Casino Queen

The Casino Queen was a real riverboat casino, opened in East St. Louis in June 1993, across the Mississippi from St. Louis and about a year before the session. Tweedy said he once took his father there, that his father told him it was something he could write a song about, and that he more or less made him do it. The band cut it at Easley McCain in Memphis in the summer of 1994, with Max Johnston on fiddle and the band, Henneman and Daniel Corrigan supplying handclaps, crowd noise and clinking glasses.

Medialoper heard a joyful tale of dissolution on a riverboat, driven by big Stonesy guitar from Henneman, and Pitchfork wrote that Henneman plays as if he is holding on for dear life. It was never a commercial single, but Reprise sent radio a promotional CD that paired the album version with a live take from the Fox Theatre in Boulder, Colorado, recorded on 23 May 1995.

Live

Wilco played it at their first show, at Cicero's on 17 November 1994, and kept it close for decades: setlist.fm logs 377 Wilco performances, most often in 1995, 1997 and 1999, the latest in August 2025. Old School Freight Train recorded a bluegrass version for a 2004 tribute album. The upload in the hypersongs web is an official live video, not the studio recording from A.M.