No depressions

America's new roots pioneers

by Jonathan Perry

WHISKEYTOWN

At the moment, country seems to be the farthest thing from Ryan Adams's mind. He and his roots-rock band Whiskeytown are deep in the throes of "Not Home Anymore," and Adams is hunkered down on haunches, guitar slung across his shoulders, coaxing a sheet of feedback from his amp that blankets every square inch of Bill's Bar in Boston. Besides the decidedly uncountry wall-to-wall noise, Adams's just-woke-up tousle of shoulder-length hair and faint hint of eyeliner ringed around his lashes recalls not George Jones but Paul Westerberg.

"It's funny how much it all goes back to the Replacements," Adams explains when we're in the band's touring camper, the inside of which has been pinned with newly purchased postcards of the Rolling Stones and, uh, Poison. "I mean, listen to that song that was on their first single, `If Only You Were Lonely.' It's a beautiful country song." Sheer songwriting ability, he says, is "an important thing in this day and age of bands who say the chorus pedal is their sound. But I think things are changing. People want to get moved again."

If a handful of recent and forthcoming albums are any indication, a small but growing crop of similar-minded artists are pinning their musical dreams on the hope that audiences "want to get moved again." To these artists, moving audiences means -- to greater or lesser degrees -- writing songs rooted in vintage C&W twang, shitkicker Southern rock, and Stonesy clatter and crunch. Hear the sob of a weeping pedal steel or the petticoat prettiness of a country fiddle mixed in a stew of bleary guitars? Chances are it's one of the emissaries of what, for the moment at least, is being called the "No Depression" movement, a loosely defined genre whose only real constant is that its practitioners aren't sure exactly what "No Depression" means or is.

In fact, just about the only thing everybody can agree upon is where the phrase comes from: it's both the title of the first album by the influential country-punk outfit Uncle Tupelo and the name of the bimonthly magazine that has, since 1995, devoted itself to covering and promoting this roots-oriented subgenre. Yet the "movement" -- if you want to call it that -- is also known as "Americana," "alterna-country," "twangcore," "cowpunk," and simply "roots rock." And even these terms don't really capture what artists like Dwight Yoakam, Junior Brown, and BR5-49 are doing. Yoakam, for example, could fairly be called "alterna-country," but how often is he mentioned in the same sentence as Uncle Tupelo or the Jayhawks? Which brings us back to the original question: what the hell is this stuff, anyway?

"To a certain extent," says No Depression co-editor Peter Blackstock, "one of the things my co-editor Grant Alden and I have tried not to do is specifically define what we're doing as far as coverage is concerned. It may keep things ambiguous, but I think it better reflects on the music itself. We like the fact that there are blurred lines there." This approach seems to have paid off. Alden and Blackstock printed 2000 copies of the first issue of No Depression in September 1995, with the intention of publishing every three months. Within a year circulation had risen to 10,500 and the magazine was coming out six times a year.

HONEYDOGS

In keeping with Blackstock's willfully elusive vision, several artists now viewed as part of the alternative-country genre are interpreting the music's essence in dramatically different ways. Raleigh's Whiskeytown recently released the sublimely unsettling Strangers Almanac (Outpost), a disc that draws on the graceful country rock pioneered by Gram Parsons when he was spending all his time hanging out -- and nodding out -- with Keith Richards. Another Raleigh-bred band, 6 String Drag, have just issued a rollicking long-player, High Hat, on E-Squared, the Nashville-based label co-owned by renegade honky-tonker Steve Earle.

Outside of the Carolinas, Missouri's Bottle Rockets cross John Mellencamp's heartland rock (they even name-check him on "Indianapolis") with Lynryd Skynyrd's shot-and-beer bluster on their new 24 Hours a Day (Atlantic). Meanwhile, on Too Far To Care (Elektra), Dallas boys the Old 97's favor the freight-train gallop, grit, and wit of contemporaries like Cracker and '80s shoulda-beens like Guadalcanal Diary and the Sidewinders. Then there are the Honeydogs, who on their third album, Seen a Ghost (Debris/Mercury), evoke the ragged romanticism and pop heart of their Minnesota brethren the Replacements.

The arrival of these No Depression bands began around 1995 -- right about the time Wilco and Son Volt rose from the ashes of Uncle Tupelo. That increasingly influential group were led by songwriters Jay Farrar (Son Volt) and Jeff Tweedy (Wilco), who were, as journalist Bill Wyman so aptly puts it, "a couple of kids country enough to love the music and punk enough to feel that so many people not liking it was a pretty good reason to play it."

