Wilco- Live at The Fillmore, Denver Colorado, 9/2/2007

Jeff Tweedy is doing it better than any other musician right now. He has been for a couple of years. His albums are amazing, his individual songs are incredible, and, since he remade the band for the AGIB tour, the live shows defy belief. Their show on Sunday was either my 8th or 9th Wilco show, and I do not think I will ever get tired of watching that band on stage.

The show was similar in many respects to their show I caught in Toronto over to summer. He still opened with a slow acoustic version of "Sunken Treasure," and they still closed with a complete freakout on "Spiders(Kidsmoke)". Richard Swift was opening instead of Low, but I got there too late for him anyway. Swift is an amazing performer, and well worth looking into if you enjoy insturments and the sounds they make, by the way. A slightly odd choice to open for Wilco, but definitely I am sad I missed the show.

There's a feeling, after seeing a band enough times, that the only thing thats going to influence the show is the occasional surprise song( in this case an amazing version of "Too Far Apart", which was the first song I've ever heard them do off of AM) and the crowd. It could be a Denver standard, but the crowd was horrendous. People pushed past me every 5 minutes, on their way to the bar to grab yet another cheap beer or watery mixed drink. It wouldn't have bugged me so much if those same people didn't seem to think they had the right to push right back up to the front after they did their shopping, spilling beer on everyone around them in the process.

The ability of an asshole crowd to bring down the quality of the show is astounding, but no matter how poorly the drunk guy in front of me tried to hit on the college student standing next to him, he couldn't kill my enjoyment at hearing "Hesitating Beauty" and "California Stars," both from the Mermaid Avenue collaborations with Billy Bragg, back to back. There was also the solo Nels Cline added into Red-Eyed and Blue, bringing it, like all the songs off their old albums, into step with their new style.

The other important thing to know about Wilco live is that Jeff Tweedy is hilarious. He was slightly off his game tonight, but he did promise to teach people how good AM was by rerecording it with the bands current lineup. It's apparently going to be called BM, and we're going to think it's the best record ever.

Jeff Tweedy is also starting to look a little old(and a little like Jeffrey Rowland, what the fuck!), and more and more I'm finding this reflected in the crowds at their shows. There was a shocking percentage of the crowd who had completely gray hair, plus bald heads, beer bellies, and an unsettling amount of terrible fashion sense. I only saw three or four "hipsters" there. It depresses me a little that a band I love so much now seems to belong to the generation before me, but that's life. I'll still keep going to see him sing.