Tag Archives: Grant Alden

No Depression Magazine: 1995-2008

The cover of #75, the final issue/Photo by Easy Ed

It’s an unusual and sad anniversary of sorts, and one I’ve either missed reading about or perhaps it simply slipped by unnoticed. On a spring day in 2008 I picked up the most recent issue of No Depression, a magazine that I had been reading for much of the decade, though they had been on the racks for 13 years. They were the last in a long line of music publications that I would read from cover to cover, starting back in my early teens with 16, Teen Life, and Hit Parader and moving on throughout my adult years to Crawdaddy, Rolling Stone, Zoo World, Sing Out!, Broadside, Down Beat, Goldmine, Relix, BAM, Pulse, Billboard, Cashbox, Record World, Music Connection, Trouser Press, Dirty Linen, and Harp. But for reasons I still have not yet reconciled nor understood, No Depression was the only one I had a strong and emotional attachment to. And so when I picked up issue #74 and turned to page 2, the following words from Grant Alden, Peter Blackstock, and Kyla Fairchild hit me in the gut.

“Dear Friends, Barring the intercession of unknown angels, you hold in your hands the next-to-the-last edition of No Depression we will publish. It is difficult even to type those words, so please know that we have not come lightly to this decision.”

The three owners continued to tick off the circumstances that brought an end to a magazine where “readership has not significantly declined, our newsstand sell-through remains among the best in our portion of the industry and our passion for and pleasure in the music has in no way diminished.” So what killed it off? A decline in advertising revenue from struggling record labels, a music industry in transition from brick and mortar to digital, increased internet traffic, and the cost of paper and production. And of course the overall economy was in free fall. People were losing their jobs, homes, and savings, and so taking that into consideration, the loss of a niche publication that supported the three owners, two additional full-time employees, and several dozen editors, writers, and artists was simply a reflection of the times.

“I have deeply enjoyed your magazine and have kept them all. Will give them to my children and grandchildren when I’m gone. Thank you for all the articles on my family members – A.P., Sara, Maybelle, Helen, June, Anita, Johnny Cash & etc. I am A.P. and Sara’s oldest grandchild; will be 70 years old in August.” — Flo Wolfe 

With a cover price of $5.95 and a tagline beneath the magazine’s logo that read “The Final Issue Of … Well, Whatever That Is,” No Depression ceased publication with issue #75. It was 144 pages of doing what they’ve always done best: long-form stories, reviews of concerts, albums, books, and films, ads that heralded new music and reissues, and the “Box Full of Letters” from their readers. But this final issue couldn’t help being a little different than all others, because it was the end of something important to many people.

“Since the notice of foreclosure on hope arrived, I’ve been sitting here in melancholy marinade … without an issue or subscription of No Depression magazine, I feel like Charlie Brown waiting at his mailbox on Valentine’s Day, wondering why, at this point, I even need a mailbox.” — Scott Michael Anderson

As I leaf through the final issue, I’m surprised of the large number of musicians who were written about in 2008 and are still performing and recording today, somehow managing to navigate the shark-filled waters of an abysmal music industry that has chomped on and spit out so many others. What we generally call roots music was first recorded and popularized back in 1927, and its resilience and relatively small but vibrant popularity as a non-mainstream genre is just as surprising as it is comforting.

“I will reluctantly face detox after I have read the last issue. Over the past 10 years my cravings for the next ND would build until I had the new issue in hand. Then, like no other magazine before … I would feast from kiver to kiver … savoring the morsels of information and insights. What kept me captivated was that you always stayed contrary to ordinary.” — Tim Willis

The last cover had a black-and-white photograph of Buddy Miller that was slightly off-center. And these were the words written to the left of him: “Guitarist, songwriter, producer, singer, and a man who loves music: Buddy Miller is our artist of the decade.”

With accompanying photographs by Thomas Petillo, it was Grant Alden who wrote the article on Buddy. His writing style has always been unique and in stark contrast to anything one might consider music journalism. He reads like a beat poet with his own distinct rhythm, in which a single sentence can carry an idea or thought that other writers take paragraphs to convey. Just the title alone is worth every ounce of ink: “A disquisition on the centrality of love and faith in the music of Buddy Miller and the several other reasons he is the artist of the decade. And stuff.”    

“What will we do without you? I even read all the damn advertisements, for God’s sake.”  — Peter Kraemer

Buddy turns 66 this year, and during the time period since Grant’s article was published, he traveled extensively on the Alison Krauss-Robert Plant Raising Sand tour, followed by his concerts billed as Three Girls and Their Buddy with Emmylou Harris, Patty Griffin, and Shawn Colvin. Early in 2009 he suffered a heart attack and had triple bypass surgery. At that year’s Americana Music Association Honors and Awards, he and his wife Julie were the winners for album, song, and duo/group. Buddy also won Artist of the Year. He’s released three albums, including one with his partner and sidekick Jim Lauderdale, has been either a guest artist, producer, or engineer on way more than a dozen others, and is active with the annual AmericanaFest and the Cayamo cruises.

