Concert review: Wilco's sunny vibe counters Duluth's chill

Tickets for Wilco's concert Tuesday night at Duluth's Bayfront Festival Park reiterated the venue's rain-or-shine policy, but they didn't say anything about a blast of Canadian-cool air and frigid mist.

Already postponed from mid-August when guitarist Nels Cline suffered a bout of chickenpox, the show was nearly derailed once again when Mother Nature took Labor Day's end-of-summer tag a bit too firmly. Twin Cities fans who left near-90-degree weather that afternoon were especially caught off guard by Duluth's mid-50s slush.

Thank goodness Wilco is a band of Chicagoans undaunted by a little Great Lakes chill. Tuesday's show also demonstrated how it's a band that seems to thrive on uncontrollable challenges, a defining factor in its evolution. This truly was a show that the 3,000 or so attendees probably will never forget.

The two-hour performance's centerpiece -- both literally and figuratively -- was the lengthy, orchestrated ditty "Impossible Germany," from Wilco's latest album "Sky Blue Sky." It started out light and lilting (like the mist) and built to a whirring rush (like the wind), and the climax came with a truly gorgeous round of guitar caressing by the plainly fully recuperated Cline.

"OK, you can play that solo," frontman Jeff Tweedy marveled to Cline afterward, "but can you play that solo with the wind and rain in your face?"

After struggling with addictions and illness, Tweedy seems to be in a permanently cheery mood nowadays. Hence the opening line of the concert (which genuinely warmed the crowd): "Maybe the sun will shine today/ The clouds will blow away."

With the happy onstage vibe and the healthy doses of guitar noodling -- not to mention the scenic outdoor setting -- the show in many ways felt like a Deadhead revival for hipsters who thought they were too cool for such hippy-dippy pleasures. Songs like "You Are My Face,"Walken" and especially the finale "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" were bona fide jams, with the band's utility player, Pat Sansone, playing ample third-guitar parts.

Tweedy & Co. balanced the six-string merry-go-rounds by see-sawing between some of the artier, bleaker tunes from their two previous albums, including "Jesus Etc.,"Pot Kettle Black" and "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart." But the really fulfilling changeup came with the first encore, a six-song run of old-school Wilco, including "Misunderstood,"I Got You (At the End of the Century),"Hesitating Beauty" and "I'm Always in Love."

The encore also found Duluth-reared openers Low -- whom Tweedy introduced as "one of the best bands in the world" -- joining in for a hearty version of "California Stars," complemented by another local giant: an ore carrier that floated past, behind the stage. Despite the wholly un-Californian weather, rock shows don't get much warmer than this.

Chris Riemenschneider • 612-673-4658

Chris Riemenschneider • chrisr@startribune.com