"I don't know," says No Depression's co-founder and co-editor Grant Alden, after a moment's thought. "I don't know whether it's a case of 'They said it wouldn't last.' I don't think anybody noticed at first. Anyway, Peter and I were doing this for funwe never dreamed it would last so long. It seemed to be a step we could take affordably, and if it didn't work out . . . at least we had fun and got to do something we wanted."
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It's been nearly eight years since Grant Alden and Peter Blackstock printed up the first 2,000 copies of No Depression "the alt-country (whatever that is) bimonthly," as the magazine's running tagline now puts it. In those days, it was a quarterly, and the total page count hovered around 32 and the pictures were photocopied and the first contributors got paid in T-shirts.
No Depression's inaugural run, though professionally printed, was pasted up and run off at a neighborhood Kinko's.
How times do change.
From the earliest rumblings to the first printing, it took no more than five months for issue No. 1 of No Depression to come together. In April 1995, Alden had left The Rocket, the Seattle-based music magazine for which he'd served as managing editor, and was trying to make a go of a small art gallery. Blackstock, a writer and copy editor who'd written for Alden for some years, was keen on what had come to be called alternative country. A series of conversations"We double-dared each other," Alden deadpansresulted in their decision to found an alternative-country publication.
"I think the focus on alternative country came mostly from me," Blackstock says, "because that was something I'd been somewhat immersed in, growing up in Austin. I was probably a little more into it than Grant, though we overlap on these things in most every way. For Grant's part, I think he was tired of documenting the whole grunge thingthis was the early, mid-1990s in Seattle, remember, and Grant had written a lot about that."
The
AOL alternative-country discussion board called "No Depression"initially centered upon the band Uncle Tupelo and named for UT's cover of the Carter Family songprovided the title. Furthermore, that discussion board made Alden and Blackstock wonder whether there was already a readership in place for a magazine like the one they were considering.
"In a way, the potential audience was somewhat visible through the Internet," says Blackstock, "and Americana radio was in its infancy then. We felt there might be an audience."
"But from the earliest discussions," Alden says, "we knew we were going to have to sell this to people. We were going to have to, first, show them that this music existed, and second, get them interested enough to read a magazine about it. If you look at the things they tell you in publishing school, that's completely ass-backwards. You're supposed to market to a ready-made audience. We didn't do that."
To compound matters, of course, there was no ready-made audience for alt-country/Americana/roots music or what have you, in 1995. There were only isolated bands like Uncle Tupelo and the Cowboy Junkies, singer-songwriters like Robbie Fulks and Terry Allen . . . and their scattered listeners, most of whom tended to fly beneath mainstream radar. (While working the grunge beat at The Rocket, Alden was wont to play Fulks' "She Took a Lot of Pills [and Died]" at a publicly disruptive volume: "It made me feel better about the job.")
"So we wanted very much to be nationwide from the beginning," Blackstock continues. "And I think it paid off. For instance, early on we were based out of Seattle, but the two markets that really embraced us immediately were Chicago and North Carolina. In other words, we were pretty sure there'd be a readership for it, but not if we stayed local. We turned out to be right about that."
Blackstock is now in Durham, N.C., and Alden is in Nashville, while business operations remain in Seattle.
Over the years, and to the consternation of some of the magazine's more orthodox readers, No Depression's net has expanded to include neo-traditional country artists as well as young punks and outlaws. In recent issues, artists like Lee Ann Womack, Alison Krauss, and (accompanied by a cover shot destined to become a classic) Johnny Cash have all come within the magazine's scope without dominating its pages.
"That wasn't an area we visualized when we started the magazine, but it became clear that it was an area we had to explore," says Blackstock. "The initial focus was on younger rock bands who were drawing from country or Americana. We quickly came to realize, and it quickly came to develop, that there was this subset of older traditional country artists who fit exactly into what we were doing, andmaybe more specificallydid not fit into what country radio was about anymore. One of the first letters to the editor we ever got was from a guy who wrote, 'Finally, somebody who realizes Merle Haggard and Son Volt belong in the same magazine.' It was a sign that there were these two seemingly separate avenues coming together in what we were doing.
"And we've taken some flak for that. But one thing we've come to discover is that, by and large, the people who seek us out and subscribe to us aren't casual listeners. They're serious music fans."
