Booting Up Alt.Country’s Online Dance
The mid-90s sound featured indie turns on retro country and roots rock, but its forward-looking torchbearers grew it on that newfangled internet
By Barry Mazor
March 28th marked the 20th anniversary of the release of the first Wilco album, A.M., the one with such Jeff Tweedy-written songs as “Box Full of Letters” and “Passenger Side,” tracks that helped define that mid-to-late 90s phenomenon, alternative country rock. By that September, Son Volt, led by Jay Farrar, Tweedy’s former musical partner in the seminal St. Louis-area band Uncle Tupelo, released their initial album, Trace.
With those two major label releases, fans of the indie twang tendency and media prognosticators alike began predicting that alt.country was surely “the next big thing.” Fueling the acceptance scare were the signings of Whiskeytown (Ryan Adams, et al.) and The Old 97s (Rhett Miller, et al.) after SXSW 1996. Those predictions — and much else that made that scene, began online. Undiluted alternative country as then understood never did reach massively beyond its core fan base — though I suspect that no small percentage of the hicksters who cared about it would have renounced it instantly if it had.
The mid-90s episode was not the first time injections of roots-linked music had changed rock & roll; similar surges under some name or other had happened repeatedly — rockabilly in the 50s, folk rock and blues rock in the 6os, country rock in the 70s, cowpunk in the 80s. A singular non-musical aspect of this particular roots rock update should be recalled, though, because it predicted so many of the ways we catch and share new music since. Alt.country was “regional roots music” all right, but the region was the internet.
It rose at precisely the same moment the net went mainstream, and primitive as that era of the cranky dial-up 14.4K modem was by today’s standards (a small still photo could be downloaded in about 20 minutes!), that communication technology was crucial for the way the music found its audience, linked it, and united it. The term “alt.country” itself echoes the constructions of the early, functioning, pre-spam Usenet newsgroups.
The often tech-savvy fans and bands of 90s alt.country had largely come of age in the 1976-‘86 new wave/punk/indie college rock era, but had developed a taste for bands with a strong song, even narrative song sense along the way, then discovered similar strengths in country music. The Minutemen, X, and the Meat Puppets would be cited as influences, not just “Hank Williams and Patsy Cline,” and for those who also favored more melodic turns, Power Pop outfits from the Flaming Groovies to Big Star, or Paisley Underground bands such as Green on Red and The Long Ryders. The latter, like the Twin Cities’ Jayhawks, had often shared stages and fans with 80s cowpunk, and their music referenced Byrds-Burritos era country and folk rock. Some of the alt.country players and followers had grown up in households that listened to country, rebelled against that in their teen years (having gone punk or hip-hop or name it), and were now pulled back to their own roots, with alternative country the re-entry point.
Most alt.country bands, famed or otherwise, came out of the same college towns their immediate indie and cowpunk predecessors had — Seattle, Austin, Athens, Minneapolis, Raleigh-Durham, Nashville, or from emerging twang scenes in the biggest cities — Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Atlanta. In virtually all of those places there were fledgling labels that began recording the music, pretty tentatively, and there were also those with early net access — computing engineers and software developers, librarians working on databases, adjunct professors of this and that — some of them had early access to pre-web online bulletin boards, and found each other that way, and some of those went for this music.
By late 1994, Uncle Tupelo enthusiasts who’d signed onto a very early AOL discussion board about the band just as it broke up, looked to broaden the discussion of music they cared for and re-named the space “No Depression,” after the hoary “no hope but in the afterlife” Carter Family song that had been repeatedly revisited in bluegrass, the folk revival, and then by Uncle Tupelo in the group’s first CD. Among those who signed on there was Peter Blackstock, who along with Grant Alden would launch the alt.country scare’s bible, No Depression magazine, with Son Volt on its first cover, in the fall of 1995.
In the emerging specialized e-mail listserv space, the list “Postcard” went into action (named for another Uncle Tupelo number) around the same time, as a place where fans could now argue over being pro-Jeff (Tweedy) or pro-Jay (Farrar) after the split. While that list was temporarily down, a spin-off, “Postcard2, The Passenger Side” was set up, out of Seattle, and stayed around, with considerable influence, as it evolved into a home base for many who’d become musicians, on-air DJs, journalists, and organizers in the field, with interests in a widening range of bands — Steve Earle, Robbie Fulks, Lucinda Williams, the Drive by Truckers, Dale Watson.
