As far as genre-decrees go, alt-country’s an especially prickly one. The phrase was never really championed by the artists it was applied to, in part because its premise was cumbersome and vague, but mostly because it was tied to a particular moment in which country music was understood—briefly and mistakenly—as inherently mainstream. (That idea, at least, has dissipated: anyone who’s ever spent any time pawing through a Used Country LPs bin or listening to “Drinks After Work” knows that country music, as a whole, is completely insane.) Still, in January 1990, when Uncle Tupelo steered a dented Chevy van to Boston’s Fort Apache South and recorded their debut full-length, No Depression, traditional country music seemed antithetical to contemporary punk-rock, and the notion that the two might comingle—might be symbiotic bedfellows, even—required a deep philological reimagining.
Our musical imaginations have become larger, the membranes more permeable; now, being equally invested in the Minutemen and Hank Williams doesn’t seem remotely incongruous. Still, No Depression, which takes its name from J.D. Vaughan’s “No Depression in Heaven”, a gospel track first made famous by the Carter Family in 1936 and then by the New Lost City Ramblers in 1959, and which later inspired a magazine dedicated loosely to alt-country and its analogues, is a heady reminder that genre hasn’t always been so fluid. It’s also a reminder of how strange and turbulent an act Uncle Tupelo was: Country and punk are both vulnerable, impassioned, tenuous enterprises, and the places where they overlap are especially combustible. Uncle Tupelo is typically evoked in discussions of the two outfits it birthed (Wilco and Son Volt), but No Depression is a significant record independent of its fallout.
Uncle Tupelo liked to play fast, but even their slower songs are imbued with a kind of frantic inertia, like some wild-eyed goon sprinting across a tightrope, knowing that if he slows down for even a second, he’ll topple. Part of that can be attributed to the experience of being young and loose in the world—Jeff Tweedy and drummer Mike Heidorn were 22 and Jay Farrar was 23 when they arrived at Fort Apache—but the tangling of sensibilities both musical and extra-musical yielded something remarkable: a raw, lonesome clatter, the singular sound of Midwestern kids getting loud and desperate.
There were a handful of other bands doing comparable work (Jason and the Scorchers were blending country and punk rock as early as 1981; in Britain, the Pogues were fusing elements of Irish vernacular music with a rebellious, adolescent ache), but Uncle Tupelo reached a certain cultural flashpoint first. This reissue—which differentiates itself from a 2003 version by collecting 22 previously unavailable demos and live tracks—proffers a good sense of the band’s trajectory, from the halls and parking lots of Belleville, Ill., through stints opening for Warren Zevon and the Band. The bonus material is demo-heavy (it includes all of 1989’s Not Forever, Just for Now, five songs from the 1987 demo Colorblind and Rhymeless, and two songs from Live and Otherwise, a self-released tape from 1988), which will satisfy Uncle Tupelo completists but likely won’t do much for new fans, who might be better served by just listening to the re-mastered record. Farrar and Tweedy, who share most of the songwriting credits, alternate between earnest, romantic confessions (“I woke up to realize it didn’t mean a thing… Give me back that year,” Tweedy hollers in “That Year”) and a populist, blue-collar righteousness likely nipped from Woody Guthrie (even the cover emulates an old Folkways LP). In both instances, whiskey is fundamental (“I got drunk and I fell down,” Farrar and Tweedy sing in an especially effortless bit of harmony).
Nodding to their predecessors (and supposed foes) in Nashville—where writing isn’t necessarily tantamount to performance, and songs are constantly reclaimed, apportioned, sold—Uncle Tupelo never eschewed a good cover, and their take on the Flying Burrito Brothers’ “Sin City” is especially doleful, heavy with a particular kind of resignation: Farrar’s voice sounds sodden, acquiescent, like a kid who’s just been hit in the face with a water balloon. “It seems like this whole town’s insane,” he sings, his voice glum. What Gram Parsons imbued with a mystical, West Coast incredulity, Farrar handles more like a shrug: “The scientists say it’ll all wash away, but we don’t believe anymore.” The sentiment’s sanguine enough, except that Farrar treats the “but” a lot more like “because”: we’ve sinned ourselves into oblivion, and nothing’s gonna keep out the Lord’s burning rain.
Ultimately, worry is the thing that animates No Depression and what, 24 years out, still resonates the most: it’s a part-panicked, part-dispirited, part-defiant reaction to broad social injustices and personal defeats, all the things that make the world seem untenable. The circumstances might reconfigure, but the sentiment remains: life is unfair.
Uncle Tupelo made No Depression for just $3,500 (the studio’s house producers, Sean Slade and Paul Kolderie, lent Farrar the same 1961 Les Paul guitar J. Mascis jammed on Dinosaur Jr.’s Bug). The band released three more records before splitting—acrimoniously—in 1994. Farrar and Tweedy both went on to lead successful bands, and in the two decades since they parted, reimagining Americana has become its own cottage industry, a fury of wool vests and reconditioned banjos and oiled beards. Alt-country doesn’t mean much anymore because country doesn’t mean much anymore; genre feels like a relic of the record store era, back when hand-labeled plastic dividers still parsed sound into neat categories.
It’s challenging, then, to appreciate the boldness of No Depression, the extent to which the members of Uncle Tupelo insisted on interdependency, on an American story. We don’t have to do that anymore—folks don’t self-identify in the same way, and hardly anyone loves just one genre monogamously—but there’s still something furious and prideful here, something worth hearing.
