An Uncle Tupelo retrospective
‘Labels like “alt-country” can make a grown man twinge.
Seriously, try saying it someday.
Take this grown man for example. Every single time the hyphenated expression pops up in a review I want to stop reading it. “Alt-” phrases brought the shotgun closer to Kurt Cobain’s mouth and should’ve died with him, without even leaving so much as a set of molars by which to be identified.
What is it an alternative too? Let’s take Uncle Tupelo for example. The band has often been thrown into the alt-country or alt-rock bargain bins. It sounds cheap and degrading. They are neither the alternative to country nor to rock music. Rather they have created fusion, a perfect and harmonious synthesis of the musical styles, something that prior to UT’s rise to glory would have been written off as producing only an impossible aural discord.
Even the flight of The Byrds did not bring this amalgamation to fruition. They and other such bands with one foot in Ernest Tubb and one in Gram Parsons may have paved the way for Uncle Tupelo, but it was UT that took the sound over the top. It was the deep and sometimes slurred voice of Jay Farrar and the untamed rasp emerging from Jeff Tweedy’s voice that gave the official okay for this musical marriage.
And like all great artists, it was not until after the band’s breakup almost a decade ago that the general public decided to finally acknowledge the legend that these four Belleville, Ill. natives had already built and moved on from. After Uncle Tupelo, there were more and bigger projects to undertake.
They started as the Primitives with Jay’s older brother Wade Farrar on vocals and subsequently made their way through the grassroots of Americana music. But in 1994, after the release of the band’s fourth album, “Anodyne,” and a subsequent tour, they put what they knew behind them and explored new avenues. Drummer Mike Heidorn had already left the band to start a family, a chasm that may have caused irreparable damage and may have lead to the band’s breakup. He was persuaded, again, to leave his simpler life behind to join Jay Farrar in his new project, Son Volt. After three albums, Son Volt went on permanent hiatus and Jay Farrar continued writing music and developing a solo career. His most recent album, “Sebastopol,” was released in 2001 and had a good number of guest appearances, including some drumming by Superchunk’s Jon Wurster and some piano parts by Steve Drozd of the Flaming Lips.
Heidorn, on the other hand, took refuge in his newfound freedom from music. At the time of the release of “83/93: An Anthology,” he was married and working for a newspaper.
In contrast, Jeff Tweedy’s career choices have allowed little to no time at all for the passive, laid back lifestyle that Heidorn now embraces.
Perhaps the release of Uncle Tupelo’s “Effigy” on the “No Alternative” compilation bought the band some post-breakup yet still much needed press, but it was most likely Tweedy’s formation and success of Wilco that brought life back into otherwise forgotten UT recordings.
It seems safe to assume that the money brought in by the overwhelming laudations for Wilco’s most recent album “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot,” as well as the added benefit of the band’s work with Billy Bragg on the “Mermaid Avenue” albums helped to finance the purchase of UT song rites from Rockville, the now defunct label which originally released the band’s first three album’s, “No Depression,” “Still Feel Gone,” and “March 16-20, 1992.”
Now that the band members re-own their songs from Rockville, which they claim never paid them any royalties on the songs, these three albums have been re-mastered and will be re-released by Legacy Recordings, a subset of Columbia Records on April 15.
“No Depression”
Originally Released: 1990
The band’s groundbreaking first release; the album was named after a Carter Family song from 1936. The grim noir realism of lower class life shines through significantly on the album’s tracks, such as “Screen Door,” which professes, “Down here, where we’re at, everybody’s equally poor.”
On this album, UT begins to establish the contrasting struggle of their two most prominent song lyric themes, alcoholism and religion. The struggle continues through all three re-releases and makes no bones about bringing up bringing up repentance and a love for Jesus as well as being too drunk to stand on the same record. As Farrar states best on the album’s opening track, “Graveyard Shift,” “It’s the same old walls closing in.”
The roots of merging folk and punk are evident and unprecedented. This traditional will continue to influence a good majority of bands from the Hot Water Music side project Rumbleseat (which does a great cover of UT’s classic “Moonshiner”) to Strike Anywhere’s hardcore covers of traditional folk songs to Kind of Like Spitting.
“Still Feel Gone”
Originally Released: 1992
This, the band’s second release, truly shows their punk roots. It is a dirty and loud album that has the ability to test the strength of your eardrums and instantaneously switch to a slower mellower tune. The guitars and drumbeats are amazing and serve as the predecessor for the post-punk movement at the time of its release. The best example of this is in the album’s fourth track, “Nothing.” Its start stop staccato action is a powerful and awing example of just how versatile UT really is.
It’s somewhere in between Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker. There are just as many fingerpicking licks as there are noise rock progressions. It is a misplaced link in the underground music scene that would’ve made much more sense a few years later and a bit further east.
“Still Feel Gone” and “No Depression” are the most musically akin of all Uncle Tupelo albums. It is pretty certain that if you like one, you will enjoy the othe
“March 16-20, 1992”
Originally Released: 1992
Recorded by REM’s Peter Buck, this album consists of about half cover tracks and half scaled down acoustic originals. Tweedy, on the tracks that he sings, begins to perfect his vocal twang and penchant for carrying out the last few syllables of a vocal melody. At points it becomes monotonous but most of the time it can easily be appreciated as an important development in the UT style. The evolution in Tweedy’s writing is the first step in the transitional process towards planting Wilco’s roots.
The dissension in the band is growing. There seems to be an unavoidable struggle for the microphone that, ultimately, may also lead to the band’s demise. Although Tweedy may actually sing more on “Still Feel Gone,” when looked at as a linear progression, these three albums read like a novel. The tension is there. It may not be overt but it is present with all of its cancerous self-destructive abilities.
If John Ford were around to make “The Grapes of Wrath” in the early ’90s, Uncle Tupelo would have been an ideal choice for soundtrack material. Their songs present an unabashed reality of poverty, the struggle with alcohol, a search for identity and defining religious beliefs, all of which elicits a heartfelt empathy from the listener. The songs are sad but are not consciously made that way. To the band members, this was the life that they knew, so it was the life they wrote about.
In an interview with Swizzle-stick.com, Mike Heidorn had this to say about his time in the band: “There wasn’t a lot of sitting around and rapping about your feelings… But there was always some kind of tension, always. Always….That was attractive to me, to play in a band with that kind of disparity.”
From there, the interview goes on to discuss the band’s natural music writing ability and how Farrar came from a heavy familial tradition of music writing and that he “just had a knack for sounding as though he’d lived through the Depression and World War, without having been young enough to experience either.” Drawing on the current conditions of his living situation, his writing was so profound that it presented a picture of something that was much, much larger.
The re-release of these albums, alongside “83/93” is a good representation of who Uncle Tupelo really was: a band that defied all traditional musical amalgamations. There was no label suitable enough to describe their music. Writer David Goodman called them “the fathers of the No Depression generation of alternative country.”
Alt-country was bestowed upon them, but was that moniker a truly apt description for these country punks? It suggests that they are an alternative and unworthy of being considered truly either. If anything, they brought both country and punk to new levels and should be deemed worth of both titles and not the alternative to either.
After all, when a dog is mixed German Shepherd and Black Lab and no longer purebred as either, is it considered Alt-Shep or Alt-Lab? Such labels are ridiculous, rendered moreso when applied to music. Leave ‘alt’ on your dashboard indicator. It stands for “alternator.”