More Volt-age

Jay Farrar's country still rocks

by Roni Sarig

Back in the late '60s, guitarist/songwriter Gram Parsons (occasionally with fellow travelers like the Byrds and Flying Burrito Brothers) fashioned an unlikely kind of Southern hippie music by merging his C&W heritage with the rock counterculture of the time. In the early '90s, Uncle Tupelo staged a similar kind of shotgun wedding, except that the rock sounds they drew on came largely from American punk and postpunk bands of the '80s: Black Flag, the Minutemen, the Replacements, R.E.M. It started a trend variously called alterna-country, insurgent country, or twangcore. Some, though, give credit to Tupelo when they label this latest rock/country marriage "No Depression."

Besides being the title of an old Carter Family song (and now of a popular alterna-country fanzine), No Depression (Rockville) is the name of Uncle Tupelo's 1990 debut album. In the three years since the group's break-up, entire legions of "No Depression"-style bands have emerged in Uncle Tupelo's wake, including two Tupelo splinter groups -- Son Volt and Wilco, led respectively by former Tupelo frontmen Jay Farrar and Jeff Tweedy -- and bands like the Bottle Rockets, Whiskeytown, and the Old 97s. The best of these groups share characteristics: reverb-juiced guitar licks, high-energy acoustic/electric strums, aching vocal harmonies, and lyrics about loss and redemption and the wages of sin. But Son Volt stand above the pack, as their 1995 debut, Trace, and the just-released Straightaways (both Warner Bros.) attest. Although the rest may be able-bodied clones -- and Tweedy takes an ambitious turn toward AOR/pop songcraft with Wilco -- Farrar and Son Volt have maintained contact with their authentic country-rock and punk roots.

Farrar comes across as somewhere between indifferent and indignant toward the glory posthumously afforded his first band. "It's all everyone wants to talk about, especially people who never saw Uncle Tupelo or just found out about it through Wilco or Son Volt," he says dryly and quietly over the phone. "They tend to romanticize it quite a bit. The reality of it was, it wasn't that romantic. There's never a direction mapped out for either band, we just take it as it comes."

Fortunately, Farrar's self-professed lack of vision has not hurt him so far. Continuing a path away from his punk impulses (evident at least three years earlier in Tupelo's acoustic album March 16-20, 1992), Trace alternated between the traditional country folk of "Windfall" and the guitar-soaked roots rock of "Drown." Although Farrar's abandonment of Tupelo's high-speed hootenanny perhaps made Son Volt sound like just another country-rock band, Trace's songs were good enough to propel them to the front of a pack occupied by other fine neo-roots groups like the Jayhawks.

Reached by phone, Brian Paulson -- the producer who was behind the boards for Uncle Tupelo's final album, Anodyne (Sire/Reprise, 1993), and continues in that role for Son Volt (he also produced Wilco's 1995 debut, A.M.) -- offers further insight. "Trace was kind of a proving ground for Jay, of being able to do it on his own. It was a hard record to make. It was all new members in a band that hadn't really played together before, people trying to find a common ground all within a week, basically. And it was kind of tough. There's quite a bit of tension on the record, I believe, though a healthy one, and it definitely worked."

Straightaways is a milder, more wistful affair, despite the driving guitar riff that kicks off the first tune, "Caryatid Easy." Dominated by midtempo songs like "Left a Slide" and "Creosote," the album uses acoustic strumming and slide guitar or pedal steel to create a more spacious, though not radically different, sound. Although Farrar's songwriting is perhaps less memorable here, his vocals sound more expressive than ever.

"Some people might miss the tension of the first album," Paulson says, "but there's a certain amount of grace and confidence in the new one that I think makes up for it. Being out on the road and having Son Volt acknowledged and revered has really helped Jay personally . . . he's a lot more outgoing now." No more Depression.

Son Volt play the Paradise this weekend, April 26 and 27, with Slim Dunlap. Call 562-8800.