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WILCO: The Essential Interviews


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In the preface to "River's Edge" he talks about not getting official permission from Rivers Cuomo to write the book, but that the other members of Weezer gave him informal consent through email.

 

Also in that preface he gives the idea of the book being a labor of love. I have my doubts now that I know he put out so many other books.

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So did anyone else order this? I just got my copy the other day. :ninja

 

Haven't had much time to do anything except flip through it so far, but it kind of seems like Mr. Luerssen did a LexisNexis search for Wilco stuff and then weeded through, picked out and compiled some of the more interesting (and occasionally not-so-interesting) pieces. I say this because I saw at least a couple of articles by Greg Kot that listed him as writing for the Bergen Record. A lot of time this is what happens with Lexis searches when one paper picks up something from another paper and lists the writer as being part of their staff. It gets put into Lexis as "Greg Kot, Bergen Record" instead of "Greg Kot, Chicago Tribune," which is where it probably came from. I know Kot does freelance stuff for other outlets, but it wouldn't be for another newspaper. Ultimately it's a small point, but worth noting.

 

I mean, I'm sure that isn't totally the case. There's articles from some publications that almost certainly wouldn't turn up in Lexis. Who knows? Maybe Luerssen collected an archive of Wilco articles and literally retyped the text of some of those. That's just speculation on my part. But I can't imagine that he got permission from every single outlet to reproduce these in book form, as someone mentioned earlier. There's hundreds of articles in here and I just don't see it. Espeically if the band was not involved and did not have any role in this book.

 

The book is mostly text with occasional low-res art (except for the front and back covers) sprinkled in. It's mostly just old promo pictures and things like the sleeve for the "All Over The Place'" 10" record or a picture of a show poster. It's definitely a DIY kind of thing, although certainly looks professional enough. I assume that's where Lulu.com comes in is assembling it all into a nice book package.

 

It's not a collection of interviews as the title indicates, but a compilation of articles over the course of the band's history. Luerssen himself doesn't appear to have written a word, not that he claimed to. As someone with an archival sort of mentality, it's nice to have a lot of this stuff collected in one place but I'm not sure it would be worth it to most people to shell out 20 bucks or whatever for a lot of stuff that you could probably find online or through one of the links that Analogman posted.

 

Anyway, my .02. ;)

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Any indication as to whether he had the rights to the articles?

 

It doesn't seem that way to me, but I certainly don't claim to be an expert on copyright law. There is a note on the copyright page that reads "All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process

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