“Your magazine has been an oasis for me. Other mags have covered some of the same artists, but opening No Depression was like going in to a special old room and closing the door and seeing all your friends there.” — Pat Fitzgerald

Peter and Kyla had plans to transition No Depression into a website (Grant chose to sell his share back, not seeing a way to continue successfully online) that not only featured paid writers, but also created space for music bloggers such as myself. The concept was to create a global ND community allowing readers to comment and interact with the writers and remain a trusted music source fostering two-way dialogue. There was also a “bookazine” that published long-form stories, edited by Grant and Peter. Three editions were done before they moved on to other projects and like Grant, Peter also sold his share of ND to Kyla. She poured her heart, soul, and money into building and running the site until she decided to make a change, and sold it in 2014 to the current owners, the FreshGrass Foundation. As you probably are well aware, with the guiding hands of former editor Kim Ruehl and help from a Kickstarter campaign, No Depression began publishing a quarterly journal the following year. And here we are today … 23 years as an entity, 10 years as a website, and forever in my musical DNA.

“Well, shit. Thanks for what you were able to do.” — Quinn Martin 

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboardand Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.

No Depression Magazine: Number 43

It’s the night after Christmas in 2017, and I’m sitting on my bed surrounded by a pile of old No Depression magazines. I pulled them down off the top shelf in my bedroom closet because I have a deadline looming for my weekly Broadside column and, since readership tends to dip low pretty during the holidays, I don’t really want to invest all that much time into writing this week. What I really want to do is go into the kitchen to make a strawberry-coconut smoothie with almond milk, chia seeds, and protein powder, and them binge-watch season four of Shameless. So I’m leafing through issue #43 for quick inspiration, since it was published exactly 15 years ago.

The cover is still in good shape, the print on the pages hasn’t faded all that much and the tagline under the name still sounds crisp: The New Favorite Alt. Country (Whatever That Is) Bimonthly. All uppercase. It cost $4.95 in the US and $7 in Canada, and there’s a barcode in the lower left-hand corner that must have driven Grant Alden crazy each month since it was obvious he put a lot of work into the magazine’s design and layout, choosing the photographs and typeface with obvious care and pride. Mark Montgomery provided the shots of Alison Krauss at the Ryman for both the cover and the feature story inside, which was written by Roy Kasten.

I’d forgotten how many ads there used to be. Kyla Fairchild handled that area (along with distribution) and tonight it’s as if I’m sifting sand and finding ancient artifacts. Tower Records. Borders Books, Music and Cafe. Miles of Music. Binky Records. There are a lot of quarter-page ads for new albums from names long forgotten and in many cases, never known nor heard from again. There are full-page ads for that year’s MerleFest and SXSW, and on the back cover is a beautiful color ad for Lucero’s Tennessee on Madjack Records. Can’t find a video of the band from that long ago, but this captures the vibe.

Peter Blackstock broke the news on a couple of marriages: Greg Brown and Iris DeMent, Bruce Robison and Kelly Willis. He gave a heads up on a number of new releases and reissues including Caitlin Cary and Thad Cockrell, Drive-By Truckers, Lucinda Williams, Jayhawks, the Minus 5 and Uncle Tupelo. He also wrote about the No Depression Alt-Country Radio Show – yes, there was such a thing – and the 14-member panel who voted on the Top 20 of 2002. I’m not going to give you the entire list, but Buddy Miller topped it with Midnight and Lonesome, followed by Mike Ireland and Holler, Caitlin Cary’s solo album, Dixie Chicks, and Bobby Bare Jr.

While some of my favorite and frequently contributing journalists included Barry Mazor, Paul Cantin, and Don McLeese, it really strikes me as I go through the pages that there were literally dozens of contributors to each issue of the magazine. The number of reviews for both live concerts and recorded music was really staggering, and I can’t think any other magazine that even came close. The feature stories and interviews always were always deep dives, and the music genres covered not only went far beyond the alt-country tagline, but also was highly diverse in comparison to today’s insipid Americana playlists.

When Kyla took control of the website, one of the first things she embarked on was archiving each issue of No Depression into a searchable database. When she sold it and the lunatics took over the asylum, the web platform transfer brought the archives over in a non-formatted jumble of words, that are as difficult to discover as they are to read. Our new editor comes over from Paste magazine, and despite their penchant for endless lists as opposed to occasional music journalism (I did find Lee Zimmerman’s The 10 Best Singing Drummers in Rock History quite interesting), they get high marks from me for bringing back to digital-life a number of articles from Crawdaddy!, one of the first rock music publications. So is there any chance that the No Depression archives can be repaired and given a new lease on life as well, or will they soon fade away? Time will tell, and in the meantime …

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music’s website.

