Wilco's Nels Cline: 'L.A. gets no respect as far as culture'

Before Wilco's Jeff Tweedy plucked guitarist Nels Cline out of the L.A. underground to join his Chicago rock 'n' roll collective, Cline was already something of an avant-garde legend. There was only one problem: Cline was broke.

In the early 2000s Cline was playing in six bands, according to his estimate. Locals who were into solo, improvisational jazz-rock guitar could find Cline regularly performing at downtown club The Smell (there were usually about 11 of us), a venue for which Cline was one of the earliest, most vocal supporters. He had turned down numerous invites to join various rock bands, instead performing in experimental outfits such as Carla Bozulich's Scarnella or with Mike Watt in jazz/punk/noise outfit Banyan. 

As far as those band offers, Cline won't, he said, "enumerate," other than to say the bands weren't very interesting. How uninteresting? Penniless frustration was actually more appealing to Cline, who, at the time, was staring at the big 5-0.

"People think I was successful because I was making records and playing out all the time, but I was not making a living, not effectively," Cline said earlier this month. "Things became really strained in my life -- just the stress of trying to continue with this idea that it gets better tomorrow. When you’re about to turn 50 years old, that can feel like a delusion. I was going to go back to the workforce and get a day job. That’s when Jeff called me."

Story: Wilco is maturing, but it is not growing soft

Joining Wilco wasn't some slam-dunk, either. His then-partner Bozulich told him he would be insane not to, but while Cline had shared bills with the band, including 2002's All Tomorrow's Parties on the campus of UCLA, he wasn't all that familiar with the group. Yet Tweedy sent Cline an unmastered version of what would become the 2004 album "A Ghost is Born," which featured some of Wilco's fiercest guitar work, and Cline's ability to make a living as a musician was suddenly a late-blooming reality. Today, Cline lives in New York, is married to Cibo Mato's Yuka Honda and is in year eight of his Wilco tenure. The band on Tuesday will release "The Whole Love," which is Cline's third with the group. 

"I really liked 'A Ghost is Born,'" Cline said. "I could really get with that record. If I had just heard (Wilco's 1995 debut) 'AM,' I would have wondered what I could contribute. That’s nothing against ‘AM.’ It’s just that it has a classic kind of rock sound, and I don’t think I’m the guy for that job."

Feeling like a champion: Hip-hop's chemical romance with Ecstasy [UPDATE]

When Hotlanta rapper-turned-movie star T.I. was arrested on drug possession charges earlier this month, there was a feeling of “haven’t we all been here before?” But also genuine surprise.

From ODB to DMX, Kanye to 'Pac, hip-hop performers have a chronic habit of getting busted for stupid stuff. Identity theft. Cruelty to animals. Wearing a bulletproof vest after being convicted of a felony. Rappers behaving badly have become one of popular culture’s most numbing constants. After all, T.I. was already on probation when L.A. County sheriff’s deputies stopped his $600,000 Mercedes Maybach on the Sunset Strip for what they said was an illegal U-turn and then detected what they said was “a strong odor of marijuana emitting from the vehicle”; earlier this year, he served a seven-month prison sentence for attempting to buy a cache of automatic weapons and silencers.

But celeb watchers began scratching their heads after deputies reported that Clifford “T.I.” Tip Harris and his new wife, Tameka “Tiny” Cottle, were also in possession of “a small amount of Ecstasy” (in addition to weed and testing positive for codeine).

Since when do gangsta rappers dabble in designer drugs?

A Mekon reflects: 'We've always been stupid enough to keep doing this,' says punk survivor Jon Langford

A role as a Mekon isn't necessarily the greatest lot for a rock 'n' roller. Now into Decade No. 4, the Mekons have consistently been critically adored and commercially ignored. Multiple major-label deals have come and gone, and the luxury of quitting a day job -- or not having to make ends meet by scraping together multiple projects -- is one a Mekon has never really known. 

Worse still is the nagging knowledge that multiple acts who came of age in the punk and post-punk scenes of the late '70s and early '80s have recently found new audiences. Artists such as Mission to Burma, PiL, which counts a Mekon as a member, and Gang of Four, which once had a Mekon, have all done the reunion circuit, benefiting either from festival stages, constant reissues or newfound idolization.

And the Mekons? The act's label for the last decade and a half, Touch and Go, was recently downsized into little more than a catalog-only operation. 

"We’ve been saying we should pretend we’ve split up and then re-form," Mekon co-founder Jon Langford said this week from his Chicago home. "That seems to be the way to generate a lot of cash. You just need to take a couple years off. We’ve always been stupid enough to keep doing this. We believed our own hype, that anyone can do this and you don’t need to take any notice of the market forces." 

