The Man Who Loved Music

If you could peer behind his pitch black Ray-Bans, you might see Scott McCaughey's eyes light up. The leader and one constant of the revolving-door collective known as the Minus 5not to mention linchpin of the Young Fresh Fellows, catalyst for Tuatara, and sideman to R.E.M.McCaughey is well-known for his unbridled excitement when it comes to all matters musical. An unapologetic rock geek, he's the sort of fellow who can plumb the depths of pop arcana and come up wanting more.

So when he's handed a copy of Would You Believe, a hard-to-find record by little-known late-'60s Britpop auteur Billy Nicholls, his excitement is hardly surprising.

Back in 1968, Nichollsmuch like McCaughey was a well-regarded if under-the-radar figure. Signed to Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham's Immediate Records label, for his one stab at rock immortality, Nicholls joined forces in the studio with modfathers the Small Facesthen coming off their masterpiece, Ogden's Gone Nut Flake, and at the height of their powers. Together with them and a handful of other like-minded compatriots, Nicholls fashioned what some consider the era's great "lost" album, a British equivalent to the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds.

As McCaughey continues looking over the disc, it's not much of a stretch to find a certain cosmic symmetry, a near-perfect parallel between the Nicholls/Small Faces team-up and his own recent collaboration with Chicago "it" band Wilco. The result of that union, the just-released Down With Wilco, may not have achieved cult classic status just yet, but one pass though its 13 songsa quirky collection of deft, melodic laments and snappily written candy flossmakes you believe it might be well be on its way.

And if you look again, closely, the gleam in McCaughey's eyes probably has less to do with the CD in his hands than the thought that somedayperhaps 35 years from nowmusic fans might be passing one of his records between themselves with the same sort of glee.

The idea for a Scott McCaughey/Wilco pairing had been incubating since 1999. "[Wilco frontman] Jeff [Tweedy] and I banged a few songs together when they were on tour opening some shows with R.E.M," says McCaughey. "Then I played a gig in [Chicago], with them backing me as the Minus 5that got us really going, too. But it was so hard to get a chance to [make an album] because of their schedule. Then, all of a sudden, when the release of their last record got delayed, they had some time, so we just rushed to do it."

With Wilco fresh off recording their own meisterwork, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, the group joined McCaughey at Chicago's SOMA studios for two sets of rapid-fire sessions in the fall of 2001.

McCaughey brought a wide mix of material to the studiosome songs had been written just weeks before, while others included bits and pieces that dated back decades ("There's a chorus in one," notes McCaughey, "that I've had kicking around since 1978").

Historically, McCaughey's m鴩er has been decidedly tongue-in-cheek, and while Down With Wilco does revel in its fair share of blithe moments, there's an undeniably elegiac quality to the bulk of the record. Certainly, it's hard to recall anything as mournful as the album's valedictory, "Dear Employer," in his catalog. It's a conscious shift that McCaughey credits Tweedy for helping bring about.

"Jeff definitely seemed to have a vision for what kind of a record it should be. He could feel which songs would hold together best. And I played him a lot of stuffprobably 25 different things. And most of the things we left off or didn't do were the more rocking songs." (Much of that uptempo material appears on the limited edition Minus 5 disc, In Rock, while a handful of others may turn up on an M5/Wilco EP later this year.)

As the two sides settled into the confines of SOMA, a strange alchemy began to take place, a charmed collision of McCaughey's grinning left-field compositions and Wilco's audacious arrangements. The groupTweedy, drummer Glen Kotchke, and multi-instrumentalists John Stirrat and Leroy Bachset to work on the songs, mutating tempos, switching styles, shifting and changing things until the best approach finally revealed itself.

"They're no strangers to trying things a number of different ways," observes McCaughey, and the band proves it convincingly, taking a song like the "The Old Plantation"which began as simple two-chord dirgeand unexpectedly turning it into a soulful Al Green pastiche. "Unfortunately, we didn't get Al Green to sing it," jokes McCaughey, "but it came out pretty cool, regardless."

Musically, much of the album draws from Wilco's recent playbook. "Where Will You Go" finds the group mining Steely Dan territorythe drawling, jazzy riff and insistent marimba hook unfolding like an outtake from Aja. Elsewhere, the moody, dissonant swirl of opener "The Days of Wine and Booze" and the minimalist bass 'n' drum exercise "Life Left Him Here" are set firmly in the avant-pop direction the band has been forging of late.

Perhaps the group's influence can be felt most in McCaughey's singing, as Tweedy encouraged him to keep as many rough and first-take vocals as possible. "He didn't want me to redo them, or make them too perfect . . . not that my vocals could ever be perfect, by any means," laughs McCaughey. While he's sometimes been derided for his reedy midrange, there is a casual, almost offhand warmth to McCaughey's voice herebest characterized as Apples in Stereo's Robert Schneider doing a George Harrison impression.