Dash 7 (revisited)

+ Chit-Chat Check-In #102: Hale-Bopp!

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, “Dash 7” from the first Wilco record.

This song gets requested all the time, but it’s no fun to play live because I sang it too low on the record.¹ If I had it to do over again, I would sing it an octave higher. Which I didn’t even do here, but I sang it a little bit better, maybe, than the original record. Of course it doesn’t have Lloyd Maines’ beautiful pedal steel.

Anyway, there’s a type of plane called a Dash 7. And when Uncle Tupelo would tour in Scandinavia way back in the day, we couldn’t get to some of those shows without taking those small planes. It was the first time I’d ever been on a prop plane. And it was 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 have a vague memory of being in a Dash 7 or some similar plane and seeing, at night, a comet. I think it was Hale-Bopp? 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.

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.

Carry on. OxO—Jeffy

[Engineer’s note: Yes, it looks like Jeff is mixing up his chocolate Uncle Tupelo memories with his peanut butter Wilco recollections. Hale-Bopp was visible for 18 months in ’96-’97, and Wilco was formed in 1994.]

All hail Hale-Bopp! Photo credit: Michel Viard, Getty Images.

This Week in Wilco, Etc.

2018 / November 12: Jeff appears on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (Season 4, Episode 44) and plays “Let’s Go Rain” along with the rest of the live Tweedy band and an ark of animals behind them.

2017 / November 13: Jeff is interviewed on the podcast The Hilarious World of Depression.

1990 / November 17: Uncle Tupelo plays their last headlining show at Cicero’s Basement Bar in St. Louis, MO.

Dash 7 (revisited)