Roger Wilco

It's weird that your car always breaks down on the day of an event. It never happens the day before. It's always the day of. Matt called my house at 8 in the morning to let me know the bad news. He was going to try to take it in to Sears so we could still go, but at this point, my parents didn't want me to go at all. We were 16, we were going on a bit of a road trip (an hour and a half drive), we were going to the This Ain't No Picnic Festival unsupervised. To say my parents were a bit apprehensive about this, would be a gross understatement.

Luckily, Matt's car got fixed up and we headed out to Oak Canyon Ranch, whose closest major city is Irvine, ironically enough. This would be our first festival experience, and why it was a far cry from a Lalapalooza (Coachella didn't exist yet), it was still an exciting and, at the time, life defining moment. Unfortunately, it was the day Sonic Youth had a bunch of their gear stolen, but we didn't find that out until much later. We were excited to be seeing a bunch of bands that we usually couldn't see because they usually had to play 21 and up venues in San Diego, so this would be our only chance to catch the likes of Superchunk, Sleater Kinney, and The Boredoms for a few years.

It was a torrid day. The only way we could survive was repeatedly taking the Pepsi vs Coke challenge over and over again. We perched out front of the stage and caught Mike Watt's opening set. As hot as we were, no one could've been suffering under the hot California sun more than San Pedro's pride and joy, Mike Watt. He was decked out in his signature flannel long sleeve shirt and overalls, rocking his thunderstick (bass). I'd been a casual admirer of Watt, and felt a need to catch his set because the festival was named after a song of his (well, The Minutmen). He was a punk rock icon, and plus his first solo album had all the coolest rock stars make cameos on it (Eddy Vedder, Dave Grohl, Thurston Moore, Mike D, just to name a few). His set changed my life forever. For one, I became a Mike Watt fan for life that day (and I would interview him the following year at the festival), and two, I was introduced to the guitar stylings of Nels Cline.

They mostly played songs from Watt's second album, Contemplating the Engine Room, an album that Watt recorded as a 3 piece band. It was just Watt on bass, a drummer, and Nels Cline on guitar. Through the set, Nels did some serious guitar shredding, and for good measure, used a Doritos bag and a toy ray gun to showcase his guitar playing skills. His guitar playing, while intricate and impressive never seemed to get in the way of the actual songs, and it immediately connected with me. This man was, for a lack of a better phrase, my guitar hero.

I was able to accidentally run into Nels a few months later at a show down in San Diego. I had booked an interview with Low, and he was opening up for them in his band Scarnella. I was able to ask him some guitar questions, like how to use the ray gun with a guitar, and was just impressed in general with how nice of a guy he was.

It made me kind of sad to see that he was such a nice and talented guy, well respected by more successful artists, but not necessarily making it big. I'm not saying that he needed to make Van Halen money or be hugely popular, but it seemed like he was getting the short end of the stick somehow. So I was absolutely thrilled when I found out he joined Wilco a few years later. He joined the band after the band had broken through, maybe not to the mainstream, but to a place where bright days were definitely ahead. Part of me was afraid that the marriage between Nels and the band would be brief, but when I saw them live, I was happy to see him having a great time, incorporating his sound into the already robust and eclectic Wilco sound.

I've always loved Wilco, but I have extra incentive to see them everytime they're in town to see Mr. Cline, finally appreciated on a larger scale. Every time I see him out there, I don't just see a rock star, or a sell out (oh, puleaze), I see the guy with the ray gun and the doritos bag, teaching me how to play the guitar.