Jamming with the dead in Athens, Georgia

Sparked by the recent inaugural Uncle Tupelo tribute show in St. Louis, I am posting some chapters from my unpublished musical memoir that deal with those guys. This is Chapter 80, so it follows immediately upon my previous post, "No Chris Bess".


Jamming with the dead
By Chris King


Toward the end of that summer, Uncle Tupelo finally released the record they made with Peter Buck of REM. I didn’t rush right out and buy it. I was broke, thanks to my broken foot, and I wasn’t keeping up with post-punk bands as I once had. I was too busy casting my musical glance backward through the folklore stacks. Rampant buzz about the new Uncle Tupelo record began to draw me in, though. From the sound of it, I was hardly the only Cicero’s songster who had caught the folklore bug.

I eventually broke down and bought the record, which was titled after the session dates, March 16-20, 1992. It did require some breaking down on my part, because acute gig envy had set in by then. Everything I had heard about this record made me wish that it was our record. In the wake of a pop album, Still Feel Gone, and on the verge of a major label signing, Uncle Tupelo had gone to Athens, Georgia, holed up with the guitar player of REM, and recorded an acoustic batch of mostly traditional music. Brian Henneman from Chicken Truck went down with them to play on it, everything from slide guitar to mandolin. All of this sounded like a perfect description of the right thing to do.

I could hardly believe my ears when I finally dropped needle on vinyl. Not only were these guys digging in the same folkloric dirt I was digging in, they had even struck the same gold – and staked the first claim.

I had been dumping hundreds of folklore records onto cassettes in the basement of the Wash. U. music library. Nothing – other than Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music – got deeper under my skin than a collection of Appalachian field recordings called High Atmosphere. This was bare-knuckle, gutbucket stuff. Mostly spare, sparkling banjo miniatures, with shivery unaccompanied ballad singing and truly strange story songs.

My favorite of the songs – “Rolling Mills are Burning Down” by a guy from Marshall, North Carolina named George Landers – had the wildest vocal I had ever heard. The vocal staggered around a wobbly banjo figure with slurry recklessness, like a wild-eyed drunk that couldn’t stay on his feet. The garbling of the words felt like part of the emotion of the song, as if the guy could hardly bear to spit out his story, an incoherent tale about torched mills on fire, a girl gone wrong, and a longing for the cold grave.

Some guy named John Cohen made these field recordings back in 1965. He got such good material, he suggested in his liner notes, because he went around asking for banjo tunings. A technical opening question about their instrument seemed to put the mountain men at ease. The result were these intense, unguarded, almost unbearably intimate performances. Part of the record’s addictive quality, for an amateur folklorist like me, was the running thread of conversation between John Cohen and his mountain sources. At the head and tail of the tunes, you could hear Cohen’s calm, likable voice encouraging the musicians, whose speech had grit and character equal in fascination to their rustic instruments and songs.

I was all on my own in the folklore stacks. I had never seen a copy of High Atmosphere (issued by Rounder on LP in 1974) anywhere outside of the Wash. U. music library basement. No one I knew seemed to even know it existed. Now, spinning on my turntable, was unmistakable evidence that Uncle Tupelo had gone down to Athens, sat around with Peter Buck of REM, and recorded some of these songs!

Three of their old time covers – “Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down”, “Warfare,” and “I Wish My Baby Was Born” – all appeared on High Atmosphere. It was obvious from the Uncle Tupelo recordings in Athens that the High Atmosphere versions were the sources of their songs. The coincidence pretty much knocked me out. As I blabbed about this discovery at Cicero’s, one of the basement bar’s beautiful bartenders, Heather Crist, confirmed that Jeff Tweedy had become fixated on one particular tape of Appalachian field recordings. “He was playing it constantly when we were driving around,” Heather said, as she poured me a beer. So Tweedy was even turning Cicero’s barmaids onto this shit. My gig envy got far worse.

That Uncle Tupelo’s versions of these songs were thin and unconvincing compared to the High Atmosphere originals was no consolation. Nobody my age – perhaps no American alive – could touch the voices of those old mountain men and women. Worlds have disappeared since they sang. Something in their singing was one of the things that went away. No contemporary cover version could recapture it. At least Uncle Tupelo had the sense and guts to grasp this forgotten document of that lost world, learn the material word for word and note for note, and put these fabulous songs into play once again.

Of course, reviving mountain music was as old as the hills in 1992. I didn’t know it at the time, but John Cohen had played with Mike Seeger in the folk revival combo New Lost City Ramblers. Cohen was right in the heart of the folk revival of the ‘50s and ‘60s, which would turn back into rock & roll when Bob Dylan plugged in. But I had skipped over the folk revival of the previous generation, bypassing the middlemen. I stumbled from post-punk right into the ancients themselves, face to face in the folklore stacks.

And now, some guys my age – who grew up in the same basement bar as me – were waking up the ancients, the very same ghosts I had claimed for my own. Uncle Tupelo wasn’t content to enshrine the dead, however: they poured them a shot of moonshine and jammed with them in Georgia.

I felt the same urgency as when I first heard Butt of Jokes bust out songs in the spirit of the Meat Puppets at a campus battle of the bands, when I was a lonely college transfer student, alone with all of this new music and nobody to share it with me. My sacred text wasn’t my secret, after all. It was still sacred, but it wasn’t a secret. It was out in the open, walking around, looking for gigs.

And what do you know? The guys from Butt of Jokes were my buddies now. They were my bandmates. So was a pretty good banjo player in the hills of Tennessee, who happened to be learning the art of capturing sound on tape.

Folklore wasn’t a basement in a university music library. It was a wide open road.

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From And Let Him Ply His Music: Adventures in Post-Punk and Amateur Folklore (unpublished).

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Previous posts in this series

In the hothouse basement
The allure of the ever-elusive exposure gig
Opening for Uncle Tupelo
A meeting in Old Blue
Strangers in the village
Managing your religion
A farewell to Old Blue
Trading horses
No Chris Bess

No Chris Bess

Sparked by the recent inaugural Uncle Tupelo tribute show in St. Louis, I am posting some chapters from my unpublished musical memoir that deal with those guys. This is Chapter 79, nine chapters on from my previous post, "Trading horses".


No Chris Bess
By Chris King


The front and back of gigbooks from our years on the road always have hand-drawn calendars, crowded with tour itineraries, details for court appearances (I had a parking ticket problem), and other bits of crucial dated information. “Pay doctor! Pay hospital!” starts popping up in the summer of 1992, after I broke my foot playing football on tour, and stretches longer into my future than I care to remember. And another phrase becomes common as that summer faded into fall: “NO CHRIS BESS”.

Scheduling around Chris Bess’ absence when he drove to Massachusetts to play on the second Uncle Tupelo record, Still Feel Gone, became a pattern. It got more and more convoluted as Chris’ services became more widely known through our travels across the country. Now I was trying to schedule a traveling band around a traveling accordion player.

In a way, we made things harder on ourselves. If there was a place on your stage for a charismatic sideman with comic gifts and virtuoso chops on accordion, then we were a mobile showroom for what you needed. As we slid into the category of goof rock, we were constantly paired with bands that drooled over Chris Bess. Quite a few of them got over their shy crush and asked him out, and quickly learned that he was an approachable guy who truly loved to play – and was starting to look for an escape hatch.

It’s human nature, and a law of the marketplace: don’t quit one job until you have found another one. In fact, take full advantage of the resources at the job you want to leave to land the job you want to have. Chris Bess never phoned it in with Enormous Richard – he played his butt off, every night – but he was certainly mailing out resumes from the stage.

And who would blame him? The guy liked a smooth, assured sound with a big, accessible shtick. Our ass pop period, which he had ushered in, had suited him just fine. Then Matt and I dumped the band upside down the second Elijah got back from Hong Kong and Johnny got bit by the Hasil Adkins gig bug. What was smooth and assured in our sound suddenly became nervy and unpredictable. Skuntry was a chaos that could be transcendent or godawful, from gig to gig, song to song, even moment to moment. It began to cut the big, accessible shtick that Chris Bess loved back to our old, problematic, messy hilarity.

