Uncle Tupelo's No Depression - 30 Years Of An Album Worth Listenin'

Over the past few months, I rated my Top 100 favorite album. Narcissistic but fun.

In hindsight, I did miss a couple vital albums. One that actually just turned 30 years old a couple weeks ago was the Uncle Tupelo debut No Depression.

1990 when the album was released it was during a really important time in my music listening history. At 17 years old I had my first car and was no longer regulated to just the local record store which at the time did not have too deep a selection. Now I could venture on my own down to Smash and Orpheus Records in Georgetown for a nice selection of punk and new wave respectively. A trip to the used record store in College Park where I could trade in my unwanted CD for a great selection of all sorts of Alternative, Punk Rock Hardcore, Metal, and everything else on LP, CD, or even cassettes. These stores along with the Record Theater right outside Baltimore City on Liberty Road where I bought Nirvana's Bleach and Jawbreaker's Unfun are long gone, except for Smash which still survives at another location. 

Another store that was formally just out of reach was Vinyl Ink in Silver Spring, MD. I’m pretty sure this was where I found a copy of the recently released No Depression.

The album was released on Giant Records, only now renamed Rockville Records. A name perfect for a record company that put out this album.

The band had been described as “Hank Williams meets Husker Du”. Even though at the time, the only Husker Du albums I had heard were  Zen Arcade and maybe one of the two major-label albums, they were already becoming one of my new favorite bands.

Unfortunately that time because of being played on commercial radio in the area I was more familiar with Hank Williams Jr than Senior. This made me a little cautious.

Once the play button was hit on the CD player, I was sure the purchase was correct.

The album has an awesome lead-off track in "Graveyard Shift". It also serves as a great introduction to guitarist Jay Farrar's vocals, as song #2 does for bassist  Jeff Tweedy on "This Year". 

In song three the bands do an acoustic number in the title track. I wouldn't find out until years later when I had a whole store containing all types of CDs to listen to that the song was a cover of the classic made famous by the very early folk/county band The Carter Family, which Johnny Cash's wife June was a member at one point. 

There are also a couple songs dealing with small-town life, like "Factory Belt" at Track #5. I always interpreted when  Jay Farrer sings "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" The character in the story is relating how he sees the "Mad men in suits walking about" and thinks they are no better than him. So why waste his life here just working in the factory?

Another would be "Train" at Track 8. Jeff Tweedy sings I'm twenty-one, and I'm scared as hell.I quit school, I'm healthy as a horse. Because of all that I'll be the first one to die in a war". This probably many small-town young men across the country were scared of happening at one time. 

Side note: This was probably the first time I heard the name Roger McGuinn, lead singer for The Byrds, A few songs had been heard in passing but soon I was seeking the whole Byrds discography. 

This song as well as "Flatness" right before it and of course the lead-off track are perfect examples of why Sean Slade and Paul Q Kolderie were perfect choices to record the album. Uncle Tupelo picked the duo because they liked the job they had done on Dinosuar Jr's Bug album just a few years earlier. The duo was great at letting bands get loud, adding just the right amount of fuzz and distortion without it getting out of control, drowning out the vocals. or Mike Heidorn's drums. Sean and Paul had also just recorded the soon-to-be-released Lemonheads album Lovey and would go on to do Morphine's Cure for Pain, fIREHOSE's Flyin' The Flannel, Radiohead's debut Pablo Honey, and many more. 

Many subjects and characters in the songs on No Depression are timeless. The ones in "Screen Door"  could be from the year the album was released, possibly from 20+ years before, present-day, or 20+ years from now. The same goes for the song right before it "Life Worth Livin'", my favorite song on the album. 

The last song "John Hardy" closes the album out. This is another song made famous by the Carter Family, a fact I would again learn years later, The only difference now is I was familiar with the lyrics from singing it at a summer camp years before, Imagine the backlash a camp would get today if they had campers singing a song that goes "John Hardy was a desperate little man. He carried two guns every day. He shot down a man on that West Virginia line"?

On the next couple of albums, two electric and one acoustic, Uncle Tupelo would add more members, taking a little away from their sound. They were very good albums but I listen to them about a tenth of the time that very same copy of No Depression I have owned for the past 30 years makes it into my stereo, As it will for another 30 years to come. 

The album pretty much created a new genre, bands like Giant Sand and the Long Ryders have been combining the sound of underground rock with a country vibe for many years, but Uncle Tupelo really put the term "Alt-Country" on the map. The premier magazine of the genre would even take the album's title for its name. 

A couple years because of tension between Jay and Jeff, the band would split up. Jeff would form Wilco, while Jay took drummer Mike and formed Sun Volt. Surprisingly, two bands, I could never get into. 

Are There Any Songs You Consider a "Perfect Song"?

I have a confession to make.

