Uncle Tupelo - inventing alt-country

Here's my take on Uncle Tupelo, one of the bands credited with starting the alt-country movement.

To say that I had been looking forward to hearing Uncle Tupelo’s No Depression would be putting it mildly. I had been better prepared for this album than perhaps any other – not least because I was coming to it 12 years after its release. As I discovered more and more of the alt-country field, it seemed like I was re-tracing the steps that country-rock had taken to get to where it is now. Among the Ryan Adams and Lucinda Williams records, Jay Farrar’s Sebastopol found its way into my collection and into my consciousness, and its immediacy and originality were quite startling. And then my education in Uncle Tupelo and their various offspring really did go backwards. I listened to some Wilco CDs, saw the film about the making of their classic album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, read all about Uncle Tupelo’s history, got to grips with their final album, Anodyne, and finally laid my hands on a copy of their debut record, No Depression - one of the albums widely acclaimed to have grabbed country music, shaken it free of its schmaltz, introduced it to punk, and reminded it what a few well-written songs could do.

If the term country-rock seems to be a meaningless label, a convenient way of making country music sound cool and accessible, when actually it never needed that kind of assistance, how about country-punk? Imagine Clarence White’s country picking style, combined with power chords which are delivered as a short sharp shock to your ears, literally cutting out before they begin to echo the big rock band excesses of the late sixties and seventies. That is more or less what you get in songs like That Year, Factory Belt and Flatness. These are songs written to reflect a United States that is both rural and yet industrial.

Looks like it's time to lay this burden down
Stop messing around
Don't want to go to the grave without a sound
Give this whole place a rest
Not to ride on the factory belt
Not to ride on the factory belt

The tone of the lyrics is remarkably weary coming from such young songwriters, but weary it is, as their characters (if not their selves) live an industrial life while displaying a rural mentality – there is a yearning quality which conjures up vivid images of small-town America. Whether those images are accurate or not is another issue, but this matters less than the fact that the stories told match the uneasy combination of authentic country and biting rock.

Indeed, the stinging riffs were what I came away remembering after hearing the album for the first time. Not that I was humming them to myself – if you are seeking a collection of catchy melodic hooks or vocal lines, look elsewhere. But the constant random sequencing of quick riff after quick riff, sudden tempo change, rapid country pick, lends No Depression a dynamism which is unique in character but also quite unsettling. This is not background music, and I am glad I came to it after hearing the more approachable side of Americana. The same can be said of the voice of Jay Farrar, who in the early part of Uncle Tupelo’s career was the dominant singer. Feted by such writers as Greg Kot, Wilco’s biographer, as having a golden voice, Farrar can sound very peculiar. His low tones in particular can sound graceless. But this album is pretty short of ballads, and its fast and lively style suits Farrar’s strident vocals more than any other type of song.

So did No Depression live up to the expectations I had formed? Just about. I will listen to it again and again – the way it remains resolutely upbeat in the face of some pretty gloomy subject matter makes it an album I, like many people, will turn to when I need a lift. With No Depression, Uncle Tupelo brought a modern feel, an interesting sound and a good attitude to nineties American folk music, and the influence of this album on a musical generation is undeniable. But to be honest, they left others to think about the tunes.

If nothing else, however, Uncle Tupelo laid down a distinct marker with their first album. Of course looking back, it would be easy to say that with that album they defined a genre. And although at the time even the most discerning listener couldn’t have known this for sure, it is fair to say that their debut effort marked a new departure for country music; and this, coupled with the fact that No Depression is clearly not the finished article, suggested a vast amount of potential. By the terms set by the music they made in their first album, they realised that potential with Still Feel Gone. Their second album starts with a line that would appear half way through most songs: “Falling out the window”. Jeff Tweedy even sings the line like he’s in the middle of a vocal jam. But it is the right opening line, perhaps the only sensible opening line for this album. Because with the opening flurry of easy jagged riff and harsh voice, it is as if the whole eclectic house of country-punk has come tumbling down into your lap before you can get through the front door.

