Learning Music History Backwards

Sometimes you don't start at the beginning.

I've been exploring a very different type of music over the past three or four years than I could have imagined myself listening to six, ten, fifteen years ago. I mean, if you took my musical tastes at the age of 10 (a silly thing to do, anyway) and compared them to today, it's a striking difference. Even comparing the sort of music I listened to at the beginning of college or when I came here three years ago, it's very different. I've actually started listening to...country.

Not a lot, mind you, or even anything particularly new. Some Johnny Cash, some Willie Nelson, that's about it. Some occasional Hank Williams or Merle Haggard or George Jones. Old country, good country, back before it became pop with a twang.

And I approached it because of the Old 97's. Actually, because of their singer, Rhett Miller.

That's where this journey begins, actually. I heard something off of one of his solo discs one night in Borders a couple of years ago, and his voice and musical style and lyrics were pretty strong. So I grabbed the album, and liked it well enough. The girl at the music counter told me he'd been in another band that was even better called the Old 97s, and I eventually checked their stuff out.

And it floored me. Country and punk mixed together into a style I'd never imagined. Country played at break-neck speed, punk with a twang and a lot of heartache...it was great.

Then I heard about a band called Wilco, and they were supposedly the pinnacle of this alt-country style I'd found in the Old 97s. This turned out to be not quite true, but they blew me completely away. These guys had stripped away the layers of pop music, found the core of what American music was supposed to be, and rebuilt from that foundation up.

About this time, I was also digging deeper into Bob Dylan's catalogue, and I discovered the music he made with the Band on the Basement Tapes. And they'd done what Wilco was doing again, even if the results were rather different--taking the roots, the blues and folk and bluegrass and rock and gospel and everything else that went into American music--Americana, if you will--distilling it, rebuilding on the foundation. It was rootsy, raw, and real. It had my full attention.

And then I started pulling these various strands together, tying them and twisting them into a single, unified whole of my own. And then I started going backwards. I started looking at Woody Guthrie, Willie and Johnny. I started looking at Wilco's pre-Wilco stuff, in the band Uncle Tupelo, at the roots they'd explored and made their own. And music started to make so much sense to me on more than just a sonic level.

And recently, I found Gram Parsons, the guy who pioneered country-rock and probably had the greatest influence on guys like Uncle Tupelo and Wilco, the Old 97s and Ryan Adams (the guy behind another alt-country band, Whiskeytown, and whose own solo work has often reflected an urge to ape and occasionally synthesize various disparate musical traditions). And more Neil Young, who made country-rock the force that it is.

And I took all these musicians, these styles, these genres and ideas and forms and themes, and I've begun to internalize them. I've begun to understand them as expressions of the human condition, as ways of thinking about life and expressing life. I've started to look at the things the music says and what it doesn't need to say. I've been looking at music backwards, working my way back through the paths others have walked, coming to both similar and different conclusions. I've come away with a deeper appreciation for music.

I still love the music I started out listening to. I still love the Beatles and all the other bands I grew up listening to. You can see their roots, too, even if it's not always the same roots of these other guys (though there's often crossover). But I see the direction I want to take my own music, I see the direction it's come from. I hear it.

~chuck

Song of the Moment: Uncle Tupelo, "No Depression"