Alice Wheeler
From left, No Depression's Peter Blackstock, Kyla Fairchild, and Grant Alden.
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When it comes to defining genres, even people who are paid to express themselves with the written word are often at a loss. After almost a decade of declining to provide a succinct description of what alternative country is, the publishers of the bimonthly music mag No Depression have issued a compilation instead. Until now, they've followed the term "alt. country" with the caveat "(whatever that is)," but with No Depression: What It Sounds Like, Vol. 1 (Dualtone), they seem to have nailed it down. From the angsty, bar-stool rock of a 1995 Whiskeytown track to the harmonized, lonesome pull of a quietly insistent song by Hayseed with Emmylou Harris to the Carter Family's original, 1930 version of "No Depression in Heaven"—the song from which the magazine took its name—What It Sounds Like won't leave you wanting for a more solid explanation.
The alt-country sound is right at home in Seattle, and fittingly, the triad behind No Depression belongs, in part at least, to us, too. Co-editors Grant Alden and Peter Blackstock both wrote about music here in town before leaving for points South, at the now-defunct Rocket and the Seattle P-I, respectively, and partner Kyla Fairchild is a knowledgeable, friendly fixture in scenes all along Ballard Avenue Northwest. The three sat for the Jukebox on a recent Friday afternoon in Fairchild's home.
Link Wray: "Big City After Dark" (released in 1990) from Missing Links, Vol. 2 (Norton)
Grant Alden: I don't know what it is, but I'm feeling like I should; I'm waiting for a voice.
Seattle Weekly: There won't be a voice.
Peter Blackstock: That would make it harder.
Alden: Presumptively, it ought to be Link Wray.
SW: It is.
Blackstock: Oh, that is very good. What was your reason for presuming that?
Alden: [Wray] doesn't sing.
Blackstock: There are lots of guitar instrumentalists; how did you identify this one as Link Wray?
Alden: I've listened to him a fair bit—the guitar sound is pretty distinctive. I saw him in Nashville about three or four years ago with every guitar player in town up onstage with him. It was amazing.
Etta James: "Let's Burn Down the Cornfield" (1974) from Come a Little Closer (Chess)
Alden: It's not Etta James, is it?
SW: It is.
Blackstock: You're two for two. So this was a good bit past At Last [1961], which was her breakthrough.
One reason that I bought At Last and that I'm somewhat more familiar with her is that an artist who I wrote a feature story on for No Depression about two or three years ago, Tift Merritt, is very much influenced by Etta James. That At Last record, I went out and got because Tift said it was one of her favorite all-time records. I don't think [Merritt] sounds much like [James]—Tift is much more country, honky-tonk. But I can hear some of where she wants to come from vocally.
Johnny Cash: "The Time of the Preacher" (1996) from Twisted Willie: A Tribute to Willie Nelson (Justice Records)
Kyla Fairchild: Oh, I know this one.
Blackstock: I can name that tune in those first five notes that Kim Thayll played right there.
SW: This is on the [What It Sounds Like] comp, but I was interested in the brief story in the liner notes about this song.
Alden: Rolling Stone called me and said, "We want you to go into the studio and listen to Johnny Cash cut this song for this tribute record with Kim and Krist [Novoselic] and the drummer from Alice in Chains [Sean Kinney]. I said, "Yeah, throw me in the briar patch and pay my rent for two months and let's go." I got to hear Johnny Cash screw up lines at Bad Animals [Studios]. Kim was really confused by what they wanted from him. He was trying to give too much respect to Willie's song, and he tried to play it straight; and he ended up sounding like Neil Young, and that's not what he wanted to do, either, and he kind of looked at me and said, "What do they want?" I said, "They want you to be you." So he went in and did this.
Blackstock: And this is what Grant wrote in the liner notes: If you're looking for a way to define what we were doing when we started this magazine, which was exactly the same time this was recorded, there's almost no better way to define it than this—you know, this combination of the hard side of alternative rock with the classic side of country.
SW: And in Seattle.
Blackstock: Yeah.
Alden: So the next day, Mark Lanegan cut his track for [the tribute comp], so I got to go back and hang around for some of that, and at the same time, Krist was running around with these old reel tapes going, "Somewhere on here is that old unreleased Nirvana track—you gotta come hear this. . . . I've just got to find it first." He never did find it. He was promising this unreleased Nirvana track that had everybody excited. I think they finally did find it, and it'll be on the box set that's been endlessly delayed. But I think it took years.
