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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
In so many ways, the story of Uncle Tupelo is the same do-it-yourself rock 'n' roll tale that has played out countless times in American life over the last half-century. It's about growing up in a dreary small town (Belleville, Ill.), and grabbing on to music like a life raft. In the heart of REO Speedwagon country, Tweedy was a teenage Ramones fan while Farrar worshiped the Sex Pistols. "It [was] like the two visitors from Mars," said Farrar. "We felt like the only two people listening to that type of music."
So the guys start a band (picking the name by randomly selecting one noun each from separate columns of possibilities scribbled on a legal pad), win a local following (in this case at a little St. Louis club called Cicero's), meet up with a horned-rim-glasses-wearing record-store owner who, despite having no experience in management, agrees to help them chart a path in the industry. They make a record in 10 days for $3,500, and then tour cross-country -- surviving on revenues from T-shirt sales, not tickets or records -- in a 1970 Ford Econoline van that was eventually traded in for $50.
The band paid its dues. "They were touring their asses off," recalls Jeff Pachman, who signed the little-known band to Rockville Records. "There wasn't even time to do laundry. So you'd see, Day 1, T-shirt with logo on the font; Day 2, same T-shirt with logo on the back; Day 3, same T-shirt with logo inside out. They were drunk when they played the Continental [in New York] -- Jeff fell off the stage and onto a table -- and they were great. I hadn't had my socks blown off by a band like that since the first time I saw the Replacements."
And just to complete the American music-industry fable, Uncle Tupelo got screwed over by its record company. Much to embarrassment of Pachman, his bosses at Rockville Records, which sold more than 200,000 copies of Uncle Tupelo's first three albums -- a killing for a small indie label -- never paid the band a penny in royalties. (In 2003, Farrar and Tweedy won an undisclosed court settlement.)
But what separated Uncle Tupelo from the majority of basement bands who give it a shot was that Farrar and Tweedy created something entirely original and compelling. In the mid-'80s, when they started out, and when rock's elite were still focused on the Clash's London and the Talking Heads' East Village, nothing could have been less cool than covering old Carter Family songs, welcoming a steel guitar, and doing it all without a hint of irony. But Uncle Tupelo didn't cradle its throwback sound with reverential nostalgic care. The band's signature start-stop crunch had more in common with the Pixies than the Louvin Brothers.
Farrar and Tweed made for an usual rock pairing, in that both were withdrawn and, during the Uncle Tupelo days, they often appeared uneasy -- certainly overly earnest -- onstage, where shoe-gazing was the norm. Musically, Tweedy provided the group's small bouts of buoyancy, while Farrar filled the role of "Grapes of Wrath"-type brooder. Buddy Brian Henneman, the talented front man for the Bottle Rockets, calls Farrar "the griever, a young man who wore an old man's scars." As Kot notes, it was the griever's voice -- that once-in-a-lifetime voice -- that gave Uncle Tupelo the "blue-eyed soul heaviness," and demanded that attention be paid from the first note of "Graveyard Shift," the opening track on "No Depression." (When the band split, Farrar founded Son Volt, whose stunning debut, 1995's "Trace," still stands as the quintessential alt-country record. Farrar, however, has not been able to sustain that quality over the years.)
Today, Tweedy looks back and dismisses a lot of the mythology and "revisionist history" that's been built up around a band that put out only four records. He's right; Uncle Tupelo was overrated. The band made just one truly great album, 1993's "Anodyne," whose stellar wall-of-guitar tracks like "The Long Cut" and "We've Been Had" still stand alongside anything Pearl Jam, Nirvana or the Smashing Pumpkins did in terms of rock's great rallying cries of the '90s.
Still, by the time of "Anodyne's" release, Farrar and Tweedy's relationship, surprisingly distant even during the good times, became increasingly strained as Tweedy began to write and sing more of the band's songs. In the liner notes for 2002's retrospective, "Uncle Tupelo: An Anthology," Tweedy, retracing his progressively prominent role in the band, mentioned that Farrar "encouraged" him to sing songs. Then Tweedy corrected himself, conceding that Farrar had simply refused to sing any of Tweedy's songs, so he had to do it himself.
