I LEFT YOU BEHIND, IT'S BEEN A LONG TIME, AND I'M NOT OVER YOU: Like Let it Be, I Am Trying to Break Your Heart started as a documentary about the making of an album and ended up as a movie about a band more or less breaking up. In it, there's an argument between Wilco's Jeff Tweedy and Jay Bennett over some small thing that becomes a big thing. It's tremendously uncomfortable, especially since, rather than exploding and wasting a lot of energy, the argument seems to cut efficiently deeper and deeper into both men's tissues, doing irreparable damage. Bennett comes off needy, passive-aggressive, and irritating; Tweedy seems like a cruel and dismissive tyrant; it's clear that the two have reached the point where they cannot work with each other, but only one knows that. Shortly after the movie, Bennett put out an album, The Palace at 4 a.m., that included another version of his "My Darling" (he pointedly won't call it a cover, since he wrote it; he calls Wilco's version a cover) and two other songs based on his parts of Bennett-Tweedy collaborations, with the Tweedy parts stripped away. While there's certainly nothing wrong with an artist deciding to release (or re-release) his own material, it certainly didn't dispel the image of Bennett as the jilted lover pointlessly stating his case to mutual friends, the Aniston to Tweedy's Pitt.
Sadly, four years later, Bennett and Tweedy are at it again, with Bennett suing for royalties for the documentary itself (and possibly for some of the albums). And it gets sadder, too, since although the impression will be one of a guy who just can't let it go (Aniston again), the fact is that Bennett needs money. He needs a hip replacement but has no health insurance and can't afford it. I doubt that Wilco made a ton of money off an indie documentary, and I have no idea whether Bennett got his fair share if it did, but I'm not going out of my way to judge a guy desperate to fund an operation. And I think it's just too bad that it came to this -- I wonder if it couldn't have been possible for both sides to just bury the hatchet with a benefit concert for Bennett or something.
Hat tip: Adam and Adlai.
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