If Enormous Richard actually held gagmen sessions, where we all sat down at a table and tore the act apart, perhaps we could have salvaged the Chris Bess version of the band, or at least ended it as adults. Instead, we were headed straight for the schoolyard.

Imagine Elijah, abandoning a dopey blues band in Hong Kong and settling down in middle Tennessee, where he knew no one. Then, on select weekends, he gets to join his buddies on the road to play songs with the flavor of his creativity all over them. He knows that Chris Bess now sprawls all over these songs, but Elijah has heard the grumbling, and he knows his old parts are more than welcome with us. He is back from Hong Kong and sprung for the weekend from the hills of Tennessee, and he is going to get his licks in, regardless.

I’m in a band! is what he’s thinking. He stretches out his long legs, encased in stretchy hippy pants. He takes that banjo solo, just like he always did, back when Chris was just a charming stranger who joined us in my sister’s basement to record one song for The Almanac. I’m in a skuntry band! Elijah thinks, as he takes that next banjo solo, too.

The song ends. Elijah wiggles his butt. He’s in a band! His banjo chops are coming back. This is cool! What’s the next song?

Elijah sees Chris Bess motioning to him. It’s the age-old come-hither gesture. Elijah watches the knob of his banjo so he doesn’t hit anybody in the head, and leans back toward Chris to hear what he has to say.

Chris Bess delivers a stinging slap to Elijah’s cheek.

“Let me take a solo once in awhile!” Chris Bess says, in his crabby-old-man voice.

To Chris Bess’ credit, he did convene something of a gagmen session, just before he quit. It was in the kitchen of the Marconi house. That dim, vermin-infested room was the only place where we ever sat together and looked each other in the face, and never for more than a few minutes.

On this night, Chris Bess surprised us with an ultimatum: he would stay in the band, but only if we added a new song to our set list. He produced a ukulele – Chris’ size is such that he really can produce a ukulele, as if from thin air – and sang his new song, “Funny Band from Hell”. I can't say any of the words come back to me now, but I’m sure you get the gist from just the title. This was his I Hate Enormous Richard song.

The songwriting was on the wall.

Chris quit abruptly that fall. He stepped to the mike as we were finishing a gig and announced that he had just played his last show with Enormous Richard, and that was that.

I haven’t set foot onstage with Chris Bess in going on twenty years, and I never see him anymore. But I can always hear his playing, no matter what I’m listening to, if I so desire. It’s an interesting consequence of playing a lot of music with someone, particularly if the musician in question is forceful and original in his playing, as Chris Bess always was.

It’s like I have a Chris Bess track burned into my brain. No matter what is on my stereo, I can mix him in, if I wish. All I have to do is ask my imagination to turn up the accordion, and all of the sudden I hear Chris Bess, his characteristic swelling and surging, his bold and subtle flourishes, his solos that always add to the momentum of the song. It’s the greatest gift one musician can leave with another at the end of the gig.

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From And Let Him Ply His Music: Adventures in Post-Punk and Amateur Folklore (unpublished).

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Previous posts in this series

In the hothouse basement
The allure of the ever-elusive exposure gig
Opening for Uncle Tupelo
A meeting in Old Blue
Strangers in the village
Managing your religion
A farewell to Old Blue
Trading horses

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This stage shot of us pulling our Pale Richard stunt when opening for Pale Divine is one of the few surviving shots of Chris Bess onstage with us.

Trading horses between skuntry and ass pop

Sparked by the recent inaugural Uncle Tupelo tribute show in St. Louis, I am posting some chapters from my unpublished musical memoir that deal with those guys. This is Chapter 70, just around the corner from my previous post, "A farewell to Old Blue".


Trading horses
By Chris King


When we finally recorded a follow-up to (Why It's) Enormous Richard's Almanac in February of 1992, it was a compromise between ass pop and skuntry. The record straddled a line that divided the band into two camps, the accordionist Chris Bess vs. the drummer Matt and me.

Junior, the former child clown, was never quite accepted as possessing an adult vote. Skoob was always a silent partner. Prop him up with a pitcher of beer and a borrowed cigarette and he would chop chords all night long without asking any questions, other than for directions to the bathroom. As for Guitar Karl, he was gone.

The return of Lij had evaporated him. They both occupied roughly the same spot on the gig spectrum: the unpredictable, trippy guy with a natural musical gift. Having them in the same band was like having two guys in the same room at the same party wearing the same bizarre hat. One guy has to leave — or knock off the other guy's hat and beat the shit out of him. Karl left.

There was something of a parting fight — in Louisville, of course. Drunk at an afterhours party, Karl picked up Skoob's acoustic guitar and broke into "Whiskey Bottle", an Uncle Tupelo dirge. I have never liked that song. It strikes me as so ponderous that it verges on a parody of world-weariness.

Whiskey bottle
Over Jesus
Not forever
But just
For now

The symbolism is just kind of beating me over the head with a whiskey bottle here. But it spoke to Guitar Karl in the dark hours of the rock & roll night. It became the only song he wanted to play when he was desperately drunk at the end of a night on the road.

That night in Louisville, as he started to belt out the Tupelo dirge once again — not forever, but just for the fifth night in a row — I impolitely suggested that he stop. "This station is really overplaying this song," I said. Which touched Karl off to remark that he had been forced to sit through a fuck lot more of my singing than I would ever be subjected to his. "And, frankly, your singing sucks!" he said. "You contribute nothing melodically to this band!"

"I might suck as a singer," I came back at him, "but I wrote almost every melody we play. I'm still waiting for you to write an actual guitar part. The only actual guitar parts you play, you copped from Guitar Johnny. Everything else is just acid head doodle."

To bounce back from heartless attacks like these, you have to both really want to be together again. That wasn't the case for either one of us. So Guitar Karl was gone.

Lij still had no urge to occupy our guitar chair. He was itching to reclaim and further his fiddle and banjo chops. Chris Bess urgently did not want this to happen in the context of our upcoming recording sessions. I can seldom quote Chris Bess from memory, because he was not very verbal when it came to confrontations. His method was to throw up his arms, say something abrupt and scornful, and walk away, leaving the rest of us to sort it out. "I guess Chris Bess doesn't want Elijah in on this thing," for example.

Chris' wishes seemed fair on that point. We had a well-honed set list of ass pop that really didn't cry out for jagged banjo or scratchy fiddle. So we set Elijah to work on the next batch of songs, mostly mail-order collaborations with Guitar Johnny, and began negotiations toward finalizing the electric guitar and studio choices for the recording.

Of course, there were no actual negotiations. Junior soaked it all up, Skoob soaked in beer, Matt and I confided in each other, and Chris Bess threw up his arms in scorn and walked away. In this manner, we arrived at a guitar player, Ayatollah Joe, and a new engineer, good old Meghan Gohil, our Wash. U. chum who set up and then slumbered through the Almanac sessions.

It occurs to me, now, listening to the recordings we made that winter, that if Ayatollah Joe and Guitar Karl had ever taken a road trip together, they could have easily agreed on a selection of road tapes. Karl was a classic rocker, but Joe was also formed by the 70s — particularly Neil Young and the early, brutal Aerosmith. The best Joe could do in the context of ass pop were spidery lines that sounded a little like Robbie Krueger of The Doors. Guitar Karl could have envisioned and played those parts, if only one of us had thought to say, "Treat it like a Doors song."

Ayatollah Joe's approach failed on us in the studio twice — on one song from each camp. For our skuntry contingent, Joe couldn't get the right grungy sound on a goofy piece of country post-punk called "Freezer Full of Meat". So I enlisted Brian Henneman, of Chicken Truck and the Uncle Tupelo crew. Brian came over to the Marconi house one biting cold day and laid down the original Chicken Truck shit tone for us.