In fact, Gun, the song with which the album kicks off, takes some beating. We can all name countless albums which peter out, some time soon after the promise of the first track or two. Still Feel Gone doesn’t do this, mainly because its best two songs have been placed in the two most memorable positions – first and last. If you buy this album on compact disc, you will get five very good bonus tracks tagged onto the end. Do yourself a favour – the first few times you listen, give them a miss. Because only that way will you feel you have travelled on the journey on which Uncle Tupelo’s album can take you. More than any of their other three albums, Still Feel Gone tells a story like we were taught to write them in primary school – quite simply, with a beginning, a middle and an end.

'Cause my heart it was a gun
But it's unloaded now
So don't bother

With these lines, Jeff Tweedy gives lyrical expression to the musical feel of the album. Just as the probability for confusion arising out of the combination of country and punk (as witnessed on No Depression) is resolved by the sound produced on Still Feel Gone, so these lines bring the band’s thoughts together in words. The violent idea of a narrator’s heart being a gun – not bleeding, not broken, but a deadly weapon – is counterpointed by the impotence of that very weapon. And the singer’s conclusion: oh, forget it. Once this tension is resolved, what do we get? A characteristic musical pause for breath – it does sound like the strings are breathing, you know – and then more, more, more.

That’s right – Still Feel Gone is even more relentless than its predecessor. Not until the fifth track in do we get any sign of a gentle side to the band. And even then, in Still Be Around, the acoustic guitar introduction is a prelude to an evocative song; a song of haunting doubt:

When the bible is a bottle
And the hardwood floor is home
When morning comes twice a day or not at all

As for the rest of the album’s body, the songs trip over each other, clamouring for your notice, for some special attention. None of them quite make it – what we have is a barrage of sound descending over ten songs, with all of the Tupelo trademarks: country picking, sudden stops, crunching electric guitars. But somehow, on this record, they are more together than on the band’s first album. They sound like a band without unfinished business. This sense is partly due to the words employed – the album is less sweeping than No Depression. Rather than creating broad images of blue-collar America, the lyric rely on the music to maintain that vision – which they do – and concentrate themselves on the more personal side of things. Jay Farrar’s curious voice stands out in this respect. He has the ability to sound both sublimely rich and peculiarly grating, and the nearest he gets to entrenching himself in the former quality is in the song Punch Drunk. But with the soaring way he sings the word “is”, Farrar finally combines emotion and technique in what is a seminal vocal moment.

But ultimately, the masterpiece of Still Feel Gone is surely If That’s Alright. It starts as a bleak tribute to a dream which is neither euphoric nor nightmare, but blurred circular daydream. The repetitive nature of the music is deliberate, as Farrar describes his life as a carousel, and there is definitely something vaguely hypnotic about the progression of the song. Backed initially by a lone metallic guitar which sounds like it’s been recorded not in the garage, but in the car inside the garage, Farrar delivers an intense and concentrated vocal performance, and as an organ starts softly and gradually comes to the fore, Uncle Tupelo have somehow invented alt-country, as the punky attitude, introspective lyrics, focused emotional vocals and small-guitar-organ-band all finally come together into some sort of organic whole.

In fact, I would say that it is Still Feel Gone, rather than No Depression, which sits alongside the Jayhawks’ Hollywood Town Hall as a real founding moment of alt-country – a true inspiration for the likes of Whiskeytown. No Depression fuses punk and country within the album and within songs - you can still hear the punk, you can still hear the country. The two styles fight it out for space, and that makes for an unsettling listening experience. Interesting yes, enjoyable mostly, but certainly disconcerting, at least at times. But by the second album, Uncle Tupelo had resolved the dispute. Country? Punk? Can’t find a victor? Well you’ll just have to work together. The fusion works to such an extent that by the time of their next album, the band felt confident enough to move on from the seminal sound they had invented, and make an acoustic throwback album. Because with Still Feel Gone, their first task was complete.

