Tickets to Adams Center Show Go on Sale March 18

Wilco to Play Missoula May 5

By Grant Rhodes, 3-14-08

Wilco, the band Rolling Stone once referred to as “one of America’s most consistently interesting bands,” will be playing in Missoula this spring, UM Productions has announced.

The Chicago-based band will play at the Adams Center on the University of Montana campus on May 5. It will be Wilco’s third appearance in the Garden City.

Tickets for students and faculty of the University go on sale Tuesday, March 18 at 10 a.m. in the Adams Center and at The Source. Tickets will cost $24 plus fees with a valid Griz Card.  Tickets will available to the general public beginning Friday, March 21 at 8:30 a.m. and will be sold at all GrizTix locations.

A supporting act has not yet been announced.

Wilco played the Adams Center five years ago when the band opened for R.E.M., but this will be the first time headlining the venue. The band first played in Missoula at the University Center Ballroom in 2001.

Wilco, which is currently touring in Australia, released their sixth studio album, Sky Blue Sky, last May. It was received with generally positive reviews, and prompted Entertainment Weekly to call it the “best Eagles album the Eagles never made.” Beyond studio work, Wilco has one live album and has recorded collaborations with The Minus 5 and English musician Billy Bragg. The Missoula show is expected to be among various other sites for the next leg of their U.S. tour.

Wilco, led by founder and lead-singer Jeff Tweedy, may best be known for their breakthrough album in 2002 entitled, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot -- an album the band’s record company, Reprise Records, found too strange and not radio-friendly enough. So after negotiating a buy-out from Reprise, Tweedy and the band began streaming it for free on the Internet before signing with another major label.

The move was seen as somewhat of a mini-revolution, a metaphor for every artist to resist the inevitable financial temptations to conform to corporate appeal.

Following Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, in 2004 the band released A Ghost is Born, which won two Grammy awards, including Best Alternative Music Album.

Despite the awards, Wilco has remained perpetually teetering on the cusp of mainstream exposure. They have been called the “American Radiohead,” and are rabidly supported by an ever-growing zealous fan base, one that Kelefa Sanneh described in the New York Times a few years ago as “an army of earnest listeners, inordinately proud of their own middlebrow tastes.”

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