Tag Archives: Peter Blackstock

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.

Thirty Years of Guitar Town, Steve Earle and The Dukes

steve-earle-guitar-townOn a high-temp Sunday in Manhattan, after a train ride on an excruciating slow-moving local that stopped at every single station, I took a 36-block stroll downtown with music in my head. It’s not unusual to occasionally find Steve Earle walking the western grid between Houston Street and 14th Street, so I began to look for him as I cut across Washington Square looking for shade.

Forty-five minutes earlier, somewhere between Fordham and Harlem, I had made the decision to hand him a 20 dollar bill. Had I checked to see where he and Shawn Colvin were appearing, on what The Guardian has tagged the “nine divorces, two addictions, one perfect mix” tour, I’d have known they were down in Virginia.

What prompted me to seek Earle out was that I’d listened to the complete digitized bootleg Magnetised Motherf**kers along with the second shorter edition More MMs. Together there’s over 75 live tracks, B-sides, promo-only songs, collaborations, duets, tribute albums, and compilation appearances which are not so easy to find in this post-pirate world of online streaming. Both are essentials in my Earle collection, and I felt the need to make amends.

Loosely calculating that if these albums were ever released Steve might actually see 20 bucks after performance and publishing fees, it seemed like a good gesture on my part. And since we didn’t connect, I’ve taken a bill, folded it into thirds, and tucked it into my wallet behind my driver’s license. Next time I see him on the street, it’s his.

Anyway, to my point. Guitar Town, the first full-length album from Earle and his band the Dukes, was released on March 5, 1986. It topped the Billboard country album charts and the title song reached number seven on the country singles charts. There were two Grammy nominations. The album is turning 30 years old this year, so it seems too important an anniversary to skim over.


Ten years after the release of Guitar Town, a new magazine called No Depression put Earle on the cover of their third issue, and Peter Blackstock wrote an excellent profile that was part interview, part history. Earle had already crashed, burned, and risen again. Blackstock wrote:

Guitar Town, which presented the most definitive synthesis of country and rock ‘n’ roll during the 1980s, is generally considered Earle’s debut, but in fact he had released a rockabilly EP titled Pink & Black in the early ’80s. Furthermore, he had been a fixture on the Nashville scene for more than a decade before Guitar Town came out, ever since he had moved there from his boyhood home of San Antonio to play bass for Guy Clark.

In the late seventies Earle left Clark’s band and began to get work as a songwriter. He told Blackstock:

People [publishers] would keep signing me because they knew I could write, but nobody got a lot of cuts on me, so they’d usually drop me eventually, and then somebody else would sign me. I had the odd cut here and there.The first record I ever had that made any money was a Johnny Lee single in about 1980 that I co-wrote.

You can find Lee’s “When You Fall In Love” here on You Tube, and it was co-written with John Sherrill and produced by Jim Ed Norman. Released in 1982, it made it to just the middle of the charts and peaked at number 14.

Of more interest to me is a song that came out almost exactly one year before Guitar Town was released. Connie Smith was planning to come out of semi-retirement, and “A Far Cry from You” was written solely by Earle. Released as a single and never on an official album, it was dead on arrival. Reaching number 71 on the Hot Country Singles chart, it was anything but. Yet to my ears, it’s the first song of his that I hear written in the “Earle-style.” This past year, it was re-recorded beautifully and released by Marsha Thornton, a label-mate of Earle back in the early ’90s, at MCA.


To mark the anniversary of Guitar Town, Universal announced that they would do what they usually do these days: remaster and reissue it on black 180-gram heavyweight vinyl, and sell it for 17 bucks. That’s some brilliant marketing. Checking on Amazon, it’s ranked today at #39,430. In a press release from back in March, there’s also a two-disc set and a digital download (who does that anymore?) deluxe edition coming before Christmas. Huh.

Does anything else really need to be added to the 34 minute and 35 seconds ten-track original? I think not.

In an article titled Albums of Our Lives written by Lucy Shiller in 2013 and posted on The Rumpus, Shiller nails the essence of what makes Guitar Town so special. In her youth, this disc became the soundtrack for family road trips. She wrote:

Here was a harder-edged voice than I was used to, yelping and sneering about having a “two-pack habit and a motel tan.” I barely knew what a two-pack habit might be, and I had no idea about a motel tan. But I wanted both. My father and I screamed the lyrics as we entered the dreaded hour five of a day’s drive—just about the time when you feel you should almost be there but know you’re only halfway, and with each passing hour, you become, in the parlance of my family, increasingly “rumpsprung.”

Steve’s guitar was rambunctiously cheery, bolstered by swift pickings on the mandolin. The instrumentation belied gloriously bitter lyrics. Singing them, singing them loudly, was being full, suddenly, of a rightful rage about a discovered outsider status. “Hillbilly Highway,” the album’s third track, was an epic: a young man leaving his country home for a job, years later, his son leaving for college, and then, finally, the grandson — Steve Earle — picking up his guitar and hitting the road. He’d had enough.’


While Earle’s ten songs alone would be cause for tribute, it’s the entire package of collaboration between songwriter, band, and producers that makes it work as well as it does. The Dukes, or more accurately this version of the band, breaks down like this:

Bucky Baxter-Pedal Steel Guitar
Richard Bennett-Guitar, the infamous Danelectro 6-string bass, slap bass and associate producer
Ken Moore-Organ and synth
Emory Gordon, Jr. -Bass, mandolin and producer
Harry Stinson-Drums and vocals
Paul Franklin-Pedal Steel Guitar (‘Fearless Heart’ and ‘Someday’)
John Barlow Jarvis- Synth and piano
Steve Nathan-Synth
Tony Brown-Producer
Steve Earle-Guitar and vocals

The album was recorded in late 1985 and early 1986 in Nashville at Sound Stage Studio. Overdubs were later recorded at Emerald Studios. It was one of the first country music albums to be recorded digitally, utilizing the state-of-the-art Mitsubishi X-800. Each of the album’s ten tracks was either written or co-written by Earle.

Thirteen years after it’s release, Guitar Town was certified gold by the RIAA in 1999. Reno Kling on bass and Mike McAdams on guitar joined Baxter, Moore, and Stinson as the touring Dukes.

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside on No Depression dot com.