Chit-Chat Check-In #102 Transcript

Hello, this is your Captain speaking. Which is a funny thing to say considering the song I’m going to share today, which is “Dash 7” from the first Wilco record. Which is a song that gets requested all the time, and is no fun to play live because I sang it way too low on the record. And if I had it to do over again, I would sing it an octave higher. And I can do that, but I didn’t do that here, I just sang it a little bit … better, maybe … than the original record. Of course it doesn’t have Lloyd Maines’ beautiful pedal steel. 

But the version I’m going to share here—in my opinion, I have grown into the range of this voice, the key that this song is in. I can sing it a little stronger than I did back then. But live—no. They don’t make microphones that can pick up my voice at that soft volume. Maybe nature microphones? They’d have to use a microphone that they might use on the wings of a mosquito or something. Capture the proboscis of a small insect penetrating a berry, or something. I don’t know. They have microphones for special things like that. And that’s what I would probably have to use to accurately convey the original version of “Dash 7” live.

Anyway, the song is … there is a type of plane, some of you probably know, called a Dash 7. I think there’s a whole series of Dash planes made by a plane manufacturer named Fokker, I think. But when we would tour in Scandinavia way back in the day—in Uncle Tupelo days—we would play a lot of shows in Norway. And you couldn’t get to them without taking small planes. That was the first time I think I’d ever been on a prop plane. They’re pretty exciting, but also pretty terrifying. During the day it would be beautiful to just go over the fjords of Norway and get to see so much beautiful landscape.

Then, I don’t know if this is possible, but I do have a vague memory of being in a Dash 7 or a small plane, or similar, and seeing, at night, from the plane, a comet. I think it was Hale-Bopp? But in my memory, it looked like we were just flying alongside a comet that was following us. But I don’t know … my memory of those days can get kind of blurry.

But for a long time, I’ve held on to that memory as something that really happened. I also have a memory of looking through the vent on the top of the bus that we had at Hale-Bopp, or a comet. I’m sure that somebody can look up the time period to see if that’s even possible. But, anyway, I’m not going to do that. Because I’m allergic to the internet these days.

All right. Carry on.