If the Mekons members had, they likely wouldn't have jettisoned their late '70s punk rock sound for multiple decades of genre-hopping experimentation. The Mekons were playing with synths and pre-industrial dance sounds in the '80s, and then writing country records by the end of it. They scored a book, staged a performance-art concert in which everything was on backing tapes, and often wielded a violin as if it were the lead guitar.  

When Langford, a native of Wales and a Chicago resident of 18 years, comes to the Los Angeles-area this weekend for a pair of shows -- a Saturday night appearance at Santa Monica's McCabe's and a performance Sunday at Hollywood's Amoeba Music -- he'll be doing so in more of a singer/songwriter guise. His "Old Devils," released this month by Chicago's Bloodshot Records, is a folk-rock effort that confronts aging, regret and the false romance of a life as an artist. It tackles it all with Langford's conversational, charmingly self-deprecating tone.

Think of it as the grown-up musical bookend to Nick Cave's recently issued sophomore album with his Grinderman project ("Grinderman 2"). Cave's effort is menacing -- an album devoted to late-in-life recklessness. Langford's effort is the sobering, country-tinged wake-up call. Characters are "overworked, overwhelmed, over here and over it all," and the narrator in the quiet lament "Luxury" is haunted by past mistakes. A "disposable income and weakness for drinking have disposed of me," Langford sings.

"That song," said Langford, "is like the invention of the teenager, and the myth that everything will get better and better. For me, I was growing up in the '70s and saw my friend’s hipster parents having wife-swapping parties and leopard-skin sofas and moving to Australia or South Africa for a better life. I remember those days fondly. It’s sympathetic. People were sold something, the belief that there was a better life."

Track-by-track: Beck, Nigel Godrich, Emily Haines, Bryan Lee O'Malley & Edgar Wright dissect the 'Scott Pilgrim' music

Fifteen pages into the first volume of Bryan Lee O'Malley's six-part Scott Pilgrim series, the characters break into song -- or at least they rock out as much as one can in a black-and-white graphic novel. Electric bolts shoot from the singer's mouth, O'Malley provides a chord progression and a teenage girl watching the rehearsal falls in love. 

As for the sound, the reader is informed it's "kind of crappy," but the rest is left to one's imagination. Such could have been the fate of Edgar Wright's big-screen adaption of O'Malley's tale of twentysomething hopeless romantics. After all, bringing rock 'n' roll to the big screen is not the easiest of feats, and with video game quirks and elaborate action sequences, it'd be easy to see how one could conclude that it would be best for "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World" to just to do away with the rock.

As star of the film Michael Cera put it to our sister blog Hero Complex, "Whenever you see a band in a movie, the music is barely passable. It's like when you see a film, and someone is writing a book. Whenever you hear excerpts of the writing, it's just terrible. You're like, 'That's what they're writing?' It's kind of the same theory."

Early versions of the script, which is credited to Wright and Michael Bacall, did in fact do away with the music -- completely. With Cera's Pilgrim forced to do battle with the seven evil exes of the object of his obsession, Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World" has plenty of ground to cover without the rock 'n' roll.

"In the first draft of the script, there was this running joke that you never heard the bands," Wright said during a Q&A following a recent Los Angeles screening. "You heard the intro, and then it would cut to the next scene, and somebody would be going, ‘Oh my God, that’s the best song ever.’ That was a joke for a long time."

At least until Nigel Godrich entered the picture.The famed producer, best known for his work with Radiohead, Beck and Paul McCartney, was entrusted to bring to life the sound of the punky Sex Bob-Omb, the fictional band in which Cera's Scott Pilgrim plays bass (poorly). Godrich made overtures to Atlanta punks the Black Lips, put ultimately persuaded close friend Beck to lay down sketches of a couple dozen garage rock songs. 

"I completely understand why you might downplay the music in the script," Godrich said. "It’s one of those things where it might be better to just not hear any music and to leave it to your imagination. Then it will be as good as it will ever be. But once a few inquiries were made, and it was clear that we could maybe get those people to contribute, it was an exciting prospect."

In addition to Beck, the "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World" soundtrack, released Tuesday via ABKCO (also available in a digital expanded edition), features original songs from Broken Social Scene -- in full thrash mode -- as well as a previously unreleased cut from electro-rockers Metric. The 19-track album is rounded out by songs from the Black Lips, T-Rex, the Rolling Stones, Frank Black and, of course, Plumtree. Some of the bands in the film are referenced in the comics or were suggested by O'Malley, and others were selections from Wright. 

Pop & Hiss spoke to Wright, O'Malley, Godrich, Beck and Metric's Emily Haines, asking them to contribute to a track-by-track look at the songs in "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World." It's the second installment of this blog's look at the music in the rock 'n' romance picture, as earlier Godrich and Beck spoke in detail about the thoughts behind Sex Bob-Omb. 

Track-by-track analysis is after the jump.