Today’s Vinyl: Uncle Tupelo
Long before the mandolins took over and they were crowned the founding fathers of a new genre of music, Uncle Tupelo were three kids from Illinois who performed a jazz-ectomy on the Minutemen and grafted on folk and country to create a novel hybrid. Punk and country had been melded before, but almost always to humorous effect - this was serious, thoughtful, often sad music. The original trio made two powerful records – No Depression and Still Feel Gone – before they hit the big time and came under the tutelage of Peter Buck. During those early years, though, you could count on every Jay Farrar song to reference alcoholism, Rust Belt decay, or the latter’s influence on the former, while Jeff Tweedy’s tracks read like a dog-eared atlas of awkward breakups and perceived romantic slights. Together, it made for a heady mixture of Americana viewed through a prism of angst and disappointment, a sort of punk Woody Guthrie.
I caught the band on their first trip through Austin - after No Depression merited a short blurb in Rolling Stone - at the Texas Tavern, when they were still fun and pissed off at the world (it wouldn’t be long before Tweedy and Farrar were eternally pissed off at each other). Their manager at the time was the only one who said much of anything between the songs, and he mostly bitched about the inability to smoke on stage. The band, as quiet and socially awkward as fumbling teenagers on first dates, created such a big, raucous, staccato noise – Mike Heidorn could have ably manned the drums for any punk act in the world – that you’d be hard-pressed to square it with the sound of the band as they matured.
This 1992 seven inch was released toward the tail-end of that period, when the group still had a rough edge and an audible undercurrent of anger and indignation. Sauget Wind attacks Rust Belt industrial pollution head-on with Farrar’s quiet/loud template – dirge-like lament building to pissed-off distortion. It’s a little heavier and less polished than the material that made it on to the first two records, and there’s not much subtlety to the lyrics: “They’re poisoning the air/For personal wealth.” Still, if you dig Farrar’s sad stuff as much as I do, this is essential. Side B contains a live, acoustic version of one of my favorite Farrar songs, “Looking for a way out,” and a short, unfinished-sounding acoustic instrumental called “Take my word” that hints at the more traditional acoustic sound that would dominate the next record (their last one for Rockville), March 16-20, 1992.
