Well, let the backlash begin.

Peter and I have been telling interviewers ever since we started this magazine that there was no litmus test, no imposed orthodoxy, no sacred degrees of separation from Uncle Tupelo underlying its content. No, for better or worse No Depression is and hopefully always will be a magazine guided by the music which engages its two editors.

As in: Stuff we like.

Not necessarily stuff we both like – there’s surprisingly little of that. Just stuff we like.

And so it is that our covers move from Robbie Fulks, who’s yet to sell his first 10,000 discs, to Ricky Skaggs, who’s had a decade or more of mainstream success. Jon Weisberger’s introduction is as eloquent a defense of Skaggs’ presence in this magazine as needs be made, though it pains me to realize I feel some kind of defense need be made at all.

And yet I will add this, too. Without Ricky Skaggs – and Robbie Fulks, for that matter – this magazine wouldn’t exist. See, back in the early ’80s when punk rock had lost its ability to speak to me (for the first time, anyway), and I was in the midst of an unhappy half-assed stab at yuppiedom…duh, you don’t wear long hair and a beard if you’re trying to get next to people with money…that’s when I fell into country music.

Raised on folk and bluegrass (and Mozart and Zappa), it wasn’t much of a leap. But there on the radio was Skaggs and the Whites and the Judds and Randy Travis and I don’t remember who-all else, and it was just what I needed, sitting at night in that office on the water, working for people who would go on to file bankruptcy and watching those rich folks tinker with their yachts.

That phase ended soon enough, and there I was pumping the star-making machine of grunge from an editorial desk in Seattle. Straggling through the mail came the first two Diesel Only compilations, and the first offering from Bloodshot. Enter Robbie Fulks. Enter, if slowly, the germ of an idea which several years later became my half of the genesis of this magazine.

Thanks, Ricky.

Thanks, Robbie.

– GRANT ALDEN

By the time you’ll be reading this, the annual Wavefest concert in Charleston, S.C., sponsored by local radio station WAVF-FM will have come and gone – though as I’m writing, it’s still a few days away. Which explains, in part, our lack of coverage of the event in these pages. Sometimes the simple reality of deadlines dictates what does or doesn’t get covered in No Depression. Since we’re shipping this issue to the printer a week or so before Wavefest, and won’t get it back for two weeks…well, you see the problem.

Certainly the lineup of the all-day festival was impressive, featuring, among others, the Jayhawks, Blue Mountain, Junior Brown, Cracker, David Byrne, the Ben Folds Five, Cowboy Mouth…and a couple bands called Son Volt and Wilco. Given the name of our magazine and the history behind it, one might have expected this event would be a shoe-in for us to cover, which is why it seemed necessary to write a note explaining the circumstances.

However, there’s more than just deadlines at issue here. When we first heard that the two bands descended from Uncle Tupelo would both be at Wavefest, it certainly raised some eyebrows; after all, they hadn’t shared a bill since leaders Jay Farrar and Jeff Tweedy had gone their separate ways in 1994. On the other hand, recent events – specifically, a rendezvous between Farrar and Tweedy in New York City this past April sparked in part by Roger McGuinn (who sat in with both bands that night) – made such an occurrence seem less surprising.

Perhaps more importantly, enough time has passed that it just doesn’t seem like that big a deal anymore. Nowadays, it’s not that hard to see Wilco and Son Volt as two fully separate identities, perhaps overlapping just enough that you might think, "Yeah, they’d work pretty well together on the same bill" – without really needing to consider the ties of the past.

The quality of Uncle Tupelo’s catalog speaks for itself, and our magazine’s name remains a tip-of-the-hat to their debut (and to the Carter Family song and America Online message board of the same title). It seems best to view the Wavefest lineup not as a much-hyped potential reunion, but simply as a bunch of good bands sharing a bill together. Here’s hoping it was a blast.

– Peter Blackstock