Danny Alexander writes:

“It’s the sound of nature; it’s like being under dark clouds,” Bruce Springsteen tells Danny Federici in the band reunion documentary Blood Brothers.  Springsteen is scratching his head, and Federici just nods.  He gets it.  He may already know it, and this conversation may really just be for the cameras.

Whatever’s happening in that scene, whether Springsteen is describing the thin twinkling light of Federici’s keyboards, like a low sparkle just along the horizon line, in the song they are about to play, “Blood Brothers,” I don’t know.  I know it is my favorite moment in the film.  I imagine that they’ve had many conversations like this, talking about sounds in terms of images, setting and effects.  Federici could be whatever he needed to be.

Springsteen had many nicknames for his lifelong bandmate.  One was the Phantom, and one was the Minister of Mystery.  They both say a good deal about the unique role Danny Federici played in the E Street Band.  Often, he all but vanished into the mix, though you would certainly miss him if he were truly gone.  Other times, his organ reached for ideas when words fell short, often at those moments when the singer hit a spiritual impasse.  Two moments like this jump to mind.  One is when the singer challenges his dark half to try to destroy his relationship in “Two Faces”; Federici’s organ kicks up a defiant riff that gives the song some fight.  At the end of “You’re Missing,” something very similar happens, when Federici’s bluesy answer offers just enough spirit to keep going.  Federici’s instrument could stand for mystery, and it could stand up to the mystery with a few well placed notes; it gave you something to believe in.

But, mostly, he stayed in the background, an absolutely crucial part of the scene but not one that called attention to itself.  Often, in the rockers, his keys broiled red, like embers, just under the racket.  They were often the colors of fire—red, and yellow, jet blue and white, whatever colors served to accentuate the other colors on stage.  In the reunion tour “Youngstown,” he’d paint a pale yellow sky between the low hanging smoke from that steel mill, offering the necessary backdrop for Nils Lofgren’s angry red guitar solo at the climax of the song.  Often, his sustained notes sounded like seething placeholders, or the revving of an engine, a furnace containing the flame that would soon explode from Springsteen’s guitar when he stepped out for one of his solos.

More than any other instrument, Federici’s seemed to do its job to make sure everyone else could be the best they could be.  He offered a wall of sound against which Roy Bittan could dribble his countless, intricate volleys.  He seemed to offer resistance that heightened the punch of Gary Tallent’s bass and Max Weinberg’s drums.  While Clarence’s horn could open “The River” with a jazzy, lonesome blues, Federici’s organ stepped in to answer the call of Springsteen’s keening at the end of the song.  In “Badlands,” he’d be this bright yellow light behind the chords, offering bravura flourishes at the end of certain lines, like a cross between the Hammond B3 and slide guitar.  He was always underscoring lyrics and phrases coming from other members of the band, making them shine.
As much as anything, whether accordion or calliope or a strand of sparkling light, Federici’s keys were that element in the E Street Band that gave it the smell of the boardwalk, the mystery of what might be if all of our secret dreams come true.  At one point in “Mansion on the Hill,” the song all but paused for his revolving, sparkling colors caressing the visions this mansion elicited in the mind of the child.  Whether he was hanging up high in the mix or improbably low, he always suggested a horizon line beyond the physical world, a horizon of our dreams.

That vision’s so powerful, it continues to call us to territory uncharted.  It’s a sad time, but we can all count ourselves very lucky to have his art still with us.  May our dreams do it justice.

*****

Visit the website for the Danny Federici Melanoma Fund, here.

Roy Kasten writes:

I first moved to Saint Louis, Missouri in August 1987. I was 22, a student of literature and a writer. I spent most of my days and nights in the stacks and study rooms of Olin Library at Washington University.

I moved to the river city from Utah. As a teen I had discovered something called “community radio” in the form of KRCL, a volunteer-based music and talk station that broadcasted (and still broadcasts) along the Wasatch Front from the far left end of the FM dial. I think I first heard Bob Marley, the Grateful Dead, Bill Monroe, Hank Williams and John Coltrane on that station. It was a part of my secret teenage life, something no one else would understand, a place and space of solace and discovery.

