This persistent ringing in my left ear is making it hard for me to concentrate, but I'll try to explain why these Wilco shows were so incredible.

Y'know, I had to work for these shows. Approximately 500 miles of unforgiving Chicago express[sic]way traffic (with gas at $2.30/gallon) just about sums it up. But boy was it ever worth it.

I continue to feel great love for Otto's. It's just so tiny and totally relaxed. And there's free parking. leahrosmerta and I cruised into town around 7 and got into line. We weren't particularly near the front of the line, but we still got an excellent spot—right in the front row, on the extreme stage right corner. The stage at Otto's is, I think, less than fifteen feet wide, so the extreme right isn't very remote from the center of the stage (or extreme left for that matter): we had a good view of everything, and particularly Nels (guitarist)'s large, packed pedalboard. He also had two lap steels, a Kaoss pad and several metal implements (and I think he used every last one of them during the show).

The opener was this odd duo called the Aluminum Group. I'm not even going to try to describe their act, partly because the full description of the sight of a pair of gay brothers touching each other in ways that were somewhat not fraternally appropriate is, I feel, beyond my powers. Which isn't to say I didn't enjoy what they did. They did sing well, but their backing music was a bit overpowering. They played their accompaniment via an iPod and one of the brothers (the bald one) explained, "I wanted to bring a guitar but apparently Jeff Tweedy bought all of them." (See, that was a joke.) I visited the bathroom during their last song. It was starting to smell a little vomity back there and I resolved not to return that evening.

Wilco came out and they were off. And man, they were so good. Oh, here's a scan of the setlist (they added I'm the Man Who Loves You and left off Spiders). As for Nels—my vocabulary is inadequate to describe what he was doing on his guitar. He and Jeff indulged in a lot of twin-guitar dueling which kind of made me want to scream because I couldn't express my joy any other way. Jeff played a few solos too and whenever he did he looked like he was thinking really, really hard about it. It was rather cute. Meanwhile Nels was taking screwdrivers and springs and little whirly things and whacking his guitar with them. He has huge hands, by the way, and not only are his fingers long, but his nails—not the part of the nail that grows out past the fingertip, but the part, you know, that's actually on your finger (I don't know what the name of that part is)—they're really long too, and very oval.

The crowd was very, very happy. The guy next to me was sort of lurch-dancing and repeatedly elbowing me in the upper arm as he lurched in my direction, but he was having such a good time I couldn't bring myself to scold him. At one point, rather early in the show, somebody called out "You guys sound great!" and John and Jeff both smiled, and Jeff said "thank you," which I thought was sweet. Then there was some jerk in the back who kept yelling idiotic things and annoying people. When he shouted, "I love Jay Bennett!" there was a murmur of deep disapproval from the crowd. Jeff got this look of disbelief on his face and said, "That's your shit" and the audience was very pleased at this witty rejoinder.

Jesus, etc. was the song after Hell Is Chrome and in between Jeff said, "Having given the devil his due, here's a song about Jesus...as an exclamation." And when they did One by One, I noticed that, during the part of the song where he sings but stops playing guitar, he still kept moving his left hand on the fretboard to finger the chords even though he wasn't actually playing them. (The next day I watched for him to do it again but he seemed to get suddenly self-conscious about it and instead put his hand into his jeans pocket à la Art Garfunkel.)

I was really digging Nels's lap steel playing. When the band came out for the second encore there was relative quiet as they got back into their places and I yelled, "We want more steel—"

Just at that moment he looked right at me (he was less than two feet away from me) and I felt embarrassed.

"—please," I finished lamely. And he, very calmly, said, "Okay." At which point I giggled like a schoolgirl. It was easy for him to be gracious since he already knew he'd be playing lap steel on the last number, but I thought he was very nice about it. And the song was absolutely lovely.

Next day we left Chicago a little earlier, but there was an accident on the Eisenhower so we got to DeKalb at about the same time as we had the previous day. We actually got a better spot in line, but still ended up in pretty much the same spot in the front row, with many of the same people around us. It was very neighborly up there.

Time to haul out the superlatives. I felt this second show was definitely better than the first. In fact, this was one of the best musical performances I've ever seen, by any band.

That sweeping statement out of the way, I'll go on to the unimportant details. First off, Jeff was in a really good mood, and he was talking a lot. And again, the crowd was very, very happy. There's this neon sign up on the wall that says "BOOGIE" (Otto's is a bar/nightclub on nights when there's not a show), which was not illuminated but which I very much wanted to see lit up. Apparently I wasn't the only one with that sentiment because somebody shouted out a request for the boogie light. Jeff looked confused, and then when he understood, he said, firmly, "The boogie light will not be turned on." And then he said, "The Iron Sausage will not be performing in the round," which I didn't understand at all but found extremely amusing. Jeff also found it amusing—at any rate, he repeated it at least twice more.

Before they did Jesus, etc., Jeff told us the title of the song (as he had the previous night), and then he said, "Why is that the one song that I always introduce? I don't even talk that much, and every show I'm like 'this is Jesus, etc.'—" and then he made this odd, very dorky noise and we all laughed. To introduce Heavy Metal Drummer he said, "You might recognize this song from the motion picture..."

He trailed off and Pat (auxiliary keyboardist) leaned into his microphone and suggested, "Last Tango in Paris?"

"No," said Jeff, "The Last Temptation of..."

He trailed off again and Pat once again spoke up: "Paris?" (That Pat is a cutie, by the way.)

When Nels picked up his lap steel for the first time during the show he looked at us (I mean specifically at me and leahrosmerta) expectantly and we cheered wildly. But I wasn't the only Nels partisan in the audience. Somebody started asking him to turn it up and Jeff was like, "I'm not gonna ask him to turn it up." When protests continued he humored us by saying, "Oh, you're gonna get a healthy dose of Nels later." We all cheered and then Jeff said triumphantly, "Later in this song!" Oh, snap! Yeah, I found that absolutely hilarious.

I'm not sure the Vic show next month will be able to top this one, but I'm looking forward to finding out if it can.

I have a few, not very good photos (of the 5/19 show only), and also the scan of Wednesday's setlist. A BitTorrent of the Wednesday show is already up on Sharing the Groove and the Thursday show should follow shortly, if you'd like to take a listen and dispute anything I've said here.