How Chicago Became the Epicenter of the Alt-Country Boom in 1998

A chronicle of the city’s country music history, highlighting the ’90s scene that mixed punk ethics with honky-tonk traditions.
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Longform: Chicago 1998

by Jeremy D. Larson

“I shoulda moved to New York city, but I never was that cool/ I just languished in the Midwest like some old romantic fool” —Freakwater - “My Old Drunk Friend”

Even those who watched grunge die have a hard time pinpointing the time of death. The exact date when the grim reaper placed its bony finger on the first disaffected, flannel-shirt-wearing stereotype remains lost to a cold stew of opinions and a confluence of corporate maneuvers. Here lies grunge: Interred in a bone-white crypt engraved both with Kurt Cobain’s opening line of In Utero, and a sketch of Korn playing Lollapalooza in 1997.

The late '90s live in this strange lacuna between the end of the monoculture and the beginning of the internet. Picture this hermetic moment of paranoia and self-reflexivity, where after seeing the corporatization of countercultures throughout the ‘90s, everyone knew nothing sacred could remain sacred for long. In fact, rock music in ‘90s was defined not only by its countercultures, but by how quickly those countercultures were co-opted by the mainstream. Just as the Seattle grunge scene famously inflated and exploded, so too did riot grrrl become another curio maligned by the media, much to the chagrin of the feminist punks who started it, and then suddenly the radical notion of “girl power” became associated not with Bikini Kill, but with Tracy Bonham and The Spice Girls.

While the mainstream stalked the margins for the next music phenomena, Chicago, for the second time in its civic history, became a bastion of country music. Thanks in part to British art-punks The Mekons, the launch of Bloodshot Records, and the continued success of anything Jeff Tweedy touched, “insurgent country” and “alt-country” became Chicago-based sobriquets. And sure enough, by 1998, alt-country became the next genre de jure upon which major labels wanted to prey.

Photo by Kristine Larsen. Courtesy of Music Box Films

But a corral of Chicago artists battled through those times to continue to record some of the finest Chicago country today, including Robbie Fulks, Jon Langford, Freakwater, and more, all guided and inspired by Chicago’s collectivist ethos. “We didn’t start this label because we hate shitty country music,” says Bloodshot founder Rob Miller, “We started the label because we hated the shitty rock ’n’ roll that was appearing everywhere.”

None of this would have happened if it weren’t for the first time Chicago became a bastion of country music, almost a century earlier. What started as an out-migration of the Appalachians and Mid-South in the early 20th century, turned into an emigration event large enough to earn the name "Hillbilly Highway.” White, southern families made the pilgrimage up through the Midwest and settled in urban and suburban neighborhoods across the Chicago metro area alongside millions of African Americans seeking industrial jobs and work in the city’s stockyards.

A few of these hillbilly migrants from down south helped spur the start of Chicago’s famous bi-weekly radio show, the “WLS National Barn Dance” which began broadcasting in 1924. Throughout the ‘30s and ‘40s, the pointedly nostalgic show (think “Prairie Home Companion” but even more noxiously sappy because this was, after all, an anathema to the Great Depression) reigned supreme as the most popular country music radio broadcast throughout country. Millions tuned in every week to hear Gene Autry and other pickers and crooners sing patriotic, family-friendly songs and tell truly awful knee-slappers. Cities all across the nation saw the success of Chicago’s Barn Dance and wanted to have their own weekly country-based variety show. One of those cities was Nashville, whose “WSM Barn Dance” would later overtake the Chicago original in popularity and influence when it was renamed the Grand Ole Opry.

(Photo by Fred Kosth/Archive Photos/Getty Images)

However, in downtown Chicago, a seamier side of hillbilly life was cropping up along Madison Street. By the late ‘40s, a half-mile block in Downtown along Madison became known colloquially as the “Tennessee Valley”, with bars like the Southern Inn, Wagon Wheel, Hillbilly Hayloft, and as many as a dozen honky-tonks were erected to serve this hillbilly diaspora. They were home to a rowdier, more sinful side of country music. These haunts catered to the class of hillbillies in Chicago for whom the coddling, Christian tunes of The Barn Dance belied the roots, twang, and lifestyle of their former homes. As detailed in the book The Selling Sound: The Rise of the Country Music Industry, this hillbilly country, this roadhouse honky-tonk music spilling out of these displaced watering holes in Chicago (as well as in Detroit, Nashville and Southern California) would go on to popularize the sound of country radio over the next few decades.

It was these honky-tonk artists—George Jones, Ernest Tubb, Merle Haggard, Patsy Cline—that Chicago WZRD radio DJ Terry Nelson recorded onto a mixtape one day in 1983. Nelson made the tape with the intention of giving it to one of his favorite musicians, Jon Langford, lead singer of effortlessly eloquent post-punks The Mekons, who at that point was living in Leeds, England. Being a big fan of The Mekons' early records, Nelson thought the tape would show Langford how much he already had in common with honky-tonk.