I’d been writing about related music for Crawdaddy and the Soho Weekly News 20 years earlier still, but was now editor of a high tech trade magazine for digital imaging developers, so I was online at home early. I started looking up music-related sites on the brand new World Wide Web, and given my interests, signed on to both the AOL “ND” board and Postcard 2. Members of both groups soon took the daring step of moving from long-range virtual (and vague) familiarity to meeting each other face to face, first at SXSW parties at Austin thrown by No Depression magazine, and the annual Yard Dog gallery shows staged by Chicago’s Bloodshot Records, and then, in the case of P2, in inventing the annual non-profit Twangfest multi-day fest in St Louis. Twangfest began as a get-together so P2 bands could get to hear and see in person what they were all saying they did online. Volunteers were soon booking major acts in the field for it, too. Listener supported station KDHX sponsored it for a number of years; “Twang Gang” volunteers are again running it today, with it’s 19th annual edition set for this June.
With the combined tech and twang sensibilities of members of the original Postcard2 list, ideas were floated and projects tried out which, looked at now, seem prescient. “P2” had enough on-air DJs from new, mainly public radio-affiliated Americana stations on the list, with limited streaming capability, that the idea emerged, “Couldn’t we try to set up a schedule where someone was playing the music somewhere most of the time, and people here voted on the programming?” That one proved logistically difficult, but the seeds of concepts like podcasts and even Pandora affinity group programming were lurking there. Live posts from shows soon followed. I showed older performance film and video from the arena during Twangfests for several years running, assembled from list members’ private collections (“Twangclips”) that amazed people then — and would be YouTube throwaway sets now.
An idea which was put into effect for a while (and which a lot of financially strapped bands would value still) was setting up dispersed P2 affiliates with connections at local venues; bands would help each other get signed for gigs at these places, and house them while they were in town, so newcomers could take to the road with enough bookings not to spend all of it on motels, gas and beer. A number of list members who somehow were contributing thousands of words a week to P2 discussions, while claiming to be out carousing at honky tonks nightly (and some actually were), would go on to do a lot of heavy editorial lifting in the alt.country press and beyond — David Cantwell, Bill Friskics-Warren, Jon Weisberger, Roy Kasten, Geoffrey Himes, Linda Ray, Carl Wilson, Kandia Crazy Horse — and my own involvement there got me back in the music writing game, which I’ve remained in ever since.
The disconnected, fledgling alt.country communities that came together online reached enough of a critical mass to have some musical effect. Already-established writers took notice. The late (and legendary) Chet Flippo, who was a silent P2 “lurker,” would often pick up on conversations from the list and raise the topic in his national column as “something people are discussing on the Internet.” Peter Applebone, of the New York Times, reported that there were these “internet lists, like one called postcard2, where the faithful debate fine points of alt.country minutiae like obsessive honky tonk Trotskyites.” Richard “Pete” Peterson, author of the important and lasting book Creating Country Music, studied and reported on Postcard 2’s essentially unprecedented sociology and music sharing experiences in another book, Music Scenes.
With the founding of the Americana radio chart, organization, and eventually, even Grammy category, much of what was being built between friends and bands and commentators in those fledgling online groups had its mainstream moment, if, inevitably, in a somewhat evolved form. Alt.country has essentially been absorbed into the broader, sturdier Americana format (louder division), and by this point, we see some young bands emulating or playing with those sounds, one more step in an off and on yet ongoing process.
This writer went from being a long single tech magazine editor based in the East Village, to the full-time music journalist and author on related matters I’ve been all through this new century, married to another P2 music enthusiast. We’ve lived and worked in Nashville since 2003. These things began online for me, too.
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Barry Mazor is the author of Ralph Peer and the Making of Popular Roots Music and Meeting Jimmie Rodgers, and he is a regular contributor to
Wall Street Journal