For Chris Bess' ass pop song, his only composition on the record, he wanted no part of Ayatollah Joe (or Elijah, God knows). Chris called in his friend Scott Roever from the Tree Weasels and EJ Quit, who played slick and precise and went along with Chris' preference for reverb-drenching. These watery guitar tones surrounded a funny, gutsy Chris Bess song about the Marconi neighborhood, "The Hill".

"We are Italian in every way," Chris Bess sang, "except on St. Patrick's Day".

Horse trading continued between the ass pop and skuntry camps in the band as I raised money to release our record. This was my one successful piece of fundraising in a life of mostly making do without dollars.

As I borrowed money from Cicero's — $500 interest-free against future earnings garnished at the door — Ayatollah Joe asked us to contribute to a compilation he was producing, St. Louis Schoolhouse, a bunch of local bands coverings songs from Schoolhouse Rock, the educational television snippets we all grew up watching. Matt and I chose "Interjections" — and gave Chris Bess a leading role in the recording. Chris got to spit out all of the interjections (hooray! aww! eek! drats! wow! hey!) and did so with maximum hilarity and spirit. Of course, Ayatollah Joe — the skuntry pick — played guitar on our song.

As I borrowed money from Joe Edwards at Blueberry Hill — $500 interest-free against future earnings garnished at the door — those shitkicker yo-yo friends of ours, The New Duncan Imperials, asked Chris Bess if Enormous Richard could contribute a track to a compilation they were producing: rock bands coverings songs released by K-Tel on their cheesy "Classic Hits from the 70s" series. Chris Bess chose "Music Box Dancer" by Frank Mills — and let me sing the lead vocal. His friend Scott Roever, of course, played guitar on Chris Bess' project. (Uncle Tupelo also did a cheezy cover for the occasion, "Movin' On".)

So we had achieved an uneasy truce.

Lij appeared on none of these winter recordings. But there he was in the hills of Tennessee, practicing his banjo and fiddle when he wasn't learning how to capture music on tape. Guitar Johnny kept dragging his roadhouse guitar out of the closet every time a songwriting tape appeared in the mail. The old, original, skuntry Enormous Richard was stirring to life, like a drunk who had slept through the best hours of the party.

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From And Let Him Ply His Music: Adventures in Post-Punk and Amateur Folklore (unpublished).

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mp3s

"Freezer Full of Meat"
(King, Minkoff)
Enormous Richard
with Brian Henneman
From Answers All Your Questions (1992)

"The Hill"
(Bess)
Enormous Richard
with Scott Roever
From Answers All Your Questions (1992)

Previous posts in this series

In the hothouse basement
The allure of the ever-elusive exposure gig
Opening for Uncle Tupelo
A meeting in Old Blue
Strangers in the village
Managing your religion
A farewell to Old Blue

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The image is Lij (in Skeletor mask) jamming with Guitar Johnny in the van that replaced Old Blue. I tried to name it "Big Orange Guy," but the name never took.

A Farewell to Old Blue, the old Uncle Tupelo Van

Sparked by the recent inaugural Uncle Tupelo tribute show in St. Louis, I am posting some chapters from my unpublished musical memoir that deal with those guys. This is Chapter 67, just a few stops down the road from my previous post, "Managing your religion".


A Farewell to Old Blue
By Chris King


Old Blue died. It was East Coast Tour II that ushered in his final decline. He never really came back after that breakdown in Worcester. We lied to ourselves, and told lies for his sake, trying to explain away his failing health. When his death could no longer be patched over with new car parts and alibis, it was like losing a member of the band.

I told Tony Margherita, Uncle Tupelo's manager. Chris Bess told Jeff Tweedy from the band. No one was happy about it, but there were things to celebrate. Uncle Tupelo had basically put Old Blue out to pasture when they ran that ad in Cicero's zine. So all his adventures on the road with Enormous Richard were like an unexpected second adolescence. We had to admit that we had given him a good run.

Survivors are left with stories. A lot of exciting music was circulated around that old van. People heard the Meat Puppets, the Hang Ups, and Soda for the first time in there. Chris Bess kept us awake at the wheel with gags and serenades. Old Blue was the coach that escorted Theo away from the job she quit. We slept in there on a few friendless nights.

Old Blue was the setting for Skoob's famous work stoppage at the wheel, when his repeated requests for a napkin, which went unheeded, resulted in Skoob finally shouldering Old Blue and declaring he was not driving another inch toward the gig until somebody handed him a fucking napkin! Barbecue sauce from the chicken nuggets he had been dipping while driving had become smeared onto the steering wheel -- it was too dangerous to proceed.

This may have been the first time in the history of rock & roll that a tour was stopped dead by a condiment. Finally, Junior dug in his knapsack and handed up a pair of his skivvies, which did the trick.

I am left with only one regret. Tweedy had taken pains to show me the dent in Old Blue's left rear panel inflicted by the Replacements. Uncle Tupelo had done some shows with them. One night, Paul Westerberg of the Replacements backed right into Old Blue. Now I can't imagine why we didn't take a blowtorch to that rear panel. Today we would have a Paul Westerberg sculpture of sorts, and right now I could still lay my hands on a piece of Old Blue.

Maybe nobody could bear to start cutting apart the old guy we had worked so hard to keep intact, and who had kept us together.

Richard Byrne, Uncle Tupelo's old advocate from The Riverfront Times, had the last word on this one. I must have been crying in my beer at Cicero's about the loss of Old Blue, when Rich, a scrapper from Philadelphia, cut me off. "Hey. How sentimental can you get about a vehicle in which Brian Henneman has taken off his shoes?"

One moves on. We had no choice but to buy a new van. Since we were making more money in a few towns now, we decided to go for adequacy of physical plant over anecdote value and buy a stronger van.

After that major purchase, we were broke again, just when we were supposed to be saving to put out a record. Indulgences, like splurging on meals from the band fund, came to a halt. One of the things we unloaded from the casket of Old Blue was a box of damaged canned goods that a friend had given to Chris Bess for East Coast Tour II. Most of us went back to the box for our road meals. Matt Fuller -- author of the tour observation, "Snacks are good" -- found even cold SpaghettiOs to be surprisingly not bad.

One night, before a packed show at the Elbo Room in Chicago, Chris and Matt snacked from the canned food box. It was, perhaps, not the most flattering self-image we could have presented in front of two hundred people who had just paid ten bucks to see us perform. But it paid off richly.

One of our well-wishers after the show was a woman named Madeline. She looked like an older sister type. "I couldn't help but see what you guys were eating for dinner," she said, shaking her head. "Here is my phone number. Please. Call me before your next Chicago show. Let me cook for you."

We did, and she did. I forget that particular meal only because more remarkable ones followed. The next edition of our zine Popular Dickhead announced a new membership program, "Feed the Needy", which proved especially popular in Chicago. (These were Cubs fans, remember, loyal to a fault.) The dented tin can box was history, at least in Chicago. We never paid for food in that town again.

The meal to remember was Lori Malatesta's grandmother's ravioli, delivered to us before a big show at the Cabaret Metro. Everything about that was right. The handmade pasta, the involvement of the grandmother, the flavors of the food, the name Malatesta, the fact of Lori Malatesta herself, a clear, prim, evidently stable young woman of startling beauty.

The name kept whispering in my ear, Lori Malatesta, Lori Malatesta, until I looked it up, and found a prominent Italian anarchist of that name, Errico Malatesta. Lori Malatesta (no relation) was the furthest from anarchy a being could be. Without question, she could have taken home any member of Enormous Richard and shaped him into a mild, obedient husband who never looked back at the road, except to make sure it wasn't gaining on him.

Lori Malatesta seemed far more interested in feeding us than assuming the more carnal duties associated with domestic life. She did, of course, develop a certain affection for Skoob. Skoob was a changing man, though. Becky the diver was just starting to come out of her tuck. She was just starting to open up to him, and Skoob was looking more and more ready to receive her. Unless I missed something, Lori Malatesta was his last kiss before wedlock, and it was only a kiss.