In Saint Louis, I turned again to the left end of the dial, and in October of 1987, I found KDHX, which had just begun broadcasting at 88.1 FM. I couldn’t believe my ears. The programming was even more eclectic, even more passionate, smart and free than KRCL. I heard country, jazz, punk, new wave, bluegrass — and especially, soul, deep soul, spun by some guy named Papa Ray, “The Soul Selector.” I’m sure it was on his show that I first heard, or really heard, ZZ Hill, Bobby Blue Bland, Joe Tex, Bettye LaVette, Jr. Parker, Johnny Taylor, Fontella Bass, O.V. Wright and Oliver Sain. In the mostly desolate radio wasteland of Saint Louis, I’m sure I wasn’t alone in that.

I became a programmer for KDHX in 2004. My show is called Feel Like Going Home, it airs Wednesday mornings, from 8:00 - 10:00 am Central Time. I try to mix indie rock, singer-songwriters, country, soul, blues and Americana in some way that makes connections, maybe even makes sense.

There are around 200 volunteers that contribute to KDHX–I’m one of them. We all believe that “community media” (and KDHX includes a local access cable TV station, an expanding web site, educational efforts and work with film and video) is more than a noble concept. It’s a practical, viable, meaningful way of building and transforming our community. Saint Louis wouldn’t be Saint Louis without the station.

You’ve heard about Clear Channel, you know about media consolidation, you know what hierarchical, corporate control does to the quality of our lives.

And forgive me for getting all Barack on you, but there is something you can do about that. For starters, you can listen to, become involved in and support community media wherever you find it.

KDHX streams live on the web 24/7 and you can check out archives from past shows and podcasts of the fine talk programs as well. We’ve just started our Spring Membership Drive, and even if you don’t live within the 80 mile or so radius of our broadcast tower, you can still discover a world of music and ideas through KDHX.

I hope you’ll tune in and support one of the finest, most diverse radio stations anywhere.

Mo. asked to ban ‘cage fighting’ by kids

By MARCUS KABEL, Associated Press Writer
Thu Apr 3, 4:48 PM ET

Legislators are seeking to ban mixed martial arts competitions — sometimes called “cage fighting” — among children in Missouri, which appears to be the only state where youth matches are allowed.

The sport is a blend of martial arts styles made popular by cable television’s “Ultimate Fighting Championship.” Republican state Reps. Bryan Stevenson of Webb City and Steve Hunter of Joplin introduced the measure Monday, days after an Associated Press report about the practice.

“I think it borders on child abuse. I just don’t think it’s appropriate behavior at all,” said Stevenson, adding that he has never attended a youth fight but has seen video clips.

A trainer in mixed martial arts who is trying to organize a national youth league warned that bans will just drive an increasingly popular sport underground.

Nathan Orand, owner of a fighting studio in Tulsa, Okla., whose young students have fought in Missouri, also defended the kids’ version as having safety rules and protective gear that make it no more dangerous than more established children’s sports such as wrestling.

Stevenson said he believes mixed martial arts is brutal and more dangerous for kids than other sports. He also said he was already alarmed by reports of youth competitions in southwest Missouri before the AP report.

Missouri law allows sanctioning bodies to permit youth fights. It is a misdemeanor in many states for children to participate, while a few states have no regulations.

Stevenson said doctors told him maneuvers used in mixed martial arts can cause permanent damage in children by putting pressure on still-developing joints.

Orand said his startup youth MMA league, called Freestyle Combat League, is adding new safety rules on top of ones already in place to make sure joints and bones aren’t damaged.

Youth MMA, as Orand teaches it in Tulsa, requires padded head gear, shin guards, groin protectors and gloves. It also bars elbows and any strikes to the head of an opponent who is on the ground.

For the new league, Orand said he is adding chest and stomach protectors for fighters younger than 14 and a rule allowing referees to stop a match if they see the danger of a joint injury.

He’s also taking away the cage, the chain-link fence that typically surrounds the fighting area. Orand and other MMA supporters say the cage is safer for fighters than the ropes of a boxing ring, but Orand said youth matches will be fought only on wrestling mats.

“One of the main concerns I’ve run into is the fact that it’s in a cage. It can look brutal at first glance. In the interests of the youth sport, we’re taking it out of the cage,” he said.

David Cantwell writes:

As the presidential campaign was taking off last year, more than a few of us predicted that if Barack Obama were to become a serious contender for the Democratic nomination, he’d be subjected to race baiting like we hadn’t seen in this country since George Wallace’s 1968 presidential campaign.

Well, as the song says, “Hello trouble!”

