When Wilco and (part of) R.E.M. Joined Forces to Create a Sad Dad Hidden Gem

Or, When Scott McCaughey Hit a Home Run

Professional baseball features a certain type of player called a “journeyman.” These players have a singular skill that teams value, such as striking out right-handed batters or hitting well against left-handed pitchers. Teams often need that skill for just one season or a play-off run, so these single-skill players usually play for several teams over the course of their career – thus the “journeyman” moniker. Arthur Rhodes was a journeyman known to few baseball fans. But during a 20-year career with nine teams, the left-handed reliever appeared in 29 post-season games with four different teams, including three games during the 2011 World Series for the victorious St. Louis Cardinals. Rhodes is far from a household name, but he was an essential member of every team he played for.  

Rock and roll, like baseball, has its own version of journeymen – accomplished musicians who are essential to the success of their better-known peers. Musicians like Nils Lofgren, who played with Neil Young on After the Gold Rush, then joined Crazy Horse for a time before landing with The E Street Band in 1984. Or organist Billy Preston, who played with Sam Cooke and Ray Charles, joined the Beatles for Let it Be, and went on to record with the Rolling Stones and tour with Eric Clapton. Musician journeymen might have their own bands or release their own songs: Lofgren’s band was Grin; Preston had a mid-70s hit with “Outa-Space.” But it is their work with more famous peers for which these journeymen are primarily known.

A musician journeyman of sorts brought together some of his more famous peers to record an album in 2002 that is a sad dad hidden gem. That journeyman is Scott McCaughey, and the album is Down With Wilco.

McCaughey’s playing days began in Seattle in the early 1980s when he founded the band Young Fresh Fellows. He was a mainstay in the Seattle alternative music scene until a team called R.E.M. picked him up in 1995. McCaughey played with R.E.M. for several years, until the band disbanded in 2011.

The casual R.E.M. fan has likely has never heard of McCaughey and those fans who have probably do not consider McCaughey a “member” of R.E.M. – after all, his last name is not Berry, Buck, Mills or Stipe. But McCaughey appeared on the band’s last six albums and played with them on multiple tours. Just as Billy Preston has on occasion been referred to as a Fifth Beatle, McCaughey surely deserves a similar honorific as a “fifth member” of R.E.M.

I saw McCaughey perform with R.E.M. at a show in Atlanta on August 30, 1999 where the opening band was … Wilco. That summer night in Atlanta was the greatest second greatest day of my life. My wedding day was the greatest of course, without question; I would never say otherwise, ever.

Wilco opened for R.E.M. several times in 1999 and during that tour McCaughey and Jeff Tweedy started working on songs together. That collaboration led to the idea of Wilco joining forces with one of McCaughey’s side projects – The Minus 5 – to record an album.

McCaughey and R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck formed The Minus 5 in 1993, not long after Buck had relocated from Athens, Georgia to Seattle. The band consists of a rotating cast of musicians, with McCaughey and Buck at the core. The Minus 5 has released fourteen albums over its 30-year history. One of those albums – Down With Wilco – makes this sad dad quite happy.

Down With Wilco might not exist were it not for Wilco’s well documented difficulties in getting Yankee Hotel Foxtrot released. By late 2001, Nonesuch Records had agreed to release the greatest album of the 2000s that Reprise Records had rejected. But the release date was not until April 23, 2002. In the fall of 2001, Wilco was on the last leg of a tour to promote the then unreleased Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. During a brief tour interlude in early September 2001 and then again in December after the tour ended (when Wilco was biding their time until the release of YHF), McCaughey, Tweedy, and Wilco members LeRoy Bach, Glenn Kotche and John Stirratt met in Chicago to record the songs that would become Down With Wilco.

After those recording sessions, McCaughey joined Buck and fellow Minus 5 member, and Posies front-man, Ken Stringfellow in Seattle in early 2002 to fine-tune the songs. Overdubs of Buck on 12-string guitar or mandolin and Ken on back-up vocals were added to several tracks. Down With Wilco was released about a year later, on February 25, 2003.

Nearly all the songs on Down With Wilco are first-person narratives that deal with some favorite sad-dad themes — failed ambition, broken relationships, being unsatisfied. But Down With Wilco is not a mope-fest. McCaughey, who wrote most of the songs himself and a few jointly with Tweedy, approaches those themes with unbridled wit.  

