Photo by Charles Harris
TONIGHT’S THE DAY: Nels Cline (L) and Wilco return to Tampa Bay after a decade away.
When Tweedy—who was last in town for a 2019 solo show at Tampa Theatre—brought the songs to Wilco, Cline heard stunningly classic country and folk songs with strong choruses and traditional song structures. Once fans finally got to wrap their ears around the tunes, many mistook the guitar sounds for Cline’s when they, in fact, belong to the Fender B-Bender of Pat Sansone, who, like Cline, joined the band in 2004.
Cline—who’s responsible for iconic Wilco guitar solo on songs like “Ashes Of American Flags” and “Art Of Almost”—told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay that Tweedy smiled ear to ear when he heard Sansone play the out-of-production guitar invented by Byrds alums Clarence White and multi-instrumentalist Gene Parsons.
“And I was digging it,” Cline added. “Now that we’ve been playing the songs out, playing them live, now Pat’s crushing even more.”
Listening, and being awash in sound is Cline’s happy place, too, and it always has been since he and his percussionist twin brother Alex were obsessed with The Rolling Stones and The Byrds, respectively. After a pandemic that saw Wilco cancel or reschedule at least 40 shows, even soundchecks provide a specific joy.
“I like them, because we get to play more,” Cline told CL. “When sound starts, there’s that sort of feeling of connectedness, or chemistry, or whatever you want to call it. Everyone’s just kind of creating something together. I live for that.”
And it’s been quite a life for the 67-year-old Los Angeles native who started playing guitar on a second hand, half-scale Melody his English teacher dad bought off one of his students when Cline was not yet a teenager. Besides the Byrds, Cline’s early musical diet included ”Help!”-era Beatles, plus the droning sounds of Ravi Shankar, who was introduced to him by his grade school teacher. Jimi Hendrix Experience’s “Manic Depression” was an inception point, and by the late-’70s, Cline earned his first recording credit as a sideman in a band fronted by jazz musician Vinny Golia.
To date, Cline’s credit appears in works by almost 200 artists and on more than 200 albums. Besides Wilco and his eponymous groups, Cline has worked with names like Yoko Ono, Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, Minutemen’s Mike Watt, Medeski, Martin & Wood, Phil Lesh and many more. He won’t entertain the notion, but countless guitar players across the globe want to be Nels Cline.
“I’ll say this. I’m a very fortunate human,” he surrendered. “It’s OK to want to have a fortunate, nice, decent way of life. And I have that. You know, it’s pretty cool. I get to play and travel and do all the stuff that people do.”
That’s not to say that death hasn’t been on Cline’s mind over the last year.
His face-to-face with mortality started last January, six days after his own birthday, with the death of Yardbirds innovator Jeff Beck. Like everyone else, Clines believed the U.K. guitar god who successfully traversed genres like psych-rock, folk, metal and jazz would live forever. Beck’s larger-than-life stature also came with an air of humility that largely shrugged off the rock and roll stardom some of his peers embraced. “The language that he developed on a guitar had become so personal, and so, at times, utterly profound, and always entertaining and expressive as fuck,” Cline said.
Eight days later, David Crosby shook off his mortal coil, sending Cline running towards Déjà Vu’s title track (“from the album… not some sort of live version”) and “Guinnevere” from the Crosby, Stills & Nash album. Revisiting those records along with The Byrds’ “Everybody’s Been Burned” made Cline realize that he first experienced a huge part of the so-called jazz harmonic language that he is drawn to when he was just 10 or 11 years old. “It’s so gorgeous to my ears. And then his voice is incredible,” Clines said, noting the episodic nature of “Déjà Vu,” which opens with brisk vocal harmonics before unfolding into a Crazy Horse-style tempo. “It’s just so great. And I really respond to that.”
He’s still responding to the death of Television’s Tom Verlaine, who died 10 days after Croz.
Cline said that he can probably sing along to every solo written by Verlaine, all the way through his 1987 solo album, Flash Light. When Cline talks about the sounds in those compositions, he refers to them as language and as alive. Speaking to CL in February, Cline confessed that Verlaine’s music was still parading in his head.
“Verlaine was the crushing blow,” Cline said. As he tries to process the loss of a hero, Cline goes back and forth between heavy emotional reactions and the thought that death is just an inevitability. Generations of humanity—people in their 90s, 80s, and 70s—croak because they’re old. But Cline pointed out that some of them are in their 60s, too.
“My age. So it’s sobering,” he added. “I can tell you that as the senior in the band Wilco, the cold tap of death’s finger on the backline edges is not infrequent. So, I’m just going to try to stay positive, and stay alive.”
And that’s seemingly just as easily done as it is said for Cline and his bandmates. For Cruel Country, Tweedy ran hot, reportedly writing roughly 50 songs in 52 days. As recording for the album neared completion, the band was already at work on an album loosely described as art-pop.
“That’s what Jeff called it, I think. Art-pop. It’s still going,” Cline said. “It’s going well, I think. It’s a completely other vibe. I can’t wait to hear it finished.”
The pivots play right into Cline’s hand. Before Wilco, he played rock and roll along with the other improvised music that piqued his interests. When he joined Tweedy’s band, Cline said that the 14-year-old guitar player inside of him was re-awakened. Next year marks his 20th anniversary with Wilco, and in some ways, not a lot has changed. “I guess that 14-year-old is 33 you say now, but he just still loves to rock,” Cline told CL.
It’s a mode he can’t shake, despite getting to the venue some days and thinking, “Why don’t I just take a completely weird approach one night?”
“But I’m just rocking out,” he said. “Because that’s how the architecture of the show kind of is. Jeff likes to have an innocent rock out where it’s just completely communal at the end of the night—and I’m down. Rock and roll, the chiming guitars, it’s a very good feeling for me.”
It’s the sensation of being alive. And considering all Cline and the country have been through over the last few years, that’s not a cruel feeling at all.