The events of the last couple of weeks, and especially the media coverage and public reactions to the comments of Obama’s longtime pastor Jeremiah Wright, have reminded me just how deeply entrenched racial biases are in our country. A few observations…

*****

Black and white Americans tend not to mean the same thing when we speak of a candidate like Obama who, it’s said, could help us transcend the racial divide and move into a so-called post-racial era. When many Americans, but particularly white people, refer to such transcendence, I think they mean something like: “Finally! Someone who will shut up about race!”

Other Americans, however, partiularly black Americans, are more likely to think: ”Finally! Someone who will inspire us to have the conversation about race we’ve never really had!” In this sense, then, Obama’s speech on race, which followed James Baldwin’s advice that directly addressing our blues is “the only light we have in all this darkness,” is exactly what many white voters do not want to hear. Darkenss? What darkness?

*****

Not all morally significant racial incidents are racist incidents. Even so, when many white Americans are confronted with some racial ill or other, their first response is to deny that they are “racist.” And then to conclue that’s the end of the matter.

Geraldine Ferraro is a perfect case in point. Called on a racially insensitive remark, her first defense was to say she’d been called a racist–of course, no one had called her any such thing–and then to deny the charge. The idea, it would seem, is that there are only two moral possibilties in play here: One, I’m a racist or, two, I’m perfectly fine. And, it’s implied, if the first can be denied then the second immediately applies. But that’s not the way it works.

Let me quote here from an excellent book by Lawrence Blum called I’m Not a Racist, But…: The Moral Quandary of Race. A common but false assumption, Blum writes, is that:

“either something is racist or it is morally in the clear…[O]ur only choices are to label an act either ‘racist’ or ‘nothing to get upset about.’…[But] not every instance of racial conflict, insensitivity, discomfort, miscommunication, exclusion, injustice, or ignorance should be called racist. Not all racial incidents are racist incidents.”

For Blum, then, the point is that “All forms of racial ills should elicit concern from responsible individuals” (emphasis mine). So just because her comments didn’t merit the term “racist” does not at all mean, as Ferraro wants to insist, that there was nothing to call her on when she suggested that Obama was benefitting undeservedly from a type of political affirmative action.

*****

For what it’s worth…If we want to talk about undeserved benefit surrounding a candidacy we would need to look to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Not because she’s a woman–in some ways that may be even a larger obstacle to her election than the color of Obama’s skin is to his–but because her entire politicial career is founded upon little more than de facto nepotism.

*****

Finally, the ridiculous reaction to Jeremiah Wright’s comments reminded just how frightening an angry black man remains to many white Americans. Wright’s comments have been “shocking” and “controversial,” we’re told, and anti-American. But just what exactly is controversial about them? Is it controversial to suggest that America is run by rich white men? That Barack Obama knows what it is like to be called “nigger”? That God might damn rather than bless America for treating its citizens as less than fully human? That U.S. foriegn policy has contributed to anti-American sentiments around the world? This is “shocking”? The underlying assumption here seems to be that any impassioned criticism of the United States is out-of-bounds and that such criticism is evidence not of a love for American ideals but proof the criticizer hates America. It’s one more childish round of America, love it or leave it.

*****

Suggested further reading…

CNN commentator Roland Park has written about not just Wright’s soundbites but the entire sermons in which they were delivered.

Anti-racism activist Tim Wise expounds on what the Wright incident tells us about America in “Of National Lies and Racial America: Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama and the Unacceptability of Truth.”

Finally, Hillary Clinton’s ties to fundamentalist Christianity are far more troubling than Obama’s to liberation theology.

For more of Roy Kasten’s SXSW coverage, see the A to Z blog.

There were two soul acts on my must-see list: the legendary Darondo and the unknown Black Joe Lewis. I was shut out of the former, but the latter was playing a free day party in the parking lot at Club Deville and I easily slipped in. Lewis is all of 25 or 26 years old, looks like a young Magic Sam, hails from Austin, and is still finding his way between Chicago blues—he’s a fast and loose but not over-powering guitar player—hard soul ala Wilson Pickett and indie rock. You can hear the latter in his drummer and lead guitarist, as they go for volume instead of swing, and you can hear it in Lewis’ novelty hit-of-sorts “Bitch, I Love You.” If all that doesn’t sound promising then you’ll have to see him for yourself. Dressed in Star Trek uniforms, the band, including a good three piece horn section and a merciless keyboard player, tore and tore through their set, covering Don Covay and Pickett, and culminating in a Jackie Wilson-esque jive dance and to-his-knees break-down that, while scripted, showed the pure, emotional direction he might yet take his music. Lewis is still growing into his role as a band leader. Another 500 gigs from now, he could be a force on the soul revival scene.

