Uncle Tupelo live Looking back on the band who invented alterna-country BY MATT ASHARE

By almost any standard, the first two years of the ’90s were a tu multuous time in the realm of pop music. The introduction of the SoundScan system for tracking CD sales by computer had, for the first time, given the music industry access to fast and accurate information about what was and wasn’t selling. And as the system was adopted by Billboard magazine, suddenly the charts — particularly the crucial Billboard 200 album sales chart — underwent an amazing transformation. Industry favorites like Michael Jackson, who under the old system had benefitted from inflated sales reports issued by scouts at large retail chains in the weeks after a disc hit the streets, were out of luck. Instead, a country artist — Garth Brooks — leapt ahead of all the rock and pop competition to become the biggest-selling artist in the country, not just in country. And country music — the kind that comes out of Music Row in Nashville — was revealed to be a much bigger business than anyone had previously been willing to admit. Even more suddenly, Nirvana’s Nevermind (DGC/Geffen) came flying down the pike in late ’91 and crash-landed right at the top of the very same Billboard 200. Yet another large base of consumers who were sick of the same old crap made their presence known to the powers that be, an event that signaled the start of an alternative revolution that had major labels combing the country for punk-inspired underground acts to follow in Nirvana’s footsteps, not to mention raiding the Great Northwest for that special brand of Seattle punk known as grunge.

In that context, it’s easy to see how the first two releases by a trio from the working-class suburb of Belleville in Illinois — releases that would turn out to be groundbreaking albums fusing the earthy twang of folksy country music with the revved-up passion of punk — could have been overlooked. Uncle Tupelo weren’t the first punk-bred rockers to embrace roots music: the ’80s had seen the rise and fall of at least half a dozen so-called cowpunk outfits, from Rank and File and the Long Riders on the West Coast to Scruffy the Cat here on the East Coast to the Midwestern Bodeans, who came closer than any of the others to scoring a mainstream hit by sounding less punk or country than any of their peers. If anything, the notion of marrying punk and country looked to have run its course by the early ’90s. And though there appeared to be enough fans to support punkabilly bands like the Blasters at an indie level of success, there seemed little hope that any group associated with the cowpunk label could sustain more than a cult audience.

But there were a few punk-associated bands — among them X, the Minutemen, and the Meat Puppets — who by virtue of their intense eclecticism had been able to flirt with country and folk without being saddled with the deadly cowpunk label. Only X caught the ear of a major label, Elektra, which tried to market them as some kind of hard-rock band, with little success. By the early ’90s, however, bands like X and even Social Distortion, with their Johnny Cash–loving singer Mike Ness, had raised the notion that punk itself was a kind of folk music. From there, it was only a small step to connect the new folk with the old, and that meant bringing punk and country together again, only this time without the yee-haw, shitkicking irony implicit in city slickers donning Western shirts, cowboy boots, and 10-gallon hats.

Whether Jeff Tweedy and Jay Farrar, Uncle Tupelo’s two principal singer-songwriters, were paying any attention at all to such developments is irrelevant. What is important is that Uncle Tupelo came along at a time when roots-inflected punk was ready to move beyond revved-up, tongue-in-cheek twang and onto the wide-open dusty plains of Americana, where punk inevitably confronted a whole new range of influences, from the Carter Family and Johnny Cash to protest folkies like Woody Guthrie and the young Bob Dylan. It didn’t hurt that by the tail end of the Reagan/Bush years, with the gap between the have and have-nots growing ever wider, Depression-era folk and Appalachian country tunes about coal mining and company stores were metaphorically, if not directly, pertinent. And the country music coming out of Nashville wasn’t about to address any of the issues of the day: the rebel yells of Nashville outlaws had long ago been silenced. What was left was a kind of de-twanged, good-ol’-boy countrypolitan music that saw the world through the rose-tinted lenses of trickle-down economics and the myth of a righteous and prosperous white-picket-fence America filled with Ford pick-up trucks, tranquil suburban Sundays, and backyard barbecues.

It didn’t take but one quick listen to the opening salvo of No Depression, Uncle Tupelo’s 1990 debut for Rockville and a disc named for a 1930s-era hillbilly song by A.P. Carter, to hear the difference between the so-called cowpunk of the ’80s and this new brand of punk-fueled Americana played by young guys in ripped jeans and frayed flannel shirts. Indeed, with its guitars set at a respectable punk distortion level, "Graveyard Shift" opens with what sounds like an inversion of the Lynyrd Skynyrd "Sweet Home Alabama" hammer-on riff played just a little too fast, as if Tweedy, Farrar, and then drummer Mike Heidorn were in a hurry to get the intro out of the way so they could step on their distortion boxes and dive headlong into the surging heart of the song, which is peppered with jolting stop-and-start refrains, sourmash harmonies, and explosive guitar outbursts that offset the yearning, world-weary melancholy that’s always given Farrar’s vocals a certain unimpeachable weight.

