Wilco cancellation leaves music fans red-eyed and blue

It'd be easy to come into this space and tell you about how Jeff Tweedy broke my heart, because his band Wilco has a very good song called "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart." It'd be easy, because it's true.

But it wasn't just my heart. Tweedy last week also sliced open several of the other weak, fragile hearts here in the newsroom -- yes, journalists have feelings, too -- as well as the grits-filled hearts of more than a thousand music-starved fans in the Lowcountry. Just two weeks ago, we were all blowing the dust off our ironic concert T-shirts and oiling up our lighters in anticipation of an event that's apparently rarer around here than a full lunar eclipse. (My T-shirt, incidentally, was from Peter Gabriel's 1982 American tour. Unless you have a 1981 Phil Collins "Face Value" shirt, don't even try me.)

There was a Wilco concert in the immediate area, and damn if we weren't all going to skip work and go.

Yet here we sit, all

broken-hearted, abandoned by Tweedy and Wilco, who postponed their scheduled show in Charleston last Friday to perform on "Saturday Night Live" the following night.

For a music fan, this is a particularly powerful feeling of rejection: Imagine you're a lonely college freshman (easy for the average Guide reader) and you've been waiting all semester for that girl you dated for a little while in high school to come visit. Finally you make plans and you're about to pick her up at the airport when you get a text message. "sry about our plans. Im going 2 visit Morepopularboy McJerkpants at NYU instead. Maybe nxt yr?" It's like that.

Still, a little background is in order: Wilco, Chicago's alt-country-turned-indie-pop-darlings, booked a show in North Charleston for Feb. 29. And, for the percentage of music fans of South Carolina who don't care much for the insatiable appetite that local venues seem to have for cover bands and jejune Jimmy Buffett wannabes, there was much rejoicing. Plans were made. Workdays were called off. IPods were filled with

obscure live shows.

Now, it should be said that we in the newsroom are big fans of Wilco, though maybe not quite as big as we sound. Here, in this live music desert, where an indie-rock band is about as likely to show up as the Michael Moore/Al-Qaeda Defense Fund speaking tour, we mostly take what we can get. All we hope for is a (surprisingly rare) blip on the music scene in Savannah or somewhat more frequent appearance by a major artist in Chuck Town. Still, this was a big deal.

Then, two weeks' ago, we found out Wilco would not be playing their only show within a four-hour drive after all. They decided to play a place even more starved for live music: New York City, specifically, "Saturday Night Live." And they apparently needed TWO DAYS to practice the TWO SONGS they would play.

And of course, the only show they canceled was Charleston's.

This is the second time Wilco has canceled on me. The first was in 2004 when Jeff Tweedy went back into rehab. Rehab I can deal with. But "Saturday Night Live?" You may remember that show as the thing you watch five minutes of on the Internet Monday morning if Andy Samberg puts on a funny costume or Hillary Clinton uses it as a centerpiece of her campaign. (This will prove unsuccessful for Hill, however, as evidenced by the failed Jimmy Carter door-to-door Land Shark blitz of 1980.)

Super-duper buzz band Vampire Weekend also announced this week they were canceling four shows to appear on "SNL" this Saturday. Oh, and all those shows happened to be in the South. Noticing a pattern?

So the lesson is, concert plans down here are the equivalent of EPCOT to musicians. It's nice if you have the time, but don't kill yourself to get there.

Jeff Tweedy, my heart is broken. What were you thinking when you let go of us?