After taking the rest of the afternoon off to write a bit at Jo’s coffee, I drove back downtown for a Direct TV taping with former country star Deana Carter. These tapings at the convention center have become something of a tradition—last year, one of my festival highlights was seeing Rickie Lee Jones at one such set—and despite the stiff and silly honky tonk stage, Carter carried herself with humor and warmth, and can still sing all right. She stuck to her ‘90s hits, explained that she wanted to do “The Boxer” from her new covers album The Chain—which she explained is a tribute to her father Fred Carter Jr., who played on or produced more hits than I had realized–but couldn’t get the clearance, and instead turned to Orbison’s “Crying,” one of the harder pop covers to pull off, let alone knock out of the park, which Carter pretty much did. She may never have a country hit again, but write her off at your own peril.

The Weakerthans

I spent the heart of Thursday evening (March 13 for anyone keeping score) at the Cedar Street Courtyard, one of many make-shift venues at SXSW. It’s a narrow, open-air space between two handsome bars with handsomer couches and stiff drinks, both of which I needed. Whatever the courtyard’s capacity might have been before this week, it was now set at infinity – 3, and people kept streaming in as Tim Fite performed on a tiny stage. Fite is a sub-sub-Waitsian songwiter with a multi-media, Pee Wee Herman shtick that grates after about 45 seconds. Weird does not trump listenable. The Utne Reader and Anti- Records, hosts of this showcase, have been right enough in the past that I gave the next band, Man Man, doubt’s benefit, but found that, much as I agree with David Cantwell’s observation about snarky music writing, snark is sometimes more than a band deserves.

Blue Man Group + punk – paint = Man Man

So why was I there, or anywhere for that matter? To see a band like The Weakerthans, whose records I’ve dug since their first (still best) album Fallow (1998), but have never seen live. Fronted by John K. Samson (of Propaghandi), the Winnepeggers play airy, bright power pop, sometimes surging into Buzzcocks-esque punk, that tempers the more-often-than-I’d-like Wes-Andersonish snapshots of Samson’s writing.

Somehow I slipped to the front the stage, with 500 people pressing up behind me, and one Weakerthans fanatic beside me singing out every line. If I only knew every line, I might have done the same. Samson stood diver-still as his band popped and bounced like lottery balls, and he sang with wit and bite, melodically but not really sweetly, and some kind of implicit, inner happiness. Rock music, I suppose, shouldn’t be compared to a cool balm, but that’s how the set felt to me as the conference ground and ground on, everywhere but here. — Roy Kasten

Living In Stereo’s best friend Roy Kasten is in Austin for SXSW. He sends the following, with more to come. For bonus coverage, check The Riverfront Times music blog.

Day one of SXSW ‘08 in Austin began for me with a PETA protest on one end of downtown and ended with veggie taco from a mobile taqueria on the other. Circularity can be more than a trope. This was my 7th or 8th South By, I’ve never counted, and though I’m one of only ten thousand writers who’ve decried the conference’s corporatization, I, like them, know I’ll keep coming back.

Not for the gimmicks, whether it’s a dude in a chicken suit apparently protesting that there isn’t a McDonald’s to protest within a 1/2 mile radius of one of the least corporate-chain-dominated major American cities I can name, or whether it’s the dudes in fraternal-jam-band People’s Party pulling a guerrilla-performance stunt–they suck too hard to merit a voluntary audience–outside the block-long queue for the Domino Records showcase at Antone’s. Nor do I come to gauge so-called buzz bands, as I wouldn’t know buzz if it sheared my silver mane.

I come to SXSW to see a bunch of bands, ideally bands I’ve never seen before, because I think that’s part of my job as a critic. That was the plan anyway when I headed into the fecal-pit of Emo’s on Red River on Wed. afternoon to catch The Ravonettes at a free day party, only to miss them by 5 minutes. Back-up plan was the venerable and age-appropriate Conqueroo/Guitartown party—dedicated this year to the memory of recently deceased Silos bass player Drew Glackin–at Mother Egan’s a mile or so west down 7th. Jon Dee Graham and the Fighting Cocks were just setting up. I’ve seen the Austin guitarist, growler and insanely under-rated songwriter some 15 times—and I’d see him 15 more. Graham had recently fallen off the wagon, and hard, but seems back to fighting shape. He opened with the Little Feat-ish “Full,” some jokes for visitors (“The weather’s always like this but the Mexican food’s usually better”), and then a harrowing “Burning Off the Cane” and his hardest rocker, “Laredo.” “There’s an endless war,” he paused mid song, squeezing the word, “between good and evil,” before the guitars returned like the latter or the former, it’s hard to say sometimes, as Graham sings, which is which. Next to me someone was seeing him for the first time: “How did he get so good?” Years and years or work, I imagine, and just as many years of suffering, and yes I know that’s a romantic cliché. He ended with a terrific Green on Red sing-a-long, “The Greatest,” which is all about beating the odds, and making them pay, note for note, for ever trying to beat him. “Go forth and be not afraid,” Graham stated plainly and split.

