Music For Robots

Back in the late ‘90s, Sub Pop was searching for identity. From the ‘60s space lounge of Combustible Edison, to the chicken scratch math rock of Heroic Doses, to whatever the Murder City Devils are (grunge-a-billy?). While they throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks, the label decided to experiment with country. They started with the Blue Rags out of North Carolina, who play a kind of mountain swing / hot jazz that’s recorded fast and loose, and pretty far from the traditional Seattle sound. 

Then they dropped Crooked Finger’s Atchafalayan Death Waltz 7″, which is a dark alt/country ballad. Then came Supersucker’s “Must’ve Been High,” which is a Johnny Cash inspired romp through surf, country, and rockabilly. It’s a real 180 from the punk hedonism of the “Sacrilegious Sounds Of...” Super suckers also cut a 7″ with Steve Earle to make it official, but that was more on the alt country side of the spectrum. 

Sub Pop also put out a 7″ of Danielle Howle’s “High School Dance.” A troubadour from South Carolina, she wasn’t quite country, but she definitely wasn’t grunge either. 

They released Scud Mountain Boys’ “The Early Year” which is more or less a country album, even including a cover of Wichita Lineman and a lot of sleepy ballads (the best of which is “Glacier Bay”). The sound was country, but the vocals were more like indie rock, so we’re almost there, not but quite. 

And all of this is a long way to say that Mike Ireland was the first pure country artist on Sub Pop. Jonathan Poneman had heard his band, The Starkweather’s, and wanted all-in. But the singer of the band cheated with Mike’s wife, which was even more cruel considering that the Starkweathers had actually formed at Mike’s wedding. So the band broke up but Poneman still wanted to be in the Mike Ireland business. So Mike formed a new band from the ashes and record a slow, considered, Countrypolitan record -- “Learning to Live” -- about the devastating dissolution of his marriage. 

Already out of step with modern Nashville country, the record would’ve been a hard sell at any label, let alone a label famous for launching Nirvana and Soundgarden. The rules of country radio are hard and fast and it’s not something easily trifled with. Mike did get on the Saturday night stage of the Grand Ol’ Opry, which was amazing, but a shy, reticent artist who was never all that interested in the packaging and merchandising of his music, he never really had a hit. 

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Back in 1978, a guy named Michael Jackson wrote a song called Blame it on the Boogie. His publishers pitched the track to another guy named Michael Jackson, who, along with his four brothers, released it as a single. So there were two Michael Jacksons singing Blame it on the Boogie on the radio at the same time. Obviously this happened in England where the relationship with singles charts has always been much stronger than here. And you have to remember that in the late ‘70s the Jacksons were pretty long in the tooth, having been a band of teenagers for more than a decade already. 

http://pitchfork.com/thepitch/811-blog-rock-revisited-musing-the-clap-your-hands-say-yeah-10th-anniversary-tour/

Ian Cohen’s bittersweet pitchfork piece about Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, and by extension, Blog Rock in general, is perhaps the most accurate depiction of the music blog era I’ve read. I think we finally have enough critical distance to see the scene for how it really was.