Produced by REM’s Peter Buck and quickly recorded in five days, Uncle Tupelo’s next record, March 16-20, 1992, has some claim to being their Basement Tapes. Like Dylan and The Band’s classic acoustic album, March 1992 contains mainly originals, some arrangements of traditional songs, and the odd cover version; also like the Basement Tapes, the feel of the album across all of these songs is historical and folky. But while the punk sound of their earlier albums has disappeared, the punk posturing remains, and the result is much darker – and vastly more powerful - than The Basement Tapes.

An early indication of what Uncle Tupelo could bring to such traditional material comes on Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down. This is not really country music – it is what most people regard as folk music, and in this case, it sounds very much like the particular strand of folk that was being played in the early sixties by people like Pete Seeger and Judy Collins. The song features a ringing guitar lines which echoes Jeff Tweedy’s vocal, and Jay Farrar’s very ordered harmonies – a world away from the raggedy vocal style of the band’s earlier albums – also root their performance of the song firmly around its origins. However, from the moment Tweedy sings the title lyrics, Uncle Tupelo put their stamp on the song – no quarter is given to sentimentality, as a strange combination of subdued and harsh tones dominates the song from the beginning.

Elsewhere the instrumental playing is often more ornate than the simple call and response feel of Satan. Black Eye is a sad song which uses the subject’s black eye as a device for describing a much deeper pain:

Like his brothers
He emptied himself
And played it safe
Like their father
He wanted to remember
But he almost always
Forgot what he was gonna say

There are no harmonies in this song, and the solo guitar uses the space provided to flick intricately up and down the fingerboard. But Tweedy’s voice sounds detached – from the emotion of the story, but also from the guitar. He sounds like a disembodied story-teller, narrating the tale in a matter-of-fact manner that allows the listener to focus solely on the story itself. In a sense, this concentration on the substance of the song, its message, is what folk music is all about.

The presence of the song Moonshiner on March 1992 suggests that there is value in comparing Uncle Tupelo, at this point in their career, and Bob Dylan. Although Dylan and The Band did not record this traditional southern ballad during the basement sessions, he had recorded a solo version of the song years earlier, in the summer of 1963. Uncle Tupelo cannot have decide to include the song on March 1992 in ignorance of Dylan’s earlier version – however great their knowledge of the original source of such numbers. But the two versions of the song are substantially different. Dylan sings the song with a thin vocal that is nonetheless beautifully knowing, as if he is coming from inside the song’s story, grasping fully what it is saying:

Let me eat when I'm hungry
Let me drink when I'm dry
Two dollars when I'm hard up
Religion when I die
The whole world is a bottle
And life is but a dram
When the bottle gets empty
Lord, it sure ain't worth a damn

Jay Farrar, on the other hand, seems to be using the song to make his own point. In stark contrast with Bob Dylan’s Moonshiner vocal (and also unlike Tweedy’s distant Black Eye vocal), Farrar’s Moonshiner vocal comes across as a temporary phenomenon – but one with much more impact than Dylan’s.

But what is that point that Farrar and Uncle Tupelo are trying to make with this album? What message are they communicating? On first listen, it appears that they are aggressively (there is that punk attitude again) returning folk music to its pre-protest and pre-political roots. This is an oft-repeated point of view: the protest singers of the early sixties were distorting folk music and taking it away from its more traditional, communitarian and personal origins, in order to help convey a broader, political message. This is certainly the view of writers like Greil Marcus, whose book Invisible Republic is based very much on the thesis that it was only in the late sixties, when Dylan and The Band started recording their basement music, that folk music was reclaimed for a more intimate setting.

