This being Cinco de Mayo I simultaneously regret both my sleep-deprived inability to muster the wherewithal to think of anything properly Mexican to contribute while also lamenting my compelling need to post something this "almost but not quite". Whatever, this is about as authentically Hispanic as any Tucson band springing forth whole cloth from the forehead of Giant Sand like a cross between Zeus and Gizmo can expect to be. Ladies and gentlemen, the new Calexico.
Another early entry in the alt-country sweepstakes, Blood Oranges were a band that had their hearts in the right places but were maybe a bit too polished and loyal to the dying roots rock scene. Never remotely popular in their time, even today the Oranges are rarely mentioned outside of Americana crate digging circles. Still a fine band in their own right, but if you've already done Uncle Tupelo to death and want more stripped down alt country of similar authenticity, you're better off ditching the slick veneers of the Silos and Blood Oranges and going with either the Jayhawks or Freakwater, neither of which had albums out in 1990 to fit in with present coverage. They both beat Uncle Tupelo to vinyl, though.
The importance of Uncle Tupelo is impossible to overstate. Did they invent what they became known for? Oh, sweet love of God, no. The mixing of punk rock swagger with traditional country and rural folk elements had become common enough (particularly in the LA music scene) that the term "cowpunk" was already common parlance by the mid-80s. And, especially early on, there were definitely cornerstones of the Tupelo sound that owed nearly everything to the by then stale cowpunk scene:
"Before I Break"
But in our haste to reach for antecedents let's not undersell the more exploratory side of the band's legacy, which came when they turned the volume down and got introspective. At that point they tended to jettison punk rock altogether and became something more akin to Neil Young acolytes:
"Life Worth Livin'"
Eventually Uncle Tupelo - Jay Farrar, Jeff Tweedy and drummer Mike Heidorn - would outgrow these formative influences and forge something unique, something elemental, out of that decidedly un-chic foundation, but when No Depression was unleashed on the public in 1990 the trio was still in full on deconstruction mode, stripping cowpunk and Neil Young's patented proto-grunge down to the frame, dowsing it with half full cans of mismatched primer and taking it for a fast ride down the country lanes of Southwestern Illinois. It was that alchemy which would prove prophetic and vastly influential.
"Whiskey Bottle"
Lastly, it would be remiss not to mention that the title cut from Uncle Tupelo's debut, itself a cover of an old Carter Family song, became the moniker of the magazine No Depression, a bi-monthly publication first appearing in 1995 that arguably did more to define the nascent musical genre "Americana", as well as consolidate it into an actual "scene", than any other band or entity on the planet.
One of the key artists bridging the gap between the jangle pop / post-punk scene of the 80s in Athens, GA and the later country-rock / Americana predominance in that same city, Vic Chesnutt established himself as an articulate outsider early on. Produced by fellow Athens alum Michael Stipe, Little constituted a low key bid at folky Americana the same year Uncle Tupelo was taking credit for establishing the sub-genre across the country in Illinois. Few of his contemporaries could match Chesnutt for sheer literacy, but a reedy voice and insistence on hewing close to acoustic roots music found the man a footnote next to his more "rockist" Americana peers. On Christmas Day, 2009, Chesnutt succumbed to an overdose of muscle relaxants, prescription drugs having been a mainstay of his entire adult life after a car accident left him paralyzed from the waist down at the age of 18.
When Opal splintered in the midst of a tour for their 1987 opus Happy Nightmare Baby, guitarist David Roback replaced vocalist Kendra Smith with Hope Sandoval and briefly continued the Opal brand, penning a handful of new songs for a second Opal full length to be titled Ghost Highway. By 1989 he had renamed the band Mazzy Star and the following year that band debuted with She Hangs Brightly. Building on his Paisley Underground roots by incorporating various Americana elements - blues, folk, country - into the Paisley bouillabaisse of psychedelia, dream pop and 60s rock, Mazzy Star took a few years before finding their feet with the hit 1994 single, "Fade Into You" (itself charting only a year or so after its parent album dropped), but in retrospect She Hangs Brightly is hardly a furtive creative effort. The song "Ghost Highway" sounds driven and self assured while setting the template for the band's metamorphosis from the Paisley overtones of Opal into the rootsier strains of Mazzy Star.
While we're being all retro... "Corner Store" was originally recorded in a more upbeat rendition on Jonathan Richman's 1986 album It's Time For, but I think this more stripped down Americana version from 1990's Jonathan Goes Country serves the humorous yet wistful lyrics better.
Man, at this point I'm actually much further ahead on the listening curve then I am in actually posting worthy singles, so apologies in advance if these next few are fairly sparse on the background material. While playing catch up I'll try to limit myself to stuff that maybe didn't warrant a novel's worth of explanatory captioning to begin with.
This first one is by Beasts of Bourbon, one of the many 80s bands from Australia still keeping the faith. For those of you unfamiliar with any Oz bands aside from INXS and AC/DC, the 80s in Australia was largely dominated by the twin strains of garage rock and an obsession with rural Americana, the latter usually twisted into some sort of gothic folk in the vein of Nick Cave. BoB pretty much dabbled in both of these things.