\

Next up was Chip Robinson, long ago of The Backsliders, one of the great white alt-country hopes of the ‘90s, whose final album, Southern Lines, remains a minor classic of that time. Robinson has been all but invisible for the last decade, and may be living in Brooklyn now, if his Myspace page—which features some new songs–is to be trusted. He still sounds wise and worn and real, and it doesn’t hurt that his old pal Eric Ambel pushed the band with a guitar the size and shape of Idaho. Robinson played the old Backsliders hits and a few newer numbers, and if you ever loved that band you’ll want to see Chip should he ever fully stage a return.

Dinner at one of Kinky Friedman’s favorite joints, Hut’s, and then a short walk to La Zona Rosa, found me in an hour-long line for a rare Van Morrison club date. Odds of entrance looked grim, but the wait was made bearable by a young woman from El Paso who claimed she was the grand daughter of the judge who got Johnny Cash out of jail. We—my traveling companion/girlfriend Dana and I—finally slipped in for the last five songs or so of Van’s set. He has a new record forthcoming on Lost Highway, and he showcased those tunes, with an eight-or-so piece band, featuring fine fiddle and organ riffage, as well as the irreplaceable John Platania on guitar. The new material submerges the country of his previous Lost Highway record (the failed genre exercise Pay the Devil) in a seeming return to the acoustic celtic soul groove of under-rated albums like No Guru, No Method, No Teacher or the more recent Magic Time. The emphasis is firmly back on improvised blues and jazz, and Van, looking leaner than recent years, scatted, slurred and growled and seemed to have as much fun as the remote iconoclast can these days. He kept the focus on the new stuff—no “Brown Eyed Girl” or “Moondance” encores–none of which was staggering, but all of which sounded right for him, as well as reworkings of “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” and “Drinking Wine (Spodeeodee).” There were moments, especially at the vamping “boogie oogie woogie” end of “Drinking Wine,” that the veil of disengagement frayed enough to let the great soul singer be great again.

After a UK band showcase at Antones (read about that here), I spent the end of the night at the absurdly snooty and surreal Pangea, where No Depression was winding down its annual showcase. The space was plush and comfy, and the couches a salvation, but the goons at the door and around the velvet-roped VIP areas were a bit much, not that No Depression was responsible for any of that. The unwashed and ill-mannered Felice Brothers closed out the night with Borat banter and accordion and trashy drum driven tunes that suggest a cross between early Gourds and early Avett Brothers, but with better songs than either combined. Whether they noticed the young lady treating her male companion to a panty-less lap dance at the side of the stage I can’t say. I can say their rockified old-time stomp and Dylanesque dreamsongs have a kind of uncouth genius about them, and you should see them-preferably at a dive—soon.

David Cantwell writes:

I wrote the following piece for the current issue of Kansas City’s weekly paper, The Pitch.

A couple of weeks from now I’ll spend a weekend proofreading the upcoming installment of the magazine No Depression. This issue marks an anniversary of sorts—this will be issue number 75—but for a lot of us the occasion will be more heartbreaking than celebratory. No Depression has dug around the rootsiest corners of American popular music for 13 years. But now, due generally to a rapidly changing music business and, especially, to a one-third decline in the magazine’s ad revenue in just the last two years, the May-June, 2008 issue will be No Depression’s last.

I’ve been proofing the magazine every two months for years now, but with only rare exceptions has it ever felt like work. In truth, each time the next round of PDFs began arriving in my inbox, there was a part of me that was amazed all over again that the magazine existed at all. Most music coverage, for far too long and with no end in sight,  consists of little more than a frantic scrambling from one next big thing to the next, an icky-squishy collection of celebrity profiles and snarky 150-word album reviews.

