Part 2 of a 3-part series
Alt-country and indie rock icons Jay Farrar and Jeff Tweedy first started hanging out after realizing their shared love of punk rock in high school English class. Farrar admired the Sex Pistols, and Tweedy adored the Ramones.
Both stole punk records, like Elvis Costello's "My Aim Is True," from their local library and, along with fellow Uncle Tupelo member Mike Heidorn, frequently ruined the local football player and rich kid parties by dropping in unannounced, scratching their Fleetwood Mac and Journey LPs, and blasting Black Flag and Minutemen tapes instead.
Farrar, Tweedy and Heidorn continued to comb music's history for the next great punk rocker. What they soon discovered was a sound totally unrelated to punk in a sonic sense but very much related to it in a subject matter sense: "After punk rock, [folk and country music] was the thing we were really into," Jeff Tweedy told UNo MAS, which interviewed Tweedy on Feb. 19, 1994. "We kept tracing [punk rock] back farther and farther. We thought, 'Punk's okay, but man, this is the real punk rock.' But you know, Woody Guthrie was a lot more punk than that - he lived it."
Guthrie could very well be considered one of the first punk rockers - catalogue of rebellious songs, a guitar adorned with the slogan "This machine kills fascists," and a connection to the Communist Party. Whether the rest of the world believed this did not matter to Uncle Tupelo. Guthrie was their latest punk hero, their reason for juxtaposing his dustbowl-era folk with the razor burn menace of 1980s hardcore punk.
Uncle Tupelo mined other folk and country sounds for inspiration. They discovered the blues of Leadbelly and the country of the Carter Family and the Louvin Brothers. Both sounds were quickly incorporated into the band's brash brand of punk rock and can be heard in equal measures on their first album, which was named after the A.P. Carter song "No Depression."
On that release, some critics claim that a new genre was born: "Uncle Tupelo pretty much invented a new genre when they released "No Depression," a collection of country ballads played with the fury of hardcore," music historian Piero Scaruffi wrote in his book "A History of Rock Music: 1951-2000." This genre became known as alternative-country, No Depression folk, cow punk, insurgent country and a variety of other names. The Uncle Tupelo debut "became something of a blue print in the emerging alternative-country movement and for the work of bands such as Whiskeytown, the Old 97's, Marah and half the roster of Bloodshot Records (the Chicago-based home of 'insurgent country')," according to Chicago Tribune music critic and Rolling Stone contributor Greg Kot.
Nirvana, too, was actively involved in expanding punk rock's palette by injecting the genre with a pop sensibility. Even from a young age, Cobain was transfixed by the power of pop rock. He listened to nothing but Beatles songs until the age of 9. He began picking up Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath albums once his dad joined a record club. The band that crystallized the sound of Cobain's ambition best, however, was the Boston, Massachusetts-based Pixies. The Pixies were, at face value, a raucous punk rock act. What differentiated them from every other raucous-sounding punk band was the manner in which they wrote their songs and the methods by which they incorporated pop hooks and arrangements into their otherwise cacophonous sound.
Cobain lifted this ideal - to combine music as contagious as the Beatles' with music as harsh as Black Flag's - and transposed it into "Nevermind," Nirvana's breakthrough album. Cobain told Rolling Stone that the album's first song, "Smells Like Teen Spirit," was his attempt to plagiarize a Pixies song. All the elements of a Pixies pop-punk song were there: the melodic chord progressions, the crunching guitar chords, the harsh but still catchy singing and, most importantly, the quiet verse, loud chorus dynamic.
Nearly every successful band to emerge from the alternative-rock explosion of the early 1990s embraced this Pixies-pioneered song structure. Everyone from Weezer to Radiohead incorporated it into their music in some form or another.
The final installment of this series will examine how both grunge and alternative-country continue to influence contemporary artists.