Yet despite its recent arrival as a charted radio format, Americana is nothing new. In fact, its very existence is predicated on the past. Rock and roll has always been an untidy bastard -- rooted as much in outlaw country as it is in backporch blues or jukejoint R&B. Just listen to early Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Eddie Cochran, or Chuck Berry. The revivalist fusion of country and rock can be traced not only to oft-cited architects like Parsons but to the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, early Eagles, and Stone Poneys-era Linda Rondstadt, not to mention lessers like Poco (whose "Crazy Eyes" was a tribute to Parsons).

Although the timing wasn't right in the '80s, bands like the Long Ryders, Jason and the Scorchers, Lone Justice, and the BoDeans also presaged Americana, as did fringe songwriters like Joe Ely, John Hiatt, and Steve Earle. Come to think of it, you could probably add the Cowboy Junkies and Neil Young to the list. And how about Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska?

What is new and different about alterna-country '90s style is how it incorporates into its mix of sources elements of punk -- not so much the sound per se as its do-it-yourself sensibility and ideals of fiercely uncompromised musicmaking. Although he's never conducted any research, Blackstock believes the No Depression audience comprises twenty- and thirtysomethings who grew up listening to '80s alternative rock but have "since become disillusioned" as alternative has become just another marketing term. "We also have older country listeners in their 50s and 60s who find what we're covering more in line with the music of Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard than what's considered country music right now."

Guitarist-keyboardist Mike Daly, who's currently touring with Whiskeytown, agrees. "I think Nashville kind of created Americana by turning its back on honest songwriting. Because Nashville does nothing but turn out these glitzy, tongue-in-cheek country songs, people got sick of it and started looking for something else. But to me, what's happening is as much about the Replacements as it is Johnny Cash."

"I grew up in the '80s and I was into punk rock because I felt it was the one thing I could embrace that was full-on music," says Ryan Adams. "The '80s were desolate, man. I'm not saying good music didn't exist, but it wasn't prevalent."

With Whiskeytown, Adams and guitarist Phil Wandscher insist they're just trying to play meaningful rock and roll. "People can call us Americana and that just means American rock and roll to me," Adams says. "If anybody could stereotype us as a No Depression band, it's because our first record [Faithless Street] was a total tip of the hat to country and rock and roll. To me, to be in a good band means to master the art of writing the perfect country song and the perfect rock-and-roll song."

"We can't even define ourselves," adds Wandscher, "so I don't know how anybody else can."

Adam Haft, who handles A&R for Debris Records, is likewise reluctant to categorize his label's Honeydogs as a No Depression-style outfit. "We want people to think of them as a rock-and-roll band," says Haft, who adds that Debris plans to service AAA and AOR-format radio with the group's first singles, "Rumor Has It" and "I Miss You." From there he's hopeful the band will crack rotations on modern-rock radio. "They don't shun their country roots, and the No Depression people have been amazing, but the band get nervous anytime they get pigeonholed. We don't want people to think they're just a country band. As much as I love country -- old country -- we're trying to break them as a pop-rock band."

Although Haft says he wouldn't put Counting Crows or the Wallflowers in the Americana camp, "I think they've helped open the doors for everybody and made radio a little bit more receptive to that kind of sound. And if people want to associate them with the Wallflowers, that's fine with us." (A few days later, along with the Honeydogs' forthcoming disc and a press kit, Haft encloses a note: "All my best, and remember, we're a rock band.")

What's most telling about Americana is not how vociferously its artists protest the No Depression tag, but what that resistance says about the artists' conception of rock and roll. Perhaps country is so built into their very definition of rock and roll that they feel no need -- or desire -- to separate that element out from what has always been an intrinsically mongrel art form. And perhaps that definition of rock and roll has less to do with country than with what country might signify: tradition and authenticity. But authenticity can be measured in different ways. Does an artist who sings about hard times and unemployment have had to have grown up in a tarpaper shack in Mississippi to be authentic?

" 'Authentic' is not a word I tend to think of when I'm listening to music," says Blackstock. "But to me, authenticity is about whether a band is playing music and means it, and that can be any type of music . . . Honesty. I think it's all about how honestly and directly you put the music across."

No wonder Adams doesn't think country is such a distant cousin to punk. But did he mean it when he wrote about starting a country band because punk rock was "too hard to sing"? He pauses. "It's true, but it's also tongue-in-cheek, you know? It's me poking fun at myself." He brushes the tousled hair away from those eyes rimmed with liner. "But at the same time, I feel like that's pretty much one of the most punk things you can say."