What's a rock star living in Chicago's northwest suburbs do for fun?

How about repairing old cars, hunting for bargains at garage sales and "garbage picking" the neighborhood for discarded but fixable lawn mowers and VCRs?

Those are a few of the leisure-time pursuits of Arlington Heights, Ill., resident Jay Bennett. He scoffs at the "rock star" label, despite his prominent role in Wilco, arguably the most critically acclaimed rock band based in the Midwest today.

The group is set to release an eagerly awaited new CD in September, with a free concert scheduled for July 4 in Chicago's Grant Park. Bennett is also playing solo acoustic shows at clubs in the Chicago area.

Bennett has a rock-star haircut, with long, twisted strands of blondish-brown hair dangling down either side of his face. With his tortoise-shell glasses and a small tuft of beard below his mouth, he has also has something of a beatnik air about him.

But his attire ¾ at least during a recent interview at his home near downtown Arlington Heights ¾ would look right at home on a gas-station mechanic. He answers his front door holding a hammer and wearing threadbare gray pants and a faded blue button-down shirt with grease on the elbows.

As Bennett conducts a tour of his home, he nonchalantly points to a medallion lying on a table. "Here's what you get when you lose the Grammy Awards," he says.

Bennett, who grew up in Rolling Meadows, bought his home about a year ago. It had been a rental property owned by his parents, John, a retired Arlington Heights grade-school principal, and Jan, a former Palatine teacher.

Nearly every corner of the house has some musical instrument, including an upright "pianner" (as Bennett calls it), an organ and several guitars. But these are just the tip of the iceberg for Bennett; he keeps most of his instruments at a loft where Wilco records in Chicago.

"I have literally hundreds of guitars, about 80 keyboards. Too many," Bennett says. "(It's) a very, very small sampling here in the house... They wouldn't fit in both floors of this house."

Bennett then heads for one of his favorite places, the garage where he stores two 1963 Ford Falcons. One is a four-door that he drives regularly; the other is a fire-damaged convertible he's been restoring.

Bennett is excited as he shows off a stereo system he recently set up in his garage after buying it for a mere $16 at a garage sale to raise money for paralyzed high school athlete Rob Komosa.

"I'm telling you, the garage sales and the estate sales and the rummage sales in the suburbs are incredible," Bennett says. "And garbage picking, too... I have no shame about doing it, even if it's on the same block. I garbage-picked this lawn mower. It didn't work at all, and I rebuilt the engine with about $8 worth of parts, and it starts right up. It's unbelievable."

Bennett says he gained his knack for mechanics as a boy, working on cars with his father, and then when he worked in the mid-'90s at an electronics repair shop. He says he hates to pay to get anything fixed.

"I just cringe. Not because of the money, just because I know if I had the time and the tools, I could do it, you know?"

Bennett is also a musical handyman, adept at playing just about any instrument you set in front of him or finding just the right way to record other musicians.

Titanic's voyage

As a student at the University of Illinois at Champaign in the late 1980s, Bennett appeared to be on the verge of making it big with his power-pop group Titanic Love Affair, which played hard-edged, melodic rock somewhat reminiscent of the Replacements.

But after Titanic Love Affair put out a CD on Charisma Records in 1991, the label slashed its roster of artists and dropped the band. Bennett says the other members of "TLA" took this as more of a blow than he did, because for them, "The record contract was almost like the goal as opposed to the starting point."

After a couple of independently released records, Titanic Love Affair seemed to have "fizzled" out, Bennett says.

But in 1995 Bennett was asked to join Wilco, a promising new band that singer-songwriter Jeff Tweedy had formed after the breakup of his previous group, alternative-country-rock pioneers Uncle Tupelo.

Tweedy knew Bennett had experience playing both hard rock and country music. Bennett says Tweedy asked him, "You want to do this tour and see how it goes?"

"Nothing ever got more formal than that, so I guess I'm in the band," Bennett jokes with a shrug, as if some doubt exists whether he's actually in Wilco.

A true band

He joined Wilco just after the recording of the group's first album, "A.M.," and was a full-fledged member by the second release, "Being There."

As the center of most press coverage, Tweedy could have continued on as Wilco's only songwriter, but instead he opened up the band to collaboration.

"He could have really easily said, 'This is my band,'" Bennett says. "That would have really changed the whole vibe of the band, too. I'm not saying people would have quit or run off or whatever, but it would have been different. It would have been like, 'Oh, that's the band I'm the guitar player in.'"

