Wilco released Kicking Television: Live in Chicago on November 15, 2005. Their first live album collected 23 performances across two CDs, recorded during four nights at Chicago’s Vic Theatre from May 4 through May 7. It caught a newly expanded band working through songs that had been recorded by earlier configurations of Wilco.
Guitarist Nels Cline and multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone made their Wilco album debuts on the set. They joined Jeff Tweedy, bassist John Stirratt, drummer Glenn Kotche and keyboardist Mikael Jorgensen. The credits show how much ground the six musicians could cover: alongside Tweedy’s guitar and vocals, Cline played guitar and lap steel, while Sansone moved between guitars, keyboards and backing vocals.
For Kotche, the way that group played together was the reason to make a live record. In a 2007 interview with the Santa Barbara Independent, he explained that Cline and Sansone had helped transform the A Ghost Is Born material during touring. He valued what previous lineups had done, but felt this combination was especially strong. That confidence gave Kicking Television a purpose beyond collecting familiar titles: the band wanted to capture what these particular musicians were doing with them.
The selection concentrated on Wilco’s two preceding studio albums. Sixteen of the 23 tracks came from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost Is Born, putting songs such as “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” and “Handshake Drugs” into the same concert program. The sequence also reached back to “Misunderstood” from Being There and “Via Chicago” from Summerteeth. It connected several periods of the band’s writing through one performing lineup, with the older “Misunderstood” opening the first disc.
“Spiders (Kidsmoke)” stretched to 11 minutes and 17 seconds, the longest performance on the original release. It arrived near the end of the second disc, immediately before the closing cover, “Comment.” Together with the three-minute title track, those selections show how much variation the two-disc program accommodated.
Tweedy heard a personal difference in the recordings. Asked in a 2007 Pitchfork interview to compare the live versions with A Ghost Is Born, he said, “I think that a lot of those songs are better on Kicking Television.” He associated the studio album with a difficult period of depression and panic; the live record let him hear a happier state of mind and his pleasure in playing with the band.
The experience also fed into Wilco’s next studio album, Sky Blue Sky, released in 2007. Kotche linked its approach directly to how good it had felt to play together onstage. The musicians recorded as a band, with Tweedy singing while they played. He described the group sitting in a circle, working on songs and offering parts and arrangement suggestions without choosing a stylistic direction in advance. The experience captured on the live album had helped establish a way for the six musicians to create new material together.
More of the Chicago recordings followed on April 17, 2010, when Kicking Television: Live in Chicago received a four-LP edition. It added eight bonus tracks, including “Theologians” and “How to Fight Loneliness,” expanding the selection from the same May 2005 shows.
