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.
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