While at college I was involved in the school radio station at Long Island University, CW Post Campus. Our call letters were WCWP. The station had two locations on the dial. 570 on AM, 88.1 FM. For some reason, the FM station was extraordinarily strong. Where most campus radio stations had a very minimal range, ours reached New York City to the West and all the way out East almost to the border of Suffolk County. Nearby New York Tech’s radio station you could barely get a few feet off campus

.

Because of this many of the station programmers and DJs attempted to compete with larger radio stations in the area like the WDRE and WBAB, playing songs in rotation and airing talk shows they felt would be aired on those stations. This basically went against the whole theory of college radio. This would probably be the only time in our future broadcasting careers where we had carte blanch on what to play and talk about while on the air. 

I, on the other hand, took full advantage of my playlist-less, zero-rotation two-hour shows to play whatever I liked and thought listeners would like to hear. There would be plenty of time for conformity later.

But on to the confession.

The radio station had a whole wall of records, mostly of heavy metal and hard rock which the WCWP had been known for through the ’80s. There were a few punk rock albums mixed in as well. Each album had WCWP written all over them, some with notes about which songs could and could not be played on the air. Opposite the AM and FM studios, there was another room holding an almost equal number of compact discs, all with their own WCWPs written all over them. The writing was to let everyone know the albums were the property of the station, not to be taken home with them.

But they forgot to label one of them.

One afternoon I was doing my show “The Fuzzy Blast”, named after a Dinosaur Jr bootleg (I still have to this day), when I saw it sitting on the shelf Teenage Fanclub’s not yet released second album Bandwagonesque.

Teenage Fanclube Circa 1991

The year before I picked up the hyped new Scottish indie band Teenage Fanclub’s debut Catholic Education on Matador Records and was instantly a fan. The band was soon snapped up by the still-new DGC records. Bandwagensque was probably one of the most anticipated albums of the year. Even more anticipated than Nirvana’s Nevermind, which DGC had released just a few months before.

 And there it was in all its unmarked up glory with no one else in the whole radio station building with me. To this day it is probably the only thing I have ever stolen in my life. Plus, stolen is a pretty hefty word to use since it probably would have never been played on any of the WCWP DJ’s shows trying to compete with the big stations.

In a way, you could say I was liberating it from years of collecting dust on the shelves in the room opposite the AM and FM studios with all the other CDs that were not getting played. It was going to be played by me an awful lot over the next 29 years. The very same copy sits in my collection right now and will get plenty more spins in the future.

Whew. Feels good getting that off my chest after all these years. Now on to the music.

Now I could go into a long explanation about everything I like and don’t like about the album, and it is a great album that would go on to be picked by Spin magazine as the best album of the year. Yes, even beating out Nirvana’s Nevermind. But that is not the reason I want to write about Bandwagonesque.  I do even not consider it my favorite Teenage Fanclub album. That prize goes to the nosier and much rougher-sounding debut A Catholic Education. The reason why this album came to mind is that it possesses what I consider one of the most perfect pop songs out there in the album's first single “Star Sign”.  

To get their full experience of the song you must pass on the single and go straight to the much better album version.  This is because the single, and video to follow, go straight into the songs. The album version has a little over a minute of droning guitars getting louder and louder, like a rollercoaster climbing higher and higher before that first drop. This builds up the anticipation of what you know is going to go over the other side and deliver that thrilling ride. And it does go over but just like those rollercoasters that pause at the very top just for an ever so small moment, so does "Star Sign" at the 1:13 mark where the droning guitars trail off, and the song really kicks in. 

And just like those rollercoasters, once it sets off the next two minutes are quite a ride. 

The first aspect that makes a song perfect is the lyrics. 

Bassist Gerard Love sings simple but awesome lyrics like “Hey, there’s a Horseshoe on my door, big deal” The vocals flow perfectly through each verse. The “big deal” stabbed a little of the slacker attitude which early 90’s rock would go on to be none for.  

"Star Sign" also has a perfect balance, Each good luck charm mentioned is balanced out with bad luck like “And say there's a black cat on the floor. Big deal”. Basically, that’s life. Good and bad luck. It really is no big deal. 

The lyrics are looking a little to the future when in the third verse the song’s narrator states  “Hey there's a side of me unknown, big deal. And say, should this unknown force be shown big deal.”  

The second aspect that makes a perfect song is the music.

"Star Sign" is filled with Teenage Fanclub’s melodic power/pop-influenced guitar hooks, with just a slight jangle present. Now with producer Don Fleming’s new clear production, instead of the rough self-produced sound of the debut A Catholic Education. 

The lyrics and music combined together to form a perfect song. A song I consider so perfect there have been times when I have played it up to three times in a row.  

The day in 1991 when I brought that contraband copy of Bandwagonesque back to my dorm I think it was more like five. 

This may be too short of an explanation but a perfect song should be able to speak for itself. Give it a listen"