Jeff Tweedy (Band) — 11 November 2025, Dallas, TX (Longhorn Ballroom)

[bböp]

Complete setlist, as played:

Betrayed

One Tiny Flower

Caught Up In The Past

Sign Of Life

Forever Never Ends

This Is How It Ends

Low Key

World Away

KC Rain (No Wonder)

Don’t Forget

Mirror

Stray Cats In Spain

Out In The Dark

Cry Baby Cry

Flowering

New Orleans

Diamond Light Pt. 1

No One’s Moving On

Feel Free

Lou Reed Was My Babysitter

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

Family Ghost

You Don’t Love Me Yet [Roky Erickson]

God Save The Queen [Sex Pistols]

Enough

 

Number of Twilight Override songs played (out of 30): 16.

 

“Special” song(s): If you had the Tweedy band covering the Sex Pistols on your bingo card for this Twilight Override tour, then you had more foresight than me. And even if I would have predicted such a cover, I would’ve thought it would happen at Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa, where bassist Sid Vicious famously punched a hole in the wall on the band’s ill-fated 1978 North American tour. But I didn’t realize that perhaps an even more infamous gig on that run happened at Dallas’ Longhorn Ballroom, which saw Vicious somehow get his face bloodied — some accounts say he was hit by a beer bottle, others that he was headbutted — and then be immortalized in a famous photograph of him playing with blood running down his chest. The lore of that incident apparently inspired Jeff to pay homage, and he took the lead vocals on a spirited rendition of God Save The Queen that he said the band had just learned earlier that afternoon. Before that, we also got a nice cover of Roky Erickson’s You Don’t Love Me Yet with Macie Stewart on lead vocals.

 

Support report: Sima Cunningham, playing solo electric with a hollow-body Gibson, as she has been doing during her turns as the opening act on this tour. She has been featuring mostly songs from her solo record High Roller, but also played a more recent composition and also invited Finom bandmate Stewart to join her on As You Are off the duo’s most recent, Jeff-produced album Not God. Sima’s set was as follows: For Liam/Your Bones/High Roller/Both Ways/Nothing/new-I’m Really Scared/As You Are (w/Macie Stewart on violin and co-vocals).

 

Venue vibes: The Longhorn Ballroom has a long history as a country-and-western dance hall that, since its opening in 1950, has been operated at various points by western swing king Bob Wills as well as Lee Harvey Oswald-shooter Jack Ruby. The current setup seems to be a flexible one in which it can be all reserved seating or some combination of a general admission standing area in front of the stage surrounded by different tiers of seating, which was the case for this show. In either case, the stage is relatively high — approximately five feet — and while there is no barricade separating the stage from the audience, there is a weird three-foot tall wood block that spans the entire length of the stage (quite handy as a place to put a drink or stow your merch purchases, I must say) that somewhat prevents the crowd from getting too close. Generally speaking, the Longhorn feels pretty big — befitting its Texas setting — and indeed the listed capacity of 2,250 was definitely larger than most of the venues the Tweedy band has been playing on this tour.

 

Bits of tid, including Banter Corner:

• You could tell that Jeff was fascinated to be playing in the same room as that infamous Sex Pistols gig. He told the audience, prior to God Save The Queen, that, “I love this place so much. I’ve never been here before, but I get to see stuff that I’ve only seen in movies or on TV.” Afterward, he asked if anyone in attendance had also been at that Pistols’ show in 1978. “They’re all dead, right?” Jeff asked. One guy yelled back, “They were making us!” To which Jeff shot back, “They were fucking to the Sex Pistols? Really? Well, that explains a lot about you fellas.” Then Jeff added, “I was 10, so I wasn’t making anybody.”
• More from Banter Corner: Jeff once again mentioned the “ambiguous” ending of KC Rain (No Wonder) — which I meant to say in the Tulsa show notes that the band avoided that night by going straight into Having Been Is No Way To Be — and joked that “every night we play that one and there’s just a little gap (of silence) that leaves me shitting my pants because no one’s clapping.”
• Speaking of clapping, I noticed that there was more encouragement by Jeff and some of his bandmates for the audience to clap along at points, such as as the start of Flowering and midway through Diamond Light Pt. 1. I guess there are obvious clapalongs during a few Wilco songs as well (The Late Greats, Spiders (Kidsmoke)), but  I just always think of how Jeff sort of shakes his head when people start clapping along during some of his solo shows, and has even talked about how he can find clapping distracting, so I found the encouragement of it here kind of amusing.
• Twilight Override, which has been the first song of the encore for every show since the tour started in earnest on 8 October, got cut from the setlist tonight. I’m not 100 percent sure, but I think it was on the printed setlist; it just didn’t get played for some reason. Unless I missed another instance, this was the first time on the tour that the title track hasn’t been played. Overall, this show was a little shorter than most have been on this run, clocking in at 1 hour, 51 minutes.
• On World Away, which I also mentioned in the Tulsa show notes, the band once again changed up the arrangement a little bit, which I guess they have been doing on this run. But I finally kind of took notice of the whole thing tonight, in particular the rest of the band taking the vocals on the second and third verses while Jeff does his shredding on electric guitar. And there is also that instrumental almost-coda to the song the way they’re playing it now, which I also appreciated more tonight.
• When he introduces all of the band members, Jeff usually says something to the effect of “everyone up here makes records outside of this project,” and the last couple of shows I’ve seen, Jeff has even noted that the guy who drives the truck with all of their gear has a record out. We need to get the details on that! “The point is to encourage you all to make records,” Jeff said in part.