“We didn’t think we liked country music much,” says Langford, who, after playing Nelson’s mixtape, began to see the natural connection between his UK punk roots and America’s country roots by listening to these stories of death, booze, lust, and loneliness. The mixtape was a direct influence on The Mekons’ breakthrough 1985 album, Fear and Whiskey.

As much as Fear and Whiskey is afire with anarchist, anti-Thatcher, anti-Reagan sentiments, it’s also loaded with fiddle, harmonica, the ghosts of honky-tonk legends, and a beautifully inept Hank Williams cover. It became apocryphally known one of the first alt-country albums, not by meaningful design, but because a bunch of punks got a hold of a mixtape with some Merle Haggard on it.

(Photo by Kirk West/Getty Images)

“We were never trying to imitate country,” says Langford. “Fear and Whiskey doesn’t sound anything like country music to me, but there was imagery and osmosis. It sounds like a bunch of punk rockers from Leeds not really knowing how to play country music.”

The Mekons found success in America quite literally sort of playing country music, and soon after touring in the U.S. for a few years in the late 80s, Langford wanted to move permanently to the States. “We had this reputation after Fear and Whiskey being somewhat influenced by country music,” says Langford, “and what I couldn’t find in Nashville or Memphis or anywhere else, it was in Chicago.”

In Chicago, Langford became pals with one of the last holdovers from the preeminent downtown hillbilly scene, the city’s country institution The Sundowners. It can’t be overstated how important The Sundowners were for keeping the wind in the sails of classic country while almost every other music genre imaginable found its foothold in Chicago. From 1959 to 1989, the trio of Bob Boyd, Don Walls, and Curt Delaney took up residence at the shit-kicking Double R Ranch, which used to be on the infamous Madison St. before it moved to the corner of Randolph and Dearborn in the basement of old Woods Theatre building in the ‘70s.

The bar was reminiscent of the old honky-tonks that decorated Madison Street years ago, a respite for both city slickers and southern transplants who wanted a taste of something down-home, even advertising the “world’s best chili.” Longtime Chicago country singer and guitarist Robbie Fulks played there regularly from ’84 to ’89, and recalls that it was “a real pit”, adding that the advertised chili was an “emetic concoction,” but the music that came out of there until 4 or 5am was nonpareil.

Four nights a week, The Sundowners would play country, folk classics, and sometimes modern-day radio hits with three-part harmony and an unwavering precision. As legend has it, by the end of their career when they had moved out from the Double R to their own Sundowners Ranch in the suburb of Franklin Park in the ‘90s, the band knew over 25,000 songs. But on his first on his first tour of the U.S. with the Mekons back in 1986, the Langford was at a poverty for country songs at that point. He sat in with the three country icons one night after a Mekons show at the Cubby Bear.

“It was kind of a wild thing for us to do,” recalls Langford, “and we weren’t entirely good at it. So I decided I’d go away and learn some of the Cash songs we were involved in, so that the next time I went back I could do something sensible in front of a potentially hostile white redneck crowd on a Saturday night in Chicago. That was where the Waco Brothers came in.”

Langford would become a regular with The Sundowners, so much that the trio played Langford’s wedding in 1991. To dive deeper into his love for Country, Langford started the hell-raisin’ Waco Brothers as a bona fide county bar band in 1994, while the Mekons continued working outside the status quo for the rest of their career.

(Photo by John Ingledew Co.)

The sonorous connection with Mekons faking their way through the country fakebook and the roots of country traces back to the days of Johnny Cash. Not only did Langford initially release *Fear and Whiskey *on his own label, Sin Records (a play on Sun Records, the Memphis label where Cash recorded), but the tenets of punk ran thick in the veins of Langford and Cash.

“I don’t have a hard time drawing a direct line between The Dead Kennedys and Johnny Cash *Live At San Quentin,” *says Rob Miller. “Johnny Cash’s guitar player Luther Perkins, he couldn’t play. You listen to those iconic early Sun sessions of Johnny Cash and those simple guitar runs, that wasn’t a ‘studied minimalism.’ He couldn’t play. It fits in perfectly with that aesthetic.”

Before he lived in Chicago, Miller came to town to see Dwight Yoakam and Buck Owens at the downtown Chicago Theatre. A friend told him that they should go around the corner to the Double R and see The Sundowners. That show changed him for good. “I thought this is an amazing place I should move to this city one day.”