Even now, with the reissue of No Depression, 1991’s Still Feel Gone, and 1992’s March 16-20 on Sony/Legacy and the simultaneous re-release of the band’s lone major-label disc, their 1993 Sire/Reprise album Anodyne, on Rhino, "Graveyard Shift" sounds shocking. No matter how many times you’ve heard it, you never quite expect that opening riff to segue into those savagely abrupt stops so naturally, as if it were the most normal way for a band to arrange a song. The disc goes on to incorporate elements that are much more recognizably traditional country folk in nature, like the banjo-pickin’ verses of the second tune, the Tweedy-sung "That Year," and, of course, the Carter-penned title track, which sticks to an acoustic foundation as Farrar intones, "I’m going where there’s no depression/To a better land that’s free from care." What’s punk about No Depression, beyond the overdriven guitars and racing tempos that drive tracks like "Factory Belt" and "Outdone," is the sense that Tweedy and Farrar haven’t followed any rules as they cobble together tunes like "Graveyard Shift." They just draw on sources that come naturally to them — sources as diverse as the Minutemen (whose passing Tweedy lamented in Still Feel Gone’s "D. Boon"), Lynyrd Skynyrd, and the Carter Family. It’s anybody’s guess, as you listen to the album, where the next riff is coming from. The 1-4-5 harmonic predictability of cowpunk was as foreign to Uncle Tupelo as the Nashville country of Garth Brooks was. On No Depression and even up through Still Feel Gone, you get the sense that Farrar and Tweedy are unselfconciously reinventing folk as punk or punk as folk without any sense of how the pieces may fall together. That it all works as well as it does is a tribute both to their taste and talent as songwriters and to their willingness to break or at least ignore the conventions governing punk and country.

A band as good as Uncle Tupelo can’t remain isolated forever. And it was inevitable that a band bold enough not just to cover the Carter Family but to name their debut album after one of A.P.’s tunes would find a following among country-music enthusiasts who could no longer count on Nashville for their fix and among indie-music fans who make a habit (and sometimes even a meager living) out of discovering the kind of connections Uncle Tupelo were making in their music. The result, by the time the band were gearing up to record their third album, was a burgeoning alternative country scene that would come to include dozens of new bands, encompass dozens of older artists, and even get its own magazine, titled, appropriately enough, No Depression.

As a genre, alterna-country remains as vague as any individual is willing to allow. It’s come to include artists as diverse as the respectable Grammy winner Shelby Lynne and the hoky-joky Southern Culture on the Skids; straightforward revivalists like Robbie Fulks and more adventurous pop projects like Jeff Tweedy’s Wilco; icons like Johnny Cash and upstarts like Ryan Adams. None of which Uncle Tupelo could have foreseen back in March of 1992, when they arrived at R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck’s home in Athens to record their rootsiest album yet, March 16-20, 1992.

Implicit in the disc’s title is that it was recorded in a mere five days — as if that in and of itself were something to be proud of. In fact, it’s a perfectly fine rough-hewn acoustic album on which the compositions of Farrar and Tweedy share space with a bunch of traditional Americana numbers like "Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down," "I Wish My Baby Was Born," and "Warfare." It’s also Uncle Tupelo’s most predictable album, and their least exciting. Gone are the jolting bolts of distortion and seamless segues from wall-of-guitar punk to pick-and-strum country.

March 16-20, 1992 marks the first time that Farrar and Tweedy fell into the trap of confusing authenticity with quality, a problem that has plagued alterna-country ever since. It was also the last time either one of them made that mistake — by they time they did Anodyne, their last album together, Uncle Tupelo were back to their old tricks of mixing it up No Depression–style. But some of the magic was gone. And before long, so was Farrar, who continued to write his Uncle Tupelo–style songs first in Son Volt and then as a solo artist.

Tweedy held on to a number of the players who’d swelled Uncle Tupelo’s ranks to a fivesome by the time of Anodyne, and he’s pushed the boundaries of alterna-country with each successive Wilco release. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for the movement they gave a name to and at the very least helped spark: the alterna-country or No Depression underground is full of authentic Americana that’s just plain dull. Fortunately, No Depression and Still Feel Gone are back, along with the requisite if gratuitous five or six "bonus" tracks apiece, to remind everyone how it’s meant to be done.