A couple of birthdays ago, Jeff Tweedy got what might seem like a strange present from his wife, Sue--a guitar lesson from Richard Lloyd, of punk-jam legends Television. But the Wilco leader was obviously an enthusiastic student: Five shows into the debut tour of Wilco's new lineup, he stood strafing a crowd with the kind of extended, malfunctioning-machine-gun blasts that Lloyd trademarked in the late '70s--half lead, half rhythm, all frayed nerve endings. That's the story of Wilco's jammy new A Ghost Is Born, on which the band mutates into Phish with a much cooler record collection.

Tweedy is wisely touring with extra firepower: indie-rock workhorse Pat Sansone (guitars and keyboards) and Nels Cline, a genre-agnostic guitar virtuoso who made a screaming John Coltrane covers album a few years ago. On this tiny, college-town barroom stage, sounding way phatter than they did following the release of 2002's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (when the downsizing of guitarist Jay Bennett had left a hole in their sound), Wilco seemed capable of nearly anything.

Nearly. "A Shot in the Arm" saw Cline using his bottleneck slide like a caveman digging for grubs, and "Poor Places" sparked a Sonic Youth-like feedback display. Just one month after his rehab stint, Tweedy is becoming a semi-generous frontman. On "Hummingbird," he unstrapped his guitar and worked the crowd from the lip of the stage; in jacket and tie, he looked like Julian Casablancas with a few more years under his white belt. Too bad the really hot-shit guitar songs from Ghost--"At Least That's What You Said" and the 11-minute "Spiders (Kidsmoke)"--never bloomed into the telekinetic freak-outs one hoped for. Sure, this is a new lineup, still finding its footing, but it was obvious that Cline (a more skilled player than Tweedy) was on a short leash, offering flickers of mind-blowing leads while his boss waxed on. It all peaked with the aphoristic anthem "War on War"; if the song's signature lines, "You have to learn how to die / If you wanna wanna be alive," are a metaphor for ceding control, maybe Tweedy is still learning.