Instead, Wilco is a band with Bennett as one of its integral parts. He frequently writes songs together with Tweedy, though Tweedy almost always handles lead vocals.

To write songs with other musicians, you have to have confidence in the musical ideas that you present, Bennett says. "But at the same time, you can't possess them because they're going to change."

Wilco recorded two albums with Billy Bragg using previously unrecorded lyrics by Woody Guthrie. The folk music legend's daughter, Nora Guthrie, agreed to allow Bragg and Wilco to write songs to go along with some of the 2,000 lyrics her father had written down without any musical notation.

Bennett describes leafing through Guthrie's papers.

"Looking at the lyrics and his little drawings and his handwriting and his little P.S.'s that he wrote at the end of things, like, 'I wrote this on July 22, 1942, sitting at the corner...'" Bennett says. "You definitely felt like you were looking at someone's diary, at something that you shouldn't be allowed to look like. But then once you started writing, you were like, 'I'm writing with this guy. Me and Woody are writing a song together.'"

The two albums based on Guthrie's lyrics, "Mermaid Avenue" (1998) and "Mermaid Avenue Vol. II" (2000) were both nominated for Grammys.

But it was the album Wilco released between those two that won the highest critical praise. "Summerteeth," with colorful arrangements evoking the best classic rock of the late '60s and early '70s, placed ninth in the 1999 national critics poll conducted by The Village Voice.

"We get as much press as a band that sells a couple million records. Literally," says Bennett, adding that Wilco sells a few hundred thousand copies of each album. "We're probably getting more press than bands that sells 10 times as many records, 20 times as many records."

Man of many instruments

The liner notes of Wilco's CDs document the amazing variety of instruments Bennett plays: several varieties of guitar; piano, organ and synthesizer; stringed instruments like the bouzouki, dulcimer, banjo, electric sitar and electric and upright basses; and accordion, melodica, harmonica, bells, drums, saw and the self-invented Delayaphone.

While Tweedy remains the frontman for Wilco, it's obvious Bennett deserves much credit for shaping the band's sound. But he's quick to say that everything about Wilco is a collaborative effort, with the whole group contributing.

Wilco, which also includes longtime bassist John Stirratt and new drummer Glenn Kotche, spent the past year recording the forthcoming album tentatively titled "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" for Reprise Records at the band's loft in Chicago, where Bennett owns the recording equipment and handles most of the engineering duties.

"It has elements of everything we've done in the past, and it has some new elements," Bennett says. "I don't completely understand it yet. I haven't gotten away from it enough to understand what it is. To me, that record is still the process of making that record... It's really hard to say for me to say what it is as a consumer might."

The album's release has been postponed three times, as Wilco's members enjoyed the luxury of being able to record at their own pace.

"We have this big, giant loft with all our instruments and all of my recording gear," Bennett says. "We don't need anybody else. Somehow we're kind of living, on that level, this dream. That's what you dream of when you first start out: 'I wish we had this giant space with all our gear and our own studio and all the time in the world.'"

Bennett laughs, adding, "I don't know why we're allowed to do that. Somebody's going to get wise one of these days."

Busy on the side

Somehow, while maintaining his busy schedule with Wilco, Bennett has been able to work on a seemingly endless list of side projects. He has gotten back together with Ken Hartz, his main partner from the old band Titanic Love Affair to record a new CD that's virtually complete.

He has also produced or played on several new CDs by other artists, and he has a trove of solo material and songs written in collaboration with guitarist-singer Edward Burch, whom Bennett described as his "Garfunkel."

"This'll sound ridiculous, but our goal is to make, like, a three-CD initial release," Bennett says. "This is exaggerating very little, but if I go and find all of my (solo) recordings from the past six years... I easily have, like, 80 to 100 songs recorded. Easily. And then another hundred that are written and not recorded or just recorded on a cassette player."

Bennett says his solo material is "minor-key, introspective" music with dark lyrics and intricate melodies.

"I tend to write more complicated songs than when I write with Jeff for Wilco," he says.

Bennett says he enjoys plays acoustic shows.

"You don't have to fight to get your vocals heard and you can really put a lot of nuance into your voice than when you're trying to belt above a band," he says. "When you're doing an acoustic show, your entertainment is just the little stuff you throw out in between songs. You don't have to jump around or anything like that."