First we lost Old Blue. Now the Goddess of Illusion was starting to shimmer and fade. If you shook your head hard, and blinked a few times, you could still see her, beckoning toward the road. But if you weren't careful, if you weren't living insistently for the dream, then you were looking at a quiet wife who wasn't even yours. She was carrying a tray of her grandma's ravioli, and she didn't know anything about anarchy.

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From And Let Him Ply His Music: Adventures in Post-Punk and Amateur Folklore (unpublished).

Previous posts in this series

In the hothouse basement
The allure of the ever-elusive exposure gig
Opening for Uncle Tupelo
A meeting in Old Blue
Strangers in the village
Managing your religion

*

That is indeed Old Blue lurking in the background of this snapshot found in the archives of Echota, a band friend. I am the homeless-looking person on the far right. Before me: producer Meghan Gohil, guest guitarist Joe Z. Armin, bassist Jay "Junior" Lauterwasser, drummer Matt Fuller, accordionist Chris Bess.

Managing your religion

Sparked by the inaugural Uncle Tupelo tribute show in St. Louis on Saturday, I am posting some chapters from my unpublished musical memoir that deal with those guys. This is Chapter 62, quite a few jumps down the road from my previous post, "Strangers in the village".


Managing your religion
By Chris King


Uncle Tupelo’s next boost into rock star orbit came that winter, 1991, when Peter Buck of REM expressed interest in producing their next record. The news spread fast around Cicero’s, stoking envy and admiration.

It was the best possible time for a band to be associated with REM. Their current record was Out of Time, which yielded their first mammoth radio hit, “Losing My Religion”. No post-punk memoir would be complete without some attempt to make sense of a Michael Stipe lyric, so let it be recorded that I thought the guy was pretty smart for becoming famous with a song about losing your cult status.

And I submit that my credentials for understanding Michael Stipe and "Losing My Religion" were impeccable in 1991, when I was running around the country singing “We’re not REM” and “I’m Not Religious”.

A year later would have been too late to benefit by association with REM and still look cool while doing it. Remember that 1992 would bring the world Automatic for the People. That record, damn it to hell, brought even into my local supermarket the treacly, Sting-esque “Everybody Hurts”, proof that everybody writes a crappy, sappy song sometimes. Everybody shits. Everybody shaves. Sometimes.

So Uncle Tupelo was going to make it. There was no doubt about it. But their success wasn’t turning into a magic beanstalk that kept feeding other bands opportunities for rock star climbing. It was looking more like a rocket ship, and it seated only four – the three guys in Uncle Tupelo and the man in the cockpit, Tony Margherita.

As a guy who wanted to be a singer but got stuck managing a band to do it, I was thinking a lot about Tony Margherita and the role of a manager in the trajectory of a rock band.

For all the musicians stunted by stupid deals, a savvy manager usually separates a worthy but unknown local from a band that breaks out. A band needs a manager, above all, because a manager gets almost nothing out of their music except a cut of the money. Musicians will leap at an arrangement that seems to further their dream but doesn't do them economic justice. A smart manager, rightly mindful of that take-home fifteen percent, and more learned in the art of the contract, will tighten the screws and sweeten the deal.

Uncle Tupelo had what it takes, all of it -- songs, looks, hooks, harmonies, chemistry, charisma, urgency, the absence of other options -- which is why a smart guy like Tony subjected himself to telephone neck on their behalf. But one of the very best things they had going for them was Tony on the phone.

For every Tony Margherita, there are a hundred knuckleheads with a Rolodex. Bookstore shelves sag under the weight of band biographies that feature a sleazy or fatally stupid manager. I can’t resist relating the one story I saw with my own two eyes.

I was hired to write band blurbs for the guide to a new music festival The Riverfront Times was producing. (With the success of South by Southwest in Austin, everybody got into the music festival business for a minute there.) My blurb chores were mostly an exercise in saying something nice when I had nothing nice to say, with one amazing exception. One tape -- a four song demo simply labeled SODA -- invaded the deepest reaches of my memory for the rest of my life.

I wanted to know everything about them, so I called the number on the tape. Their manager answered. Soda! Soda! What can you tell me about Soda?

He said there really wasn’t much to tell. They were four quiet guys from Milwaukee. They had been in other bands. You have never heard of their other bands. That’s about it.

I demanded some kind of a bio so I could write my blurb. In a few days, he faxed me a band bio. It said that they were four quiet guys from Milwaukee, they had been in other bands, no one outside of Milwaukee has ever heard of their other bands, and they like to fish.

I called the manager again. Soda! Soda! I need more Soda! Send more songs! He said they had recorded some other songs, but they weren’t as good as the songs on the demo. I insisted on hearing everything anyway. Send me Soda!

In about a week, I received a tape of some more songs. They weren’t as good as the songs on the demo. This manager had the capacity for hype of those eyeless fish that live at the very bottom of the ocean, but at least he wasn’t a bullshitter.

I went to see Soda at the RFT's music festival. Not a great live show. The lead guitarist, Charlie, had a way of closing one eye and popping the other hideously wide open when he sang a harmony. But it wasn’t bad enough to ruin my adoration for the four-song demo. I introduced myself to the band as the guy who wrote their festival bio, said I played music, too, and suggested a gig swap.

I had written (and they had read) the sort of hagiographic band blurb that tends to make you friends for life, but these guys shared their manager’s sub-oceanic level of enthusiasm for themselves. In fact, they looked like they would rather be fishing.

Nevertheless, a gig swap was orchestrated. Soda would open for us in Chicago on a Friday, and we would open for them in Milwaukee the following night. All the way to Chicago, we burned up that four-song demo.

At the gig in Chicago, there was no Soda. Just a bunch of guys we had never seen before, along with popeye Charlie, Soda's lead guitar player. His mood was in the dumps. “Soda is calling it quits,” Charlie said. “This is my new band. But come on up to Milwaukee tomorrow. That show is still on. It’s Soda's farewell gig.”

I can’t claim any connections to big rock stars with boldface names, but I can say that I was there in Milwaukee the last time Soda took the stage. I almost wept to see the drummer, Alan Weatherhead, positioned nowhere near a microphone, singing along to every single lyric. He was living it, every syllable of it, for the last time.

The afterhours party was a low-key affair familiar to anyone who has seen footage of the losing locker room after a crushing post-season defeat. I didn’t want to disrespect the dead by prying into the casket. But still, I wanted to know everything. Why? Why are you doing this to me?

The lead singer, Mike DeVogel, quietly outlined the story. Their manager – my low-energy friend from the phone – signed them to a development deal with some industry lawyer. I would say this manager was more of a fishing buddy than a businessman, because he stuck them with a stupid contract, but in fact, the guys in Soda were not notable fishermen.

"That was all for the bio," Mike explained, meaning the bio I had begged for. "He was looking for an angle. He knew me and Charles had gone fishing one time. He thought it was something the label scouts could latch onto. Soda. You know, the fishing band. The band that fishes.” Mike shrugged. “We don't have anything against fishing. But we're not avid anglers."

This manager, it turns out, was a nephew of the man who owned the Milwaukee Brewers. His uncle's ballclub had been mediocre, at best, since our Cardinals beat them in the 1982 World Series. The manager's attention to detail was perhaps a bit mediocre as well. He seemed to have missed the fine print that said Mr. Big the lawyer could write off to the band’s account his every expense associated with any travel on behalf of Soda. Once the ink was dry on that deal, Mr. Big went out and saw the world, one music festival at a time.

Let’s hope he had a good time, because his travels were a total loss as far as Soda was concerned. The closest they got was a meeting with a major label scout, who (my hand to God) presented them with an outline of “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, the Nirvana hit. Write songs more like this, he told them -- in the same breath that he urged them to write more coherent, less cryptic lyrics! For once, I wished they weren’t four quiet guys from Milwaukee, because never was a smart-ass retort more justified. “Write less cryptic lyrics? Like what? Like ‘a mosquito, my libido’?”

Then Mr. Big submitted his expenses. It was far more money than the band could make in a year. The lawyer threatened collection. Apparently, arrangements were even made to start garnishing their paydays every time they played a show – this bastard was going after them, one cut of the door at a time.