Bonnie “Prince” Billy: Too Slippery For Such Simple Categorisations

BPBA recent trip into Manhattan and a stop at Strand Books yielded a $6.95 trade paperback edited by Alan Licht and titled Will Oldham on Bonnie “Prince” Billy.  It wasn’t hard to miss. There must have been at least 100 or more in stock, sitting on several tables and display racks. It’s either a breakaway bestseller or there was a publisher error. I guess you’d call it simply an interview, with questions asked and answers given, but it reads more like just a conversation, which I imagine sets apart a good interview from a bad one.

Born in 1970, Oldham began acting in his early teens and started making music around the time he was about 22. I’m sorry to have missed his first wave of music that was released in the early ’90s on the Drag City label under various names: Palace Brothers, Palace Songs, and just plain Palace.

If you’re unfamiliar with those Palace records or his later work, I’ll quote Licht in the book’s introduction to give you context:

Emerging from the indie-rock scene of the early 1990’s, Palace was at times lumped in with the ‘No Depression’ alternative country-rock bands like Son Volt or Uncle Tupelo, or with the lo-fi movement identified with Sebadoh, Daniel Johnston, Guided by Voices or Drag City label-mate Smog, and later Bonnie Prince Billy was occasionally held up as a forebear of the ‘freak-folk’ scene of the past decade. Yet the music is too slippery for such simple categorisations. It touches on – refracts, really – rock, pop, folk, country, bluegrass and ethnic music without hybridising any of them.

In 2003 Grant Alden of No Depression the magazine, not the genre, wrote a review of Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s latest release Master and Everyone. And he shared some history.

Years ago I reviewed an early Palace release for Spin, and while I can’t remember which record it was, I know the review was a glowing bit of work-for-hire. Little enough had come my way then (say, Mazzy Star, or Mark Lanegan, both of which remain fond memories), that played so elegantly with the roar of silence, and Palace clearly and distinctly drew from a rural, country tradition. Both of which seemed like good ideas.

A while later I lasted half a set in a crowded club, for none of us had heard the like, and we all had to see. Oldham, the lead singer and provocateur of Palace, spent the whole evening dodging a solitary spotlight. Then Allison Stewart interviewed him for these pages, and he spoke at some length of an imaginary dog.

Finally, he said this in a December 1998 edition of Time Out New York: “No Depression seems like a culturalist, racist magazine to me, about a certain kind of white music.” We have not had occasion to write about Mr. Oldham’s varied exploits since.

He’s an odd duck, an ex-actor who keeps adopting new musical personae, aggressively passive aggressive. And I have come not to like him; that is, not to like his work, to feel violated by all the artifice with which he surrounds ostensibly artifice-free music, to mistrust his motives. This is a problem, when the singer’s principal illusion is intimacy, and it is especially a music critic’s problem, separating the artist from the art.

So perhaps I shouldn’t be believed, but Master And Everyone is, as advertised, a beautiful piece of work.

Probably the best thing about Bonnie “Prince” Billy is that I missed all the stuff that Grant spoke of, and was able to experience the music on its own without knowing a lick about where it came from, how or who made it, and what it was supposed to sound like. No expectations. By the time my kid flipped me a flash drive filled with Palace’s music and told me fire up the ‘Pod, it was 2008 and that concept was a decade and a half in the dust. It amazed me. And still does.

Two summers ago, I got a chance to see him and Dawn McCarthy on the stage of New York’s Town Hall with Van Campbell, Emmett Kelly, and Cheyenne Mize. They were at the end of a tour. The album that they played songs from was a tribute to the Everly Brothers called What the Brothers Sang. This is how I described their performance at that time:

Sitting on chairs that looked as if they were bought at a store specializing in selling used office equipment, and while holding blunt instruments in their hands … I witnessed a murder. Note by note, song by song. They killed it. They killed it … meaning it was one of the most memorable, loving, kind, considerate, joyful, musical, harmonious, respectful, caring and beautiful hundred minutes of concert give and take one could hope for.

I’m more than two-thirds of the way through this 329-page interview and I’m finding it hard to put down. Maybe I’m trying to rush to the end, where a 25-page discography awaits, and a seven-page passage called ‘A Cosmological Timeline’. This is a good book to read if you want to learn stuff you didn’t know you needed to know. Admit it: you had not a clue that in 1971 Meatloaf played the role of Ulysses S. Grant in a touring production of Hair. Right?

This was originally published by No Depression, as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column.