Jeff Tweedy would be a good dinner companion, I believe. I'm still pissed that the Lounge Ax closed though (no fault of Tweedy); I saw/heard a lot of good music there, when I wasn't too drunk on the cheap beer.
Why Wilco Is the Future of Music:
Great things happen when a band and its audience find harmony. By Lawrence Lessig from Wired magazine.
..I got a chance to ask Tweedy about all this before a concert in Oakland, California (that's the weird thing about law professors hanging around Wired - you get to go to the back of the bus). What struck me most was his clarity. He was a man called to a war that he couldn't believe had to be fought. Yet it isn't ideology that drives him. It's common sense.
“Music,” he explained, “is different” from other intellectual property. Not Karl Marx different - this isn't latent communism. But neither is it just “a piece of plastic or a loaf of bread.” The artist controls just part of the music-making process; the audience adds the rest. Fans' imagination makes it real. Their participation makes it live. “We are just troubadours,” Tweedy told me. “The audience is our collaborator. We should be encouraging their collaboration, not treating them like thieves.”
...
But when I asked him to explain the extremism in this war, passion faded and disbelief took its place. Commenting on a court decision to ban all music sampling without a license, he said one word: racism. And he seemed genuinely confounded by those who use the courts to punish their fans. “If Metallica still needs money,” he almost whispered, “then there's something really, really wrong.” He would protest this extremism, he explained, by living a different life. By inviting, by creating, by inspiring music, and by ignoring wars about plastic.If this war is to end, it needs authentic voices. We have had enough preaching. The outrage is beginning to wear thin. It will take bands like Wilco, who live a different example and whisper an explanation to those who want to hear. Peace takes a practice. One that only artists can make real.
“Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” (Wilco)
