Wilco

“It was the most terrifying and beautiful thing I’ve done in my life,” Jeff Tweedy says.

Two months ago, the Wilco frontman rushed to a Chicago emergency room in the midst of a panic attack. He’d been struggling to wean himself off painkillers prescribed for recurring migraines, and the pressure surrounding the impending release of A Ghost is Born became too great. Panic attacks and cycles of migraines-painkillers-detox were nothing new. But he had resisted treatment, not wanting to become a cliché—the rock star with an addiction. This time, however, the doctors made a new connection: His headaches and prescription drug abuse were likely tied to his severe panic disorder.

They recommended a facility that treats both chemical dependency and mental illness, and Tweedy checked in. His decision threw the Wilco world into turmoil. After a period of limbo for the band, its management and fans, Nonesuch Records pushed Ghost’s release back two weeks and Wilco kicked-off its would-be late-April tour in early June. Now, three days prior to the band’s June 6 show at the Pittsburgh Arts Festival, Tweedy sips a Diet Coca-Cola at a folding table in Wilco’s northwest Chicago loft. For any Wilco aficionado, the first visit can be overwhelming. Wilco HQ—the hallowed space where the band members lay down demos and deconstruct their songs, where they noodle on the couch as they develop new techniques, where they spend hours experimenting with raw sounds and noise—feedback, filters, loops—and where they shower and crash on futons when the creative process keeps them from home. All this in a 4,400-square-foot room that feels much bigger than it looks in the documentary, I Am Trying to Break Your Heart.

As the entourage prepares for the road, the loft bustles. Techs fiddle with instruments; roadies pack equipment; bassist John Stirratt sits on the couch reading a book; others attend to business on cell phones. Meanwhile, Tweedy quietly recalls those three-plus weeks in rehab.

“I got the best care that I’ve ever gotten,” he says, pointing out the staff’s compassion and years of experience. “You could look at them and really trust that they’ve seen people like me before, and they’re not lying to me. Everything they would say was gonna happen, would happen—if I worked for it, got through stuff. And they weren’t really worried that I wasn’t gonna get through it. You know, you’re not dying. You’re not going to be insane for the rest of your life.”

Looking back, Tweedy can see how his severe headaches were indeed symptoms of long-standing psychological problems. “I realized that I’ve dealt with depression longer than I really even knew,” he says. “And the addiction was fed by it. You can see the points in time where I started feeling a little weird before I started having headaches, or I started needing something else to function. And that’s what I was doing, self-medicating to stay normal but just doing it in a really stupid way.”

His fellow patients proved as helpful as the staff, if not more so. An addict would arrive so debilitated he looked like a critical care refugee. “A week later, you’re having a blast talking to this person and realizing how much they’ve been through, how resilient people are, and—I don’t know—it’s just amazing.”

Treatment came not at a famous, celebrity-chic hospital, but at a facility of predominantly inner-city men, which proved important. “I was the only white guy for about two weeks, which is pretty cool,” he says with a smile. “And once you open up in there, you realize how much compassion everybody has and how essentially alike we all are—and not just those addicts or people that suffer from depression or mental illness.”

However, opening up wasn’t an immediate process. “I have really bad headaches,” he says in his best AA-confessional voice and laughs. “You know, there are people in there that have been dealt such a diabolical hand and been through things that I could never imagine in a million years surviving. I was ashamed to open my mouth. And I had to get over that.” When he did, he found those down-and-outers the most therapeutic. “They’re the ones that would be the most vocal and most insightful and helpful and the least judging.”