In despair, Soda laid down their guitars. The authors of the greatest four song demo of their day had to hang a “Gone Fishing” sign on their music career for lack of a savvy manager.

*

From And Let Him Ply His Music: Adventures in Post-Punk and Amateur Folklore (unpublished).

Previous posts in this series

In the hothouse basement
The allure of the ever-elusive exposure gig
Opening for Uncle Tupelo
A meeting in Old Blue
Strangers in the village

Strangers in the village, still feeling gone

Sparked by the inaugural Uncle Tupelo tribute show in St. Louis on Saturday, I am posting some chapters from my unpublished musical memoir that deal with those guys. This is Chapter 53, a few stops down the road from my previous post, "A meeting in Old Blue".

Strangers in the Village
By Chris King


Local bands become traveling bands because they want to outgrow their hometown. Then the first paradox of becoming a traveling band is you aren’t a local band anymore. You aren’t even local beings.

In the fall of 1991, I saw Jeff Tweedy at Cicero’s. He invited me to his car to hear some mixes from the new Uncle Tupelo record. I heard more pop, less twang, and was amazed by one of Tweedy’s own songs, an urgent rock ballad with a chorus adapted from Emily Dickinson.

My heart, it was a gun
It’s unloaded now
So don’t bother

Tweedy always manages to be a little smarter than you give him credit for.

Sue at the Lounge Axe was firmly his sweetheart now, I knew. That uneasiness was over. We were just two band guys flipping through some very promising rough mixes. “What will you call the record?” I asked.

“I’m thinking about calling it Still Feel Gone,” he said. “We’re on the road so much now that even when I’m home, I still feel gone.” That’s a pretty good synopsis of the twilight condition of the no longer local band.

Home, for the traveling band, becomes a place to do laundry and make money, at your day job and at local gigs. My day job was strange for a white guy who spent his nights jumping up and down on stage, singing about AIDS and not being REM, and whose houseguests casually unpacked eight balls of cocaine on the kitchen table.

I was teaching mostly college students about the identity of blackness as revealed in literature. We started with slave narratives, dwelled on Jimmy Baldwin as long as I could, and ended with Sula, which I taught as a novel about two disturbing truths: you were once a part of your mother’s body, and now you are not. The students looked at me like I was a crazy white man. If only you knew the whole of it, I would think to myself, most of my mind already gone on the road.

Our hometown gigs were becoming mob scenes. One of a band's jobs is to sell beer -- to draw a crowd and keep it there, spending money on rounds -- and we excelled at this, for awhile. We had our hometown of Granite City to thank for that. Led by my older sisters, Planet Granite teleported itself across the river en masse when we had a gig. This was a rowdy, unreserved crowd that liked to roar and bend at the elbows to get the liquor into the mouth. Skoob and I, cut from the same crazy cloth, had the same approach to alcohol. We stood front and center, swigging beer for all to see. The Granite City contingent, on stage and in the crowd, set the pace for epic drinking.

A highlight for the Granite City hooligans was a homesick song, "Planet Granite," I wrote from the road.

I want to go where I was young
Feel the steel mill smoke in my lungs
I want to see the coke ovens glow
On some faces that I know
Beam me down to the Planet Granite

It was an underdog song, given Granite City’s reputation as a scary domain, home to drunken rednecks and airborne pollution, a place to be avoided. The national press Uncle Tupelo was receiving about coming from a rugged, working-class town was amusing to me. Belleville was mild and suburban compared to the Planet.

Of course, Skoob and I were not permanent residents of Planet Granite anymore. When we came home from the road, we came home to Marconi Street, as two of the only non-Italians living on the Hill. This contributed to that feeling of dislocation that Tweedy described, the still feeling gone. We had a crumbling house to ourselves for almost no money, but we were very much strangers in the village.

We did our best to make ourselves feel at home, though. For guys in a rock band, this consists of putting up traveling bands and hosting afterhours parties. When the bouncer at Cicero’s made his rounds at 1:15 a.m., hollering, “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here!” the Marconi house was often where the stragglers went.

On one such night, a very bad thing happened. A game of midnight stickball broke out across the street. Across the street, of course, was St. Ambrose Roman Catholic Church. By an act of God, or perhaps the Goddess of Illusion, no church window was shattered. But apparently the monsignor’s sleep was disturbed.

I saw Sonny -- the gruff, neighborhood meet-and-greet guy -- very early in the morning.

The hour was hard on a hangover. No amount of ignoring the pounding on the door would make it go away. Finally, I crawled into consciousness and answered the knock.

“Sonny,” I said. “It’s early. On a Sunday.”

“Sunday is a work day across the street, you know,” he said, thumbing toward the Catholic church.

I have screwed up a lot. I tend to catch on pretty quick when someone is hinting at an error of my own.

“Sonny,” I said. “I’m sorry. We went a little late last night. Please extend our apologies –”

“I grew up playing basketball across the street,” Sonny cut me off. “I’ll play you any day” – emphasis on day, as opposed to night – “that’s not a church day. And I’ll run your ass right into the asphalt. But I don’t see a strike zone spray painted on the monsignor’s bedroom wall. And we didn’t put up those lights for night games. The party’s over, fuckface.”

That seemed to be his sayonara. I started to shut the door. But he turned back before he left for good.

“This is the last time you see me,” Sonny said. “Next time, the call goes straight to Sal.”

Dressed in his Sunday best, Sonny crossed the street to St. Ambrose, where the church bells had begun calling the righteous to mass.

*

From And Let Him Ply His Music: Adventures in Post-Punk and Amateur Folklore (unpublished).

Previous posts in this series

In the hothouse basement
The allure of the ever-elusive exposure gig
Opening for Uncle Tupelo
A meeting in Old Blue

A meeting in Old Blue with Jeff Tweedy

Sparked by the inaugural Uncle Tupelo tribute show in St. Louis on Saturday, I am posting some chapters from my unpublished musical memoir that deal with those guys. This is Chapter 46, a few stops down the road from my previous post, "Opening for Uncle Tupelo".


A Meeting in Old Blue
By Chris King


Chicken Truck didn’t hitch a ride on Uncle Tupelo’s magic beanstalk after all. The band wasn’t committed to risking the road, which was the only way to escape local St. Louis status. Our scene’s buzz wasn’t showing the kind of magnetism that attracts label scouts. They were still all bunched up in Los Angeles and New York (though Seattle was just about to start blinking very brightly on the map). So Brian Henneman disbanded the mighty, grimy Chicken Truck and jumped, alone, into the faded blue Uncle Tupelo van.

Tupelo and their manager, Tony Margherita, were not stupid enough to stipulate their own solo opening act as a band just starting to headline nationally. So Brian signed on as a guitar tech, extra hand at the wheel, and occasional shit tone lead guitarist specializing in encores.

I was naive to be saddened by this. “Don’t forget about your songs,” I said to Brian one night at Cicero’s, which became a second home once I checked out of Duncker Hall at Washington University.

“Don’t worry,” Brian said. “I’ve got a plan.” His plan was to pick up contacts and experience vicariously. I was putting the same plan into effect myself, more or less, by peeking into Tony Margherita's Rolodex.

Tony didn’t have an actual Rolodex. He was just in the process of quitting working the counter at Euclid Records, where he had presided over a branch of the sacred order of undiscovered music, met his co-worker Jeff Tweedy of Uncle Tupelo, and learned to massage record label contacts. Tony was yet another Duncker Hall refugee, running the next big thing from a cordless phone on his living room couch.

“You guys have got to get to New York,” Tony said, when I asked. “You’ve got to get into somebody’s ad in the Village Voice. It should be a showcase venue with a really good sound system. Shoot for CBGB. Here’s Louise’s phone number. You can tell her I said to call. You’ll call her a thousand times, but you’ll get a show. That’s your anchor gig. Then pad enough East Coast dates around it so you don’t go too far in the hole. But don’t worry about the money. You're going to lose some money. The whole thing is getting to New York and getting in front of some label guys.”