Album opener “The Days of Wine & Booze,” a piano ballad that features more sonic flourishes than actual piano, signals where things are headed thematically – the roses have long ago wilted and been tossed out the window, but the liquor cabinet is stocked.

McCaughey’s clever lyricism makes its first real punch on the album’s second song, “Retrieval of You,” about a musician who hasn’t quite made the big time but is close to someone who has:

It’s on the airwaves—you’re coming my way / Sure, I don’t have much to lose

I’m a fumbled record star / They call me DJ mini mart / ’Cause that’s where I work.

The lyrical wit continues on the third track “That’s Not the Way That It’s Done,” about an emotionless sexual exploit, which opens with these lines that could send William Penn rolling in his grave:

I saw you crying in the Quaker choir / They don’t swing so low

There’s no religion like old time religion / It’s a heavy snow

That puts you in the mood for love / And I was in the mood, I was in the mood

These two songs are wrapped in Brian Wilson-inspired melodies punctuated by harmonic backing vocals. The lyrics are biting, the subject matter a bit depressing, but the pop is oh so sweet.

Sad dad angst rears its head a few songs later on “Where Will You Go,” a track that could easily find a home on Wilco’s third album Summerteeth. Featuring Tweedy on marimba, it is one of the best songs on the album, with a catchy melody and superb refrain that confesses the fear that a relationship won’t last:

There’s too much time for us to crack / I want my money back

One thing I guarantee / It’s so hard trying to be a little less like me

Perhaps the strongest sad dad vibe is on “The Old Plantation” – a slow-tempo song (perfect for napping) that uses the decaying edifice of a planation house as a metaphor for a failing relationship. The song channels images from a Faulkner short story through a sound that foreshadows Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky album released a few years later. “The fields are barren but for a bonfire” and “a pile of empties [is] in the mausoleum.” The sky is not a beauty to behold but a burden to unyoke, which the couple never managed to do, as the narrator makes plain with this question/confession: Did you ever really try, to peel away the sky? / Neither did I.

Finally, just to make sure the dear listener did not miss an overriding theme, the album’s penultimate track is titled “I’m Not Bitter.” Sounding like a song that could have been written on the R.E.M. tour bus in 1995, “I’m Not Bitter” features the most explicit Mike Mills-style vocal harmonizing from Stringfellow. And the song has one of the album’s best lines about a relationship that has tanked: I walk around the block to avoid you / And that’s when I’m in a social mood.

Some of the songs on Down With Wilco suffer from having a little too much Wilco. “Life Left Him There” opens with leftover noises from YHF that seem out of place rather than interesting. And the one track that features only Tweedy on vocals – “The Family Gardner” – lacks the lyrical wit of other songs and is wrapped in sonic mumbo-jumbo which is more hinderance than helpful.

Because Down With Wilco was released ten months after Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, reviews at the time tended to frame the album in relation to Wilco’s recent output. While the bells, dongs and scratches of YHF inhabit a few songs, and Summerteeth comparisons are appropriate, it is fundamentally McCaughey’s work that elevates the album. Wilco may have been the more famous players, but McCaughey’s playing is essential to making Down With Wilco a true gem, one that every dad, sad or not, should listen to.

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Another band that McCaughey plays for is The Baseball Project. Formed in 2007 by McCaughey and Steve Wynn of The Dream Syndicate, and inspired by a conversation the two avid baseball fans had on the night R.E.M. was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, The Baseball Project has released four albums since 2009 that feature songs exclusively about America’s pastime. Naturally, Peter Buck has appeared on all four albums. Mike Mills has also recorded and toured with the group. I saw the band in August at a small venue in Washington, D.C. and they put on a great show.

The Baseball Project released an album earlier this year called Grand Salami Time. One of the best songs on the album is a first-person narrative by a baseball player who sings:

I always keep my bags packed / Never get close to anyone

As long as there’s someone who needs me / Down the road I’ll go.

The name of the song is Journeyman. It is worth a listen.

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NOTES:

(1) Several factual details in this piece are drawn from an article by Bob Mehr titled The Man Who Loved Music that appeared in Seattle Weekly in March 2003.

(2) Jeff Tweedy and Scott McCaughey developed a friendship while working together that has lasted through the years. McCaughey recently made a guest appearance on Tweedy’s Substack.