[jhuml1]

I can confirm that Twilight Override was on the printed setlist.

[Albert Tatlock]

Feel free

To greet each report with a 'Ta' without ever being complacent

Since a tea break without one leaves me feeling Pretty Vacant (and you don't care . . .)

Feel free

 

On a personal note, at the time I thought that Sid Vicious marked a downturn in punk into moronic behaviour from which it never recovered, and it became more about mohawks than music. As teenagers we were just the typical drab scruffy kids you see in most audience video shots from that time, not fashionistas. Buzzcocks/Stranglers/Undertones/The Jam/Specials) were more my cultural compadres. There was only 1 kid in our school who put a safety pin through his lip, and one other who has some bum flaps. 

[Albert Tatlock]

Found this.

 

 

 

Disappointed not to see any gobbing. Kids these days . . .

[Ghost Of Bob Cumming]

It's not just that Sid Vicious was in some way attacked at the Longhorn but that he responded by whacking the attacker with his bass. At least that's the way I remember it from either the Great Rock N Roll Swindle or The Filth & Fury films.

 

I've always remembered that happened at the Longhorn. Think the name just stuck in my mind for some reason. Didn't know they'd played Cains until you mentioned it bbop (though it makes sense given the route the Pistols followed on that tour).

 

Just been listening to a podcast that mentioned how long the cult of Vicious, that Mr Tatlock nods toward, dragged on in the UK. Probably long dead in London, but in the provincial backwater town I grew up in, it was still going strong(ish) in 1982. 

[Albert Tatlock]

6 hours ago, Ghost Of Bob Cumming said:

Probably long dead in London

I wasn’t there then, but it was probably all face paint and dandy highwaymen by then. The attached sums up what was going down in Cardiff at the time. That makes it sound like quite a big venue but by today’s health and safety standards it would probably be ticketed for about 800.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/p0m4hf43
Were you listening to this? I heard it advertised. Any good?

[Ghost Of Bob Cumming]

No, it wasn't that one, Mr Tatlock, but thanks for the reminder. Heard ads for this and I will give it a listen.

 

My podcast was Mark Ellen/David Hepworth's long(est)-running Word In Your Ear, where they were talking to someone who's a written a book about rock music's flirtation with Nazi imagery, which touched on the Pistols naturally. The bit about the whole cult of Sid and how long it dragged on (and on, if you lived in the remote East Midlands) was an aside.

[Ghost Of Bob Cumming]

2 hours ago, Albert Tatlock said:

it was probably all face paint and dandy highwaymen by then

 

 

I once played an impromptu game of cricket on our local playing field with a white stripe across my nose, as a 12 year old (and I reckon this was long before actual cricketers started smearing suncream across their noses)

[Albert Tatlock]

I was thinking a while ago about the punk + Nazis thing. Suppose punk would have been ‘cancelled’ now. Makes you think what the next youth rebellion will be though, if they can be bothered to look up from their mobiles . . .

 

On the trend setting claim front, I still attest that I started the sports rap look by sitting for an afternoon in 1984 in a pretty run down (as was all of NYC then) Washington Square wearing my track suit bottoms watching body popping (or whatever it was called then) after finishing my PGCE in maths and PE (hence the tracky bottoms) at St Luke’s, then visiting the USA for the first time. No one else similarly attired but obviously all taking note.