I called Louise. She said to call back. I called back. Louise said to call back again. This became a pattern. I didn’t actually count, but the number of calls certainly went well into three figures. No rookie band's booking agent could resist suicide if he actually counted his phone calls. You should see the phone bills, and I don't mean the amount due – I mean the bills themselves, the long, hideous train of the same numbers, dialed over and over and over again.

Then, suddenly, I didn’t have to call back anymore. Suddenly, we had a gig at CBGB! Punk rock’s alma mater! In the end, we were one of five bands on some Tuesday night in June, as opposed to being, say, one of five bands on some Wednesday night in May one hundred phone calls earlier.

With my anchor gig set, I hit every club that Uncle Tupelo had played on the East Coast with a press kit, and I made another thousand phone calls. I put together a week of dates -- New Haven, New York, Philadelphia, Hoboken, and Boston, in that imperfect order -- with one day off to enjoy New York City before the big CBGB gig.

Tony agreed that it was a decent itinerary for a first time out, though he wondered at the absence of routing gigs in Kentucky, Ohio, or Pennsylvania to break up the drives east and back from St. Louis. That was a logistical quirk. We would be meeting (and leaving) Joe Esser in New Jersey, his native turf, and didn't want to attempt any gigs en route without a bassist.

I had just booked a one-week East Coast tour for a band without a van. A two-car caravan would double our gas costs, and most likely blow one of our tottering vehicles into oblivion. Our local gigs were picking up, but we didn’t have anything like a down payment on a van, not with my telephone bills to settle. I had put the cart in front of the horse. In fact, there was no cart -- just a horse in St. Louis, smelling the barn in New York.

Benny, the Cicero’s bookie, had started a little Xeroxed house zine, The Subterranean, named for the basement bar’s elevation. I appeared in the first issue, spotlighted in a mock teeny bopper column called “Babette and LuLu”, penned by two local beauties. (LuLu, a former flame of Jeff Tweedy’s, had inspired his lover’s lament “Cold Shoulder”.) In another early issue, The Sub ran its first ad: a band looking for a good home for their old blue van.

I recognized the contact name and number right away, and called it. Tony Margherita accepted a paltry down payment and a pathetic handwritten note testifying that we were good for the balance, regardless of how far from home (or from CBGB) Old Blue broke down on us.

I bummed a ride to the Uncle Tupelo band house in Belleville, where Tweedy passed this battered rock & roll torch to me. As he drove me around town, demonstrating the van's idiosyncrasies, he tried to be chatty. But we really didn't have much of anything to say, or no way of saying it. Maybe that was because we had both developed feelings for the same two women, our local LuLu and a woman named Sue, a legend of Chicago rock who owned and booked the Lounge Axe.

“I’m getting tired of these young, Wash. U. girls,” Tweedy said, obviously a reference to LuLu. “I’m looking for someone more mature,” he added, a likely reference to Sue, who had a few years of gig scar tissue on both of us.

What could I say? Sue had told Benny that I “gave good phone” when I called the Lounge Axe to book our band. At age twenty four, a rocker just creeping out onto the road, I was ready to take giving good phone to an attractive club owner in Chicago over just about anything. But Tweedy had been in the house at the Lounge Axe the night we played there, collecting money at the door and hovering around Sue at the bar, looking rather boyfriend-like. I thought that awkward night in Chicago was crawling around in Old Blue, unspoken, leaving the wrong mood for speaking.

Tweedy and I yapped enough to fill a concordance to the works of William Shakespeare, however, compared to my exchange that night with Jay Farrar, the incredibly shy Uncle Tupelo frontman. As Tweedy let me into their dumpy apartment, Jay was standing in the kitchen with a foot on a chair, thrashing the shit out of an acoustic guitar. He parted his one swooping bang just enough to give me the ghost of a wave, and then went back to thrashing the shit out of his acoustic guitar.

When Tweedy and I returned from the van tour, Jay was still standing in the kitchen with the same foot on the same chair, still thrashing the shit out of that acoustic guitar. Once again, he parted his swooping bang just enough to give me another ghost of a wave, and then he went right back to thrashing the shit out of his acoustic guitar.

*

From And Let Him Ply His Music: Adventures in Post-Punk and Amateur Folklore (unpublished).

Previous posts in this series

In the Hothouse Basement
The allure of the ever-elusive exposure gig
Opening for Uncle Tupelo

*

The photograph is of Lij playing banjo in front of the husk of a different old blue van in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Tragically, no photograph of Old Blue is know to exist at this time.

Opening for Uncle Tupelo

Sparked by the inaugural Uncle Tupelo tribute show in St. Louis on Saturday, I am posting some chapters from my musical memoir that deal with those guys. This is Chapter 40, right after my previous post, "The allure of the ever-elusive exposure gig". 


Opening for Uncle Tupelo
By Chris King


In Sula, a novel I would teach that spring, Toni Morrison, herself an Ohio girl, delivers a subtly devastating line about Dayton. Sula's man friend, Ajax, a philanderer who dreams of flying, has a ticket for the Dayton Air Show. Just one ticket, for him alone, on a day that Sula wants, and finally gets, some loving. When Sula talks him into bed, Morrison writes that Ajax made love like a man thinking about leaving for Dayton.

After our set at the Canal Street Tavern, a table of women waved me over to them. The swaggering 70s tribute act took the stage, and we got to know one another in the fragmented fashion typical of a loud bar. The headliners unleashed brash, sexy music -- they sounded the way Lenny Kravitz looks -- which may have evoked the secret one plump, innocuous-looking woman entrusted to me.

In the total confidence made possible by deafening music, she said she was engaged to marry a man who would not consummate their union until the big day. Not a virgin herself, she knew exactly what she was missing, and she needed some. Would I? Sure, I would. I left their table, and then she left the bar, and then I left the bar (with the phone number where the other guys would be staying). We rented a cheap hotel room on the outskirts of town, and I made love like a man thinking about leaving Dayton to open for Uncle Tupelo.

Very early in our time on the road, drive days took on the character of gagmen sessions. I blocked out text for cartoon panels on large pieces of drawing paper, which Matt Fuller and Chris Bess would illustrate; we would hang them up in nightclub bathrooms to entertain the drunks. I read obscure books looking for weird shit to read onstage during broken string breaks. Somewhere along the road we found some abandoned bowling pins, and kept six, which we decorated as the members of Enormous Richard and used as stage props. We were becoming something more, or less, than a rock band.

The eight-hour drive from Dayton to the Blue Note was long enough to craft an entire goof rock opera. We decided to go the other way. Uncle Tupelo, with their fist-tight thrashes and dour ballads, represented post-punk at its most serious. We thought we should cater to them and their crowd. So we left the customized bowling pins, the "Lover's Guide to Enormous Richard" cartoons, and my copy of Billy Graham Answers All Your Questions in the trunk of the Birthplace, sketched out the least ridiculous set list we could imagine, and headed into the venue.

Which made it a little magical when Uncle Tupelo's bassist, Jeff Tweedy, led me into their dressing room. Coat hangers held suspended three outrageous lavender sequined tuxedoes. "We thought we would outgoof you guys," Tweedy said with a grin. The tuxedoes turned out to be the most flagrant element of an attack plan that also included hundreds of helium balloons released above them as they played a junk country cover of "Anarchy in the UK".

About the time Tweedy was twanging Johnny Rotten to death, I found their manager in the crowd. "We tried to be serious, and you tried to be silly!" I said to Tony Margherita.

"We met each other half way," Tony said. "That's the way it's supposed to work."

Our two bands also met in the hands of their frontman, Jay Farrar. Jay had strung his guitar upside-down! This was discovered just before they took the stage, so he had to play Guitar Karl's axe instead.

It might spotlight the special nature of our band to consider how silly we could be, even at our most serious. One of our longest-standing crowd pleasers was "We're Not REM". Both a poke at REM clones and our own theme song, its only lyrics, almost, were:

We're not REM
We're not REM
We're not REM 

We're not REM
We're Enormous Richard.