Well, March 1992 is certainly strong on individual lives and their problems: hunger, family difficulties, and so on. But that is not the full story of the album. March 1992 does cover individuals, but they are constantly set in a broad context, namely the society that surrounds people and without which their stories would be meaningless. For every character on this album who escapes their problems via drunkenness, there is another who is unemployed. The album does not come together as the expression of a political movement, as a lot of the folk music of the early sixties did; but it is a world away from being pre-political or apolitical. Uncle Tupelo have a view which is both subtler and more enlightened: the link between the social and the political within song is a permeable two-way filter. Everything is, or can be, political.

So where is the country music on March 16-20, 1992? It has its moments, and in a manner in some ways reminiscent of Uncle Tupelo’s earlier albums. The album opens with Grindstone, which features some pedal steel that sounds authentic enough, and also the band’s trademark sudden change of tempo. More notable is their cover of the Louvin Brothers’ Atomic Power. Starting out as a fiddle reel, the song develops into a full-blown hoe-down, with more of those structured call-and-response harmonies which mask the song’s serious message:

Will you shout or will you cry
When the fire rains from on high
Are you ready for that great atomic power

In this way, Uncle Tupelo provide a link between older country music and more modern, ‘alternative’, country. Rather than bringing traditional music into the modern era by politicising it, introducing political themes, it sounds more like they bring the anti-traditional back into the country: by taking folk music back into the country, they claim radicalism for country music. This is something that would continue as they made their next album.

In May 1994, years of internal disharmony came to an end when Jay Farrar broke up Uncle Tupelo. What they would have done, what contribution they might have made to country music – or any other kind of music for that matter – is one of those great unknowns. They made only four albums: one in which they experimented with the fusion of country and a sort of garage punk, a second where they perfected that blend, a third in which they stripped it all away to make one of the great contemporary American folk albums, and a fourth, Anodyne, in which they took on a more traditional country-rock sound. With hindsight, it is easy enough to say that this was a very self-conscious swansong, a final nod to the basics from which they emerged, with the songs to match it. But history is never so straightforward and circular: the break-up of the band was a shock to Jeff Tweedy, notwithstanding the fact that it was on Anodyne that he really developed is own independent voice. And in fact, like all of Uncle Tupelo’s albums, Anodyne promises almost as much as it delivers – leaving us to wonder what might have been.

Even the opening notes of the first song, Slate, indicate another shift in emphasis for Uncle Tupelo. While the violin sounds self-assured, strident even though quiet, the strummed guitar for once sounds tentative, as if it is unsure of its place amidst the country instruments which have come along. Up to this point, guitars – whether electric or acoustic – had always dominated the band’s music. What they were playing was partly country, but to a large extent they did without some of country music’s staple instruments – steel guitar, banjo, violin. With Anodyne this ceases to be the case, and the guitars, while still providing the rhythmic base, compete for space with instruments which, while new on the scene, in another sense are a lot older and wiser.

The violin remains to the fore for Tweedy’s first song, Acuff-Rose, his tribute to the legendary country songwriters. The fiddle weaves in and out of the rhythm, which is set by a mandolin, and the result is an infectious-sounding country-rock tune. However, Tweedy’s voice is low in the mix, and the lyrics of the song are similarly insubstantial:

Early in the morning, sometimes late at night
Sometimes I get the feeling that everything's alright

In fact, it is with the return of one of the band’s older styles, the loose and punk-infused rocker The Long Cut, that the album really comes to life. The tempo varies as the song stops and starts, and the simple chords and drum and electric guitar driven rhythm fit nicely with Jay Farrar’s typically direct lyrics:

I've been searching and you've been gone
Out looking for the shortest path to the one that you're on
And I've already seen all I wanna see
Come on, let's take the long cut
I think that's what we need

However, this song is the exception rather than the rule, and as the country band grows slightly, with a banjo joining the fray and the harmonies spreading, the middle section of Anodyne flows unlike on any other Uncle Tupelo record. Give Back the Key to My Heart, Chickamauga, New Madrid, Anodyne and We’ve Been Had all sound fully-formed, something which cannot often be said of Tupelo songs. Their cover of Give Back the Key…, a Doug Sahm classic, is a showcase for Farrar’s soaring vocals, which as ever frequently switch between confident and well-toned on the one hand and downright odd on the other. But this number is most important for being the site, four tracks in, of the final marrying of the riffing violin and the more familiar free-and-easy drums. In a sense, this is what this album needed if it was going to work, because with that blend, we know we have an Uncle Tupelo country album rather than a plain country album.

