Jeff Tweedy — 8 October 2018, Los Angeles, CA (The Theatre at Ace Hotel)

[bböp]

Well that's a wrap on another Jeff solo tour, and the final show of the run went off more or less without a hitch. No hecklers, a minimally rowdy crowd (which included Jeff's sister and brother-in-law and more than a few friends) and a familiar and acoustically friendly setting, among other factors, meant Jeff could really present the show he seemed to want to on this tour and he responded with a generous performance.

 

The Theatre at the Ace Hotel is a venue in which Jeff seems to enjoy performing — this solo show marked the sixth he has played there in about three and a half years, including both Wilco and the Tweedy band — and it's not hard to understand why. It's a gorgeous room, with its restored Spanish Gothic features and crisp acoustics. It's also connected to the Ace Hotel next door, which means a performer can go almost directly from their room to backstage to onstage without walking outside, if they choose. The stage is a wide one, with two tiers (or one tier with a generous lip, if you will), and Jeff stood behind his usual solo acoustic setup on the upper part of the stage, which gave him some distance from the front of the audience. To me, he looked pretty comfortable up there.

 

As always, a key part of Jeff's solo performances is the dynamic between him and the audience. With this final show of the tour, I would characterize it as slightly awkward but harmless. There were brief spurts of give-and-take between Jeff and the crowd with bursts of applause coming periodically, for example, when he would change guitars or strum the opening chords of a familiar song. "You guys like this guitar that much better?" Jeff asked early on in response to one such outburst. And after another, Jeff felt compelled to share a story about once playing with the West African desert band Tinariwen at a festival and how a member of that band came to his dressing room and said "Bonjour," but instead of wanting to meet Jeff, asked "if he could meet my guitar. ... I didn't take it personally. I introduced them."

 

Another visit to Banter Corner involving the audience came a few songs later when he fielded a few random inquiries from various audience members. Jeff confessed, "I will reflexively answer anyone who says anything to me." On cue, someone asked how he felt about normal American kids. "I hate them," Jeff said. "But I already said that." Someone else then immediately asked how he liked Los Angeles. "I was talking about how I will do that, not that I want to, so let's just settle down," Jeff replied in typically dry fashion. It was probably funnier if you were there, but you sort of get the idea.

 

Probably Jeff's most extended bit of banter, as usual, came before Let's Go Rain. When he announced that he had been playing some new songs and was going to keep doing so, a single clap came from the crowd. "That's probably my sister," Jeff deadpanned. "I have family here. Don't encourage them." (He would later dedicate Evergreen to his sister.) Then Jeff went into some banter about clapping and how people did it differently all over the world, poking some fun at Germans and saying he was part German so he could do that. When that drew a few laughs, he joked that he enjoyed how some of the things he was saying were getting small spurts of laughter because he felt like he was connecting with about four of you and then reiterated one of his jokes about how in an audience this size (about 1,500), he would probably be friends with about four people. Then he went back to introducing Let's Go Rain and talking about the Biblical story of Noah and the flood and saying, "What were they doing then that we're not doing now? Were they just making s'mores out of babies? Sounds delicious."

 

So you can kind of tell that Jeff's mind was kind of all over the place as he tried to connect with the audience. He would occasionally share little personal tidbits about his performance, such as when he struggled to get through the whistling bit at the end of Hummingbird, saying that "I ran out of wind; it must be the altitude," and about how he "had a hair wrapped around my finger" during the frenetic outro of Bull Black Nova. Before going into Passenger Side, he strummed the opening chords and then stopped and joked that he wasn't going to play it. When people protested, Jeff said he was joking and that he had just "wanted to gather myself. These pants aren't getting any looser."

 

Toward the later part of the show, Jeff's comments could be characterized as gently poking fun at his audience. During California Stars, after he had admonished people about clapping on Let's Go Rain, he briefly paused after the first verse and said, "It's killing you not to clap, isn't it? You can try it..." and then gave a mocking foot stomp. Then in the encore, he responded to a woman who asked if he could play Bob Dylan's 49th Beard by saying "I can, but I won't." Then when another guy yelled out for A Shot in the Arm,"Jeff said, "I was gonna play that, but I don't want to reward you." He decided to play I'm Always In Love instead, and during the final "I'm always in love" lyric when most people singing along jump the gun and sing the line a beat too early, Jeff complimented the crowd by saying, "Nice restraint." (Of course that probably was because not that many people were singing along in the first place.) Then he had to almost urge folks to sing along on the final bit of the song, on which it seemed like a lot of people didn't really know the right parts. Again, you probably had to be there but it was kind of amusing to hear people singing several different things simultaneously.

 

In the end, it was a perfectly pleasant evening and Jeff certainly played up his "charming curmudgeon" stage persona to great effect. Personally, the crowd was a touch on the restrained side for my taste — perhaps that can be explained as a Monday-night, reserved-seating crowd in a cavernous theater in an industry town — but generally speaking it seemed like most everyone genuinely enjoyed the show, Jeff included. And that, I suppose, is as good a result as anything else for a show that closed out a fairly long run — and perhaps a long year of solo touring.

 

Here was the complete setlist as played (new songs indicated, with proper titles as known):

 

Via Chicago (w/harmonica)

Remember The Mountain Bed

new song-Bombs Above>

new song-Some Birds

I Am Trying To Break Your Heart

You And I

Hummingbird

Lost Love

new song-Having Been Is No Way To Be

Bull Black Nova

new song-Let's Go Rain

Passenger Side (started and restarted)

Impossible Germany

You Are Not Alone

California Stars

Jesus, etc.

new song-Evergreen

On and On and On

-----------------------------

I'm The Man Who Loves You

Misunderstood

I'm Always In Love

A Shot in the Arm

Acuff-Rose

[DiamondClaw]

First of all, thanks a million for your recaps on this tour, bbop. These threads are appointment reading the morning after Wilco/Tweedy shows! I've seen "On and On and On" pop up several times this tour, but no footage of it exists. I'm curious how that one sounds solo acoustic.

[kidsmoke]

I so appreciate your observant and detailed reviews, bbop. Your prodigious memory is such a gift, too, and reading this has brought back a thousand small memories of the night. You've really captured the tone of the crowd and the venue.

What was up with that person mid-room who kept doing the mariachi yell?! Weird.