The exception was the second verse, when I name-checked some other local bands that mattered to us:

We're not Chicken Truck
We're not the Suede Caesars
We're not Judge Nothing
We're not Uncle Tupelo.

I love rock bands so purely, that may be my favorite verse to scream out into a crowded bar. But with Uncle Tupelo in the house, and three people in their band (plus their manager, Tony Margherita, very much the fourth Tupe), I improvised at the Blue Note. The four lines of that verse became their four names:

We're not Jay Farrar
We're not Jeff Tweedy
We're not Michael Heidorn
We're not Tony Margherita.

So it was that kind of a super-serious night onstage for us.

We also crept into one of their songs, or at least Chris Bess did. During a rare Uncle Tupelo blues jam, intended to have a lounge feel in tandem with their tuxedoes, Chris began to play hand harmonica, standing in the crowd. Chris Bess plays the biggest, loudest, most sweeping imaginary harmonica you have ever heard. "Why don't you go do that onstage?" Joe, our bassist, asked, and he did. His antics brought down the house.

Our working together nearly got more intimate still. In a late-night deal, Skoob and their drummer, Heidorn, decided to play pool. The stakes were set at the Uncle Tupelo van vs. an Enormous Richard song about Uncle Tupelo. Then Tony, ever acting the role of manager, stepped in and upped the stakes to the van vs. the rights to all of our material.

"I want to see something more tangible," he explained, rubbing his thumb against the tips of his first two fingers.

The prospect of not being able to play our songs because Uncle Tupelo owned them (and, no doubt, never even bothered to play them) was a bit much, so haggling over fair stakes continued until it became gradually evident that the two contestants were too drunk to finish the game.

Previous posts in this series

In the Hothouse Basement
The allure of the ever-elusive exposure gig

*

Sorry I don't have an image of our gig with Uncle Tupelo at the Blue Note. I'd love to see a picture of them in the goofy tuxedoes.

p.s. I owe my career to this gig. An essay I wrote about the experienced became my first piece of paying journalism. It has paid my bills ever since.

The allure of the ever-elusive exposure gig

Sparked by the inaugural Uncle Tupelo tribute show in St. Louis on Saturday, I am posting some chapters from my musical memoir that deal with those guys. This is Chapter 39, so 14 chapters have passed since "In the Hothouse Basement," my previous post. Now their record No Depression is out, they are the darlings of Rolling Stone, and my band Enormous Richard is trying to soak up what they are learning to follow them down the road.


The Allure of the Ever-Elusive Exposure Gig
By Chris King


I don’t imagine that booking road shows for an unknown rock band will ever be easy, but with the internet at least the research is a cinch. Now that every band, large and small, has a website with a gig calendar that provides links for the venues they play, all you need to do is find the site of a band you admire and go after the gigs they have been getting.

In early 1991, when we stumbled onto the road, musicians only used the word “click” to talk about the despised “click track”, a metronome signal that helps drummers keep time. “Link” was a word spoken only when choosing one’s sausage option from a diner breakfast menu. Finding the cool places to play in towns where you had never set foot was much, much trickier than clicking through a bunch of links on some other band’s website.

Print sources and word of mouth were the only avenues. If we played with a traveling band at Cicero’s, I would pick the lead guy’s brain, and pursue a gig swap down the road. If anyone I knew was traveling for any reason, I asked them to grab the hipster weekly in every place they passed through; the Cicero’s equivalent in any town was obvious at a glance. I signed up on mailing lists for bands I liked and devoured their postcard itineraries. And we followed the paths out of town blazed by Judge Nothing, their buddies the Bishops, and Uncle Tupelo.

The Bishops, fronted by a man with the greatest natural born name in the history of rock and roll (Fritz Beer), provided a cautionary tale for the touring band. Matt stayed in touch with their bassist, Ben, his erstwhile bandmate in Butt of Jokes, and Ben told us of a two-gig tour from the inferno. Friday, New York; Saturday, Chicago. In a van, over the road. Why, in the hell, would four grown men do that to themselves? For the dream, and the killing lure of the exposure gig, that’s why.

Gig exposure is the only hope of the independent band. Radio isn’t going to play you. Press in distant towns is almost impossible to get, unless it’s a preview of a local show. You have to count on a club bookie who not only likes your band, but who understands it, and who takes the time to pair you with a local band whose audience should appreciate you. An opening slot before a sizable, sympathetic crowd – this is the ever-elusive exposure gig.

Uncle Tupelo’s manager, Tony Margherita, spoke highly of a guy from Dayton, Ohio named Mick Montgomery. Never sneer at a town like Dayton or a bookie like Mick, was Tony’s counsel. Dayton was six hours east of St. Louis. Not an end in itself but a future routing gig, a place to make fifty bucks, play in front of some new faces and break up the drive to the East Coast, where all ambitious bands must go. Mick was an old musician who came up with sensible band pairings. That meant that his club, the Canal Street Tavern, gave good exposure.

Mick liked our cassette Why It’s Enormous Richard’s Almanac. When I finally caught him on the phone with time to talk, a magic act that required perhaps a dozen prior calls to conjure, he asked a very good question. “Does this tape still represent your sound?” Er, no. Not in the foggiest. An accordion had replaced the banjo and classic rock had replaced the roadhouse guitar and we now sounded big and silly, not scratchy and sly. Oh. Hmmm. The jug band he had in mind wouldn’t work, then. Call back. So Mick reshuffled the deck and I called every indie rock venue within a half-day’s drive of St. Louis. One big target was Columbia, Missouri and its beautiful old theater, the Blue Note, Uncle Tupelo’s first home outside of Cicero’s and their biggest payday.

The bookie at the Blue Note was another smart guy named Richard King. His intelligence tilted more toward the business side of the exchange. With Mick Montgomery, I felt the exposure was for our sake – it was as if he wanted us to be happy and prosper. Richard King seemed focused on grooming a new franchise, another band he could bank on. “Maybe I could get you guys in front of Uncle Tupelo,” he told me. “Let me work on that. Call back.” Imagine a stoned graduate student spending his days on the phone, calling Columbia, Dayton, Louisville, Memphis, Chicago, Kansas City, paging through his calendar as a dozen bookies paged through their calendars and spent their days on the phone, smoking cigarettes and scratching band names on the edges of calendar pages, until, finally, things began to click.

Mick Montgomery had a Friday spot for us at Canal Street Tavern. Fridays are a cherished weekend slot, when people actually go out to bars (and we wouldn’t have to burn two work days to do it). The pairing wasn’t perfect – we would be opening for a local band that parodied the 70s – but it was the best he could do for now. And hey! Richard King had a Blue Note show for us on a Saturday! The very best night of the week! Opening for Uncle Tupelo, the very biggest draw in the state! Rock and roll!

There was one crucial broken link here. This Friday and Saturday fell on the same weekend. Dayton was six hours to the east. Columbia was two hours to the west. What’s an unknown rock band without a van to do? Reschedule Dayton, right? Work our day jobs on Friday? Stay fresh for the big gig right in our own backyard on Saturday? Prepare to follow in Uncle Tupelo’s footsteps by building that monster audience in Columbia, a town full of drunken college kids with nowhere to go for rock shows besides the Blue Note? Forget Dayton, for now? Oh, no. Not when it’s your neck that’s stiff from calling Dayton, Ohio. Not when you want to pave your way to the East Coast. Not when you are living under the lure of the exposure gig. Not when it’s your dream, man.

Previous posts in this series

In the Hothouse Basement

Photo: Members of Enormous Richard, Judge Nothing, and other locl bands at the birth of the St. Louis indie rock scene.

Uncle Tupelo in the hothouse basement

Sparked by the inaugural Uncle Tupelo tribute show in St. Louis last night, I feel like posting some chapters from my musical memoir that deal with those guys. This is Chapter 15. Though it references previous chapters by dropping band names previously elaborated (Judge Nothing, Chicken Truck), it stands alone as a description of early Uncle Tupelo and the musical culture in Cicero's Basement Bar during the late 1980s that helped to nurture them.