We’ve Been Had is another important song on Anodyne. With the balanced slightly shifted away from country-punk and towards something a little more subtle and a lot more authentic-sounding (from a country perspective), that representative blue-collar feel of their first two albums largely disappears; also gone are the sometimes explicitly ideological lyrics of March 1992, which would sound incongruous against Anodyne’s musical backdrop. But We’ve Been Had shows that Uncle Tupelo were keen to retain a political element – a protest element – to their work. Their mode of expression, however, has changed, as they eschew both social commentary and ideological polemic in favour of a more pragmatic political approach, reflecting cynically on the inability of the Democrats and Republicans to be straight with them.

Towards the end of Anodyne, the song High Water perhaps provides some sort of explanation for the break up of Uncle Tupelo. Or if this is stretching the laws of cause and effect too much, it is certainly fair to say that, in retrospect, the lyrics and sound of High Water take on a real poignancy, if not a larger significance. Backed only by his own strummed acoustic guitar – such a feature of the band’s later work – and an achingly beautiful pedal steel, Farrar eloquently describes his frustrations, his inability to control his own direction, to overcome obstacles, to do what he wants to do:

I can see the sand and it's running out
It was only circumstances
But it's the difference
It gets in the way
No race is run in this direction
You can't break even
You can't even quit the game

Faced with what he saw as an untenable situation within his band, and his powerlessness to get out altogether, Farrar chose a third option – probably the only other possibility available to him – and broke the band up. Whether knowingly or inadvertently, in so doing, Farrar directed Jeff Tweedy away from country-rooted music and towards the ever-increasingly ambitious experimental and melodic music that Tweedy and his band Wilco would become famous for – far more famous than anything Farrar himself had ever done or would ever do. For his part, Jay Farrar formed Son Volt, a band which would be entirely directed by him. Their music relied heavily on two of Uncle Tupelo’s core styles – the confident and authentic country sound epitomised (somewhat ironically given the song’s absolutist lyrics) by High Water, and the jumpy, unnerving punk/country combination that was perfected on Still Feel Gone.

But other than Wilco and Son Volt, what was Uncle Tupelo’s legacy to popular music in general, and country music in particular? Starting with the most obvious things, they left us with a decent debut album full of promise, and then three truly great albums, each one radically different from the last. Still Feel Gone was the loose and breathless realisation of what No Depression had tried to achieve; March 1992 was a fascinatingly powerful and meaningful acoustic showpiece; and Anodyne was a magnificent fusion of new country and old country.

More generally, it was possibly the order in which they made their albums which has been so crucial to the ‘alt-country’ movement. The band clearly had country leanings, but from the very outset they took a garage band approach and laced their songs with punk attitude. The first two albums give the impression that whenever they were in doubt, they turned up the volume and gave an even greater voice to what they were saying. (This was their approach right up until the end – in their last ever show as a band, they played every song as a fast and furious electric rocker – even the ones which were acoustic and quieter on record, like No Depression and Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down.) It was only later that they brought it back down, making their portentous acoustic album and, ultimately, their country magnum opus, Anodyne. This, for me, is in a way the common thread that runs through much of alternative country music. Its key exponents share a boisterous approach to country music – they are not afraid to play with it, plastering new styles onto it and taking it in fresh directions. But they always bring it back home.

A final word on Uncle Tupelo - that last album was not an end product worthy of book-ending such a short and yet marvellous career. Just as No Depression was followed by a similar but better album, could Anodyne have been followed by an even more worthy epitaph? Sadly, we will never know.