A few years after Miller moved to Chicago in 1991, he met Bloodshot co-founder Nan Warshsaw spinning records at what is now the punk whiskey bar Delilah’s. As fans of typically local, typically country, typically punk music, Warshaw and Miller (along with Eric Babcock, who parted ways a few years later) decided it was a good idea to start a label with little to no forethought. “It was that late ‘70s punk mentality of ‘Here’s three chords now start a band.’ It was, 'Here’s three music fans who are incompetent musicians, let’s start a label. Why not?’”

In what would come to define the insurgent and alternative bent of Bloodshoot, Miller’s history with country was more connected to the cowpunk and rockabilly, a fondness of The Mekons, X, The Cramps, The Gun Club, and The Panther Burn. But as they started to put together their first compilation for the label, which was going to feature exclusively country and folk acts from Chicago, the punk influence made sure that Bloodshot was going to be a buckshot to status quo, and another key ingredient to the other idiosyncratic Chicago labels Thrill Jockey and Drag City.

What came out of the late night boozing and crate-digging was *For A Life Of Sin: Insurgent Chicago Country, *Bloodshot’s first comp released in 1994, featuring a coterie of Chicago country artists like Freakwater, Texas Rubies, Moonshine Willy, inimitable album art painted by Jon Langford, and a song called “Cigarette State”, which Miller found on a Sundowners record from the ‘80s. It turns out it was actually written by Robbie Fulks. Bloodshot asked Fulks to re-record it for the comp, and after over ten years of hustling, sending demos to major labels in Nashville, Fulks signed with Bloodshot, who released his debut album *Country Love Songs *in 1996.

(Photo by Paul Natkin/WireImage/GettyImages)

Like clockwork, it was time for the counterculture to become a trend. The sometimes sweet often bitter songs on Fulks’ Country Love Songs and his 1997 Bloodshot follow-up *South Mouth *caught the ears of several major labels looking to give Fulks a well-deserved signal amplification and wide distribution. The timing was perfect: Wilco’s had a hit with their second album *Being There in 1996, *Ryan Adams’ band Whiskeytown just signed to a major label in 1997, as did Chicago singer Jay Farrar’s Son Volt. Alt-country was having its grunge moment.

“After I signed with Geffen, little remarks came up that we weren’t quite on the same page,” recalls Fulks. “An A&R guy said, ‘We want you to listen to this Ryan Adams record because he’s like you, and he’s a good writer, and we want you to be inspired.’ This idea that there was this peaking trend out there and I would be their guy. Ryan Adams was on one label, Jay Farrar was on another, and I would be that guy at Geffen. It wasn’t an offensive idea, maybe it was a predictable idea looking back now, but it wasn’t what I wanted.”

Fulks’ 1998 major label debut Let’s Kill Saturday Night was a slick record, with harder edges and a more electric rock feel than what he had done on Bloodshot. But after Geffen merged with Interscope, Fulks was left out of the fold and went back to his home at Bloodshot. During 1998, Bloodshot put out mostly 7-inches because many bands were trying to ride what was once the ebb but now the flow of alt-country. Miller recalls being at CMJ music festival and having a major label try to take The Waco Brothers from him for $75,000. Miller laughed.

“Labels were signing bands that didn’t even play the banjo but just had one in the van,” says Miller. “Two years before, bands were like, ‘Wow there’s a label dumb enough to put out our record and get behind this.’ Two years later it was like, ‘Yeah we wrote four songs and we bought a dobro the other day so we’re waiting for Geffen.’ We thought we’d be done.”

Bloodshot weren’t, of course. They were home to Neko Case's debut The Virginian in 1998, released after Case moved to Chicago to be apart of the city's collectivist mindset. In 2000, the label released Ryan Adams’ debut *Heartbreaker, one the the best-selling *records on the Bloodshot catalogue (the label’s license on the album expired in 2013, and Pax-Am records released a deluxe reissue of the album earlier this month).

The coda of Chicago’s second dance with country music should focus on the famous and acrimonious release of Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in 2002. It was a full dissimilation from the band’s alt-country roots to something definitively their own, as well as a tale of major label woes. It was everything the alt-country boom was in one album, something seeking to disassociate from the mainstream, and something that jettisoned Wilco to something much bigger.

(Photo by Ken Weingart/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

But in truth the country scene carries on in Chicago, always in flux and in bloom at Carol’s Pub in Uptown or FitzGerald’s in Oak Park, with Robbie Fulks, The Waco Brothers, and Freakwater all putting out records this year, all on Bloodshot. Bands like those, and the rest of Bloodshot’s increasingly eclectic lineup of dusty punks have been around the world, on labels across the city and country, but still call Chicago their home. It became the melting pot, a communal space, the very ideology of punk, that let country flourish.

“It wasn’t like New York or L.A. where you just felt everything was a business and everything was like grinding to the next commercial success,” says Langford. “Chicago was a place that actually had the space to support people to do what they wanted to do.”