In the Hothouse Basement
By Chris King

Very few people remember the first time they saw Uncle Tupelo at Cicero’s. That is because you didn’t actually see Uncle Tupelo at Cicero’s. You saw the backs of people who saw the backs of people who saw the backs of people who saw the backs of people who saw Uncle Tupelo.

Through a sea of flannel shirts (worn for comfort, not for fashion) and baseball caps (worn in lieu of hairdo, perhaps in lieu of shampooing), you saw flashes of fragments of Uncle Tupelo. Jay Farrar, the least expressive but most central of the three, already judged a mystery owing to his severe shyness, might be glimpsed peeking though a bang as he delivered a lyric. Jeff Tweedy, the chatty bassist and apologetic hitter and misser of harmonies, enacted the band’s constant pace changes with jumps and wobbles that sent him bouncing off the walls. Most everyone could see at least one frame of those near-falls. The drummer, Mike Heidorn, was most visible at rest. When the sea of people parted between songs, sipping or fetching drinks, he sat revealed behind his drum kit, opening his neck for a long pour of beer.

When Heidorn was replenished, and Jay had adjusted the settings on his amp through his bangs, and Tweedy had promised his next harmony would be better, they would hit again. Instantly, everyone would remember why they were standing in a crowded basement with the bill of somebody’s baseball cap digging into their neck. These guys had it. Jay’s voice had a veteran’s poise and a whiskey-red tone all its own, and Tweedy’s harmonies added tenor highlights to its prematurely aged depths. From time to time, the night would be pierced by a rightness you simply never hoped to hear from a pair of local microphones. Tweedy’s voice had a babyish register that served, to my ears, as a useful comment on the lyrics. When you could hear what Jay was singing, it was about a weary world and a dismal day in it. It brought distance into the eyes of all the drunks at the close of a show when Jay sang about drinking yourself to sleep, but I didn’t buy it. Those lyrics didn’t seem deeply lived to me. Tweedy’s harmony vocal, however, made them livable. I heard a kid’s joy in singing undercutting Jay’s perpetual dirge.

Jay's dire ballad “Life Worth Living” was the swaying, singalong culmination to an Uncle Tupelo show. There was a long climb up to that quiet place. It was mostly nasty, slash-and-burn post-punk rock. A Husker Du rhythm hand whipped through simple folk chords with sudden snarls of riffs and blistering miniature guitar solos. Three guys played as one. This band had been hammered tight in its Belleville woodshed. Whatever was driving them apart and troubling their friends in Chicken Truck was inaudible when they plugged in and played. Fingertips stilled cymbals just as hands muted strings, creating instant silences in the middle of songs. Then everything crashed back in with a single, urgent, vicious strike. There was twang in that whiskey voice, and anger in the band. It wasn’t country punk, quite, it was the next stop on the line. It was so damn good that many have been tempted to name it. Insurgent country, alternative country, alt. country, twang. Country post-punk was how it always sounded to me in the basement where it grew from a boy to a man.

Tupelo was also a well-stocked human jukebox. Even though they set the standard for the “original music” scene in St. Louis, Uncle Tupelo was a great cover band, too. These young, fresh-faced guys from the wrong side of the river had done their homework. They could take you on a breakneck, slam-and-jam tour of the history of American music, from the Carter Family, who brought the old as the hills music out of the hills and onto the radio, to Credence Clearwater Revival and Neil Young, who juiced up folk styles in the 60s and 70s, all the way up to my Meat Puppets, whose derangement of country ballads was obviously one of the primary source forms in the Belleville woodshed.

It is fair to say that everyone heard Uncle Tupelo at those early Cicero’s shows. They certainly played loud enough for that. The sonic experience in that basement left something to be desired, though. There was no escaping the fact that this was loudly amplified music in a narrow concrete basement, administered by a sound system (two generations beyond the initial Judge Nothing rig) that was hardly worthy of the bands it first delivered to the world.

The tiny, concrete confines of Cicero’s damaged its sound and cramped its crowd on a big night, but its size was essential to its role in growing a local scene. Twenty five people on a Tuesday night felt good in that basement bar. The biggest staggering-room-only Tupelo draw would have looked dinky in most of the clubs on Laclede’s Landing, the renovated St. Louis riverfront. The Landing bands played radio hits as wallpaper music for vast numbers of people not looking to discover anything new about music (or themselves). The Landing clubs were impersonal places of employment, where working musicians made a buck making it easier for people to get drunk enough to get laid. Cicero’s was hothouse soil. Bands shot up fast, because it seemed possible there, and only there, to shoot right through the roof and keep growing, perhaps snagging a few of your friends on your branches and taking them for a ride. The urgency of Uncle Tupelo, and their charisma, was inseparable from Cicero's soil.

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From And Let Him Ply His Music: Adventures in Post-Punk and Amateur Folklore (unpublished)

Picture of Uncle Tupelo in Cicero's by Toby Weiss.

Father Micheas, Fort Bragg priest of peace

I was surprised to be approaching intake at an Emergency Room as we went into Mass this morning. It was a hospital on post at Fort Bragg, and Mass was held in a small room on the third floor. As we entered the chapel, the paraphenalia of the rite was being assembled on what passed for a sanctuary. Given the military setting, I was struck by the similarity to hurriedly making camp after a day's march. It seemed like a bivouac Mass.

The priest, an elderly man with piercing blue eyes, began by calling attention to his purple robes. He said purple was proper to the celebration of Advent, which started today. Holding up what I would have called his sash, he said his stole was from Vietnam. He pointed to the wooden stand upholding the Bible on the altar and said it was from India.

He began a prayer, explaining he was using the Canadian version; the Canadian bishops, he said, did a better job with many prayers than the American bishops did. He showed us the book of Canadian bishop prayers he would read from and admitted the book was borrowed. His original copy, he said, had been lost in shipment from the north of Turkey when he left there.

Sitting in a pew, an American with a wife from Togo, surrounded by her family from Ghana, I was deeply pleased by his casual internationalism, especially on a military post. The U.S. Army, after all, is not commonly associated with the more enlightended, compassionate, humanitarian aspects of internationalism.

The surprises were only beginning. The first reading was from the prophet Isaiah. It included the following: "They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; one nation shall not raise the sword against another, nor shall they train for war again."

"Nor shall they train for war again"? Fort Bragg existed specifically to train for war!

The second reading, from Paul's Letter to the Romans, was more of the same: "Let us then throw off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light". The "works of darkness" that agitated Paul were orgies, rather than acts of aggression, but I know Fort Bragg does not hand out "armor of light" as standard issue to its infantrymen.

I knew, because the priest has taken the trouble to tell us, that these readings were ordained by the Church as part of its scheduled cycle of readings. I wondered what, if anything, he would make of this pacifist stuff in his homily, addressing an Army post parish in a time of war.

He went right at it. He said the prophet Micheas also spoke of turning swords into ploughshares. Then he pointed out a statue on the altar. I had noticed it earlier; it looked like a burly man doing something vaguely athletic. The priest pointed out that it was Micheas beating swords into ploughshares. He wished he could pass around the statue, he said, but it was too heavy. I found it touching that he wanted these military parishioners to hold in their hands this aggressive symbol of peace.

He dwelled on the subject further. He produced a picture. He said it was an image of Micheas from the National Shrine. This image was more static, less active, but there he stood, holding a hammer in his hand, the hammer that turned swords into ploughshares.

After Mass, the priest invited us across the hall for juice, cookies, and fellowship. We joined him and a smattering of the parishioners. I waited my chance to approach the man. Up close, his pale blue eyes were all the more piercing. His nose was veiny, and he had a scar on his chin that looked like it had been a nasty wound, once.

I mentioned the scripture about not training for war anymore. "That would put Fort Bragg out of business, wouldn't it?" I said.

He nodded, and said, "That would be a good thing."

I asked for his contact information - I was only visiting - and he produced for me his card. His name: Father Micheas.

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Image of the prophet Micheas from the Lady Chapel, Gloucester Cathedral, borrowed from Vidmus.