickly as possible, and spend the rest of the recording time/budget lazing around by the pool, or whatever.

Fine with me, I thought, I don’t like Wilco much anyway. There was a little tape recorder on the other side of the garden, so they decided they might as well just lay down the whole new album in one go and be done with it. “We’ll just say it’s a formal experiment or something”, they said. I was playing this strange instrument that was kind of like a fretless bass, only with thin, non-bass strings and with extremely wide gaps between the strings. I wasn’t playing a bass line; more like some twiddley, sitar-ish modal bits that seemed to magically fit in with whatever the other two guys were playing. The lead guy sang some made up blather in a gruff sort of voice, then shut off the tape and declared the song was done. I walked around the garden for a bit. End of dream.