No Depression felt like another country. The rag’s specialty, to borrow from poet Wendell Berry, was “the use of old forms,” exploring the ways that musical styles and genres persist—honky tonk, bluegrass, punk, old-timey, gospel, the blues, good ol’ rock ‘n’ roll, and so on—even without the endorsement of Total Request Live, college radio, alternative weeklies, or Grammies. Each ND arrived like a long, deep breath, a pause to consider where we’d been, where we were, where we might be headed and then to decide—this is a essential value of all ongoing traditions—just what it is from the Now and the Then that we might yet need yet further on up the road.

Detractors, I know, like to think of any interest in the musical past as one form or another of nostalgia, but such dismissals are usually wrong. More than anything, No Depression argued that our forebears have something to say to us that we could still stand to hear, not least of which being that our new stories are bound up with their old ones. We cannot shape a future, at least not any future we’d want, without deep grounding in the past.  Plus, out-of-the-spotlight artists like Mavis Staples and George Jones, gospel singer Isaac Freeman or a twenty-first string band like Old Crow Medicine Show, each a subject of major features in the magazine, were all making great music and people needed to know it.

No Depression was named after an AOL newsgroup that lifted the title from an album by the band Uncle Tupelo, on which they’d punked-up an old Carter Family number called “No Depression in Heaven.” This was in 1995, when so-called “alternative country” acts like Uncle Tupelo spin-offs Wilco and Son Volt, and Uncle Tupelo-mimics like Blue Mountain and Whiskeytown, were whispered to be the Next Big Thing (along with Techno!). To no one’s great surprise, America proved resistant to Twang-mania’s charms.

But No Depression thrived, quickly outgrowing the self-deprecating description of its early years: “The Alternative Country (Whatever That Is) Bimonthly.” Soon enough, and in no small part due to the campaigning of its several senior and contributing editors, ND began to cover bluegrass, soul, blues, folk, any sort of country too loud or too twangy to make it on the radio….really, just about any sort of popular music that remotely could be termed “rootsy” or what some now call “Americana.”

In some ways, No Depression never stopped being the fanzine of its origins. This was especially true of its new releases review section, which even 13 years on still rarely included negative reviews. Mostly, though, this we’re-just-fans-writing-for-fans approach was a key to lasting as long as it did.

ND was entirely a desk-top affair. It didn’t have an office or even meetings, and it remained the vision of its co-founders and editors in chief, Grant Alden and Peter Blackstock. Indeed, the pair routinely passed on feature queries simply because they didn’t like the artist in question’s new release or even because they figured the act was already famous enough to guarantee them plenty of coverage elsewhere. Better to shine ND’s light where its illumination was needed. So instead of, say, Bruce Springsteen on the cover, a natural fit for the magazine’s aesthetic if ever there was one, it would be some far less well-known singer-songwriter like Patty Griffin or Mary Gauthier, Kelly Willis or Kansas City native Iris Dement, or Buddy and Julie Miller.

Or it was the “King of Rock & Soul” Solomon Burke, or the forgotten mid-century R&B diva Little Miss Cornshucks, or a country legend like Ralph Stanley, Merle Haggard, or Porter Wagoner. Or “younger” alternative-country artists like Alejandro Escovedo, Robbie Fulks, and Gillian Welch, the Bottle Rockets of St. Louis or the Drive-by Truckers.

(An incomplete roll call of regional acts that made it into the pages of ND would include not only Dement but Mike Ireland and Holler, Howard Iceberg and the Titanics, Hadacol, the Wilders, Rex Hobart & the Misery Boys, the Bindlestiffs, the Starkweathers, Split Lip Rayfield, the Domino Kings, the Morells, the Original Sinners, and Jeff Black.)

All of those acts, as well as the hundreds more who were featured in its pages over the years could count on No Depression to provide the consistent notice they knew they’d never get anywhere else—and that they needed if they had any chance at all at building a career.

And the worthiest among them saw those careers essayed at unheard of lengths: A cover story I did last year on Porter Wagoner ran to 9,000 words! It’s hard to imagine just where any of these artists will ever be taken so seriously again.

The magazine never grew into its somewhat grandiose new cover tag, “Surveying the Past, Present and Future of American Music,” but it came nearer that mark than any other rag in the rack and I think was always headed in the right direction. Now, “barring the intercession of unknown angels” (to quote the latest issue), and excepting whatever limited version of the magazine may or may not continue online, No Depression will head only in the direction of the sunset. Like a really great country weeper or soul lament, it breaks my heart.