No one can say for sure if the Uncle Tupelo songwriting team of Jay Farrar and Jeff Tweedy would have remained together any longer if drummer Mike Heidorn had stayed with the band after its third and penultimate album. Then again, if it hadn't been for the pivotal role played by their fellow Belleville, Ill., band mate, they might not have remained together at all through four of the finest country rock albums ever made.It's not a scenario Heidorn has thought much about since he quit Uncle Tupelo to get married a decade ago. The drummer has put aside his kit for now while his last band, the Farrar-led Son Volt, is on indefinite hiatus. Heidorn works for the same hometown newspaper he's worked for since high school and is content, for now, with his music career on hold.
But he's been asked about his old role a lot more lately in the wake of Sony Legacy's recent release, "Uncle Tupelo 89/93: An Anthology." In his extensive liner notes to the collection, Rolling Stone writer Anthony DeCurtis suggests that Heidorn's departure may have hastened Uncle Tupelo's end. Even Tweedy told DeCurtis that the drummer was a "very necessary link" between himself and Farrar.
It's a role the affable Heidorn reluctantly acknowledges but isn't quite comfortable with.
"They probably would have made one more album with or without me," Heidorn said during a recent phone interview.
But the speed with which Uncle Tupelo began its implosion after he left suggests that Heidorn - who is invariably an afterthought when fans of the band and its offshoots, Son Volt and Tweedy's Wilco, argue the merits of the two songwriters - played more than just the drums. Like it or not, he's now being remembered as an intermediary, though he cautions that there wasn't a lot of communication when he was in the band, either.
"There wasn't a whole lot of sitting around and rapping about your feelings," he said. "It's something we used to joke about, Jeff and me: 'Let's talk about our feelings.' It was easy for me to joke with them, to make them laugh and stuff, I guess that's part of how that worked, too, just telling some jokes and keeping it light. But there was always some kind of tension, always. Always."
That unspoken anxiety resulted in some of the finest American music of the last 25 years. Farrar's world-weary baritone was the perfect vehicle for his desolate themes of urban decay and personal dissipation, while Tweedy's essentially upbeat nature and pop sensibility - though never Pollyanna-like in song, either - were a perfect foil and counterweight.
"That was attractive to me, to play in a band with that kind of disparity," Heidorn said.
He agreed that Farrar, steeped in a familial tradition of music, was the more mature songwriter and performer when Tweedy and he began playing together in bands, and even through the first two Uncle Tupelo records. Farrar just had a knack for sounding as though he'd lived through the Depression and World War, without having been young enough to experience either.
"Jay's mother owned a paperback bookstore with probably 10,000 books in it," Heidorn remembered, "and after school he would work there 'til close, maybe 3:30 to 6 or so, and he'd just sit there and read.
"So when he wrote, it just came out of him very eloquently. I was very impressed at the time. I wasn't nearly as impressed as I am now, looking back, but that's what he does and he's really good at it. But now I see that he did a pretty good job just winging it at 20 years old."
There was plenty of writing fodder, too, for both Farrar and Tweedy in Belleville, a town of 40,000 on the outskirts of St. Louis. The trio came of age during Ronald Reagan's America, and Belleville did not escape the difficult fate that trickled down to so many blue-collar towns during that time.
Heidorn knew even back then that the songs were not, however, Belleville specific. He remembers journalists asking, often in hushed, pitiful voices: " 'What's it like in Belleville? Seems so desolate and desperate.'
"But I remember distinctly at the time - we were in New York City - saying that (Jay) could have been writing the same song had he been living in New York City."
But after reading DeCurtis' liner notes -- in which the writer suggests that there is a mythic aspect to Belleville now, courtesy of Uncle Tupelo's songs - Heidorn agreed that all the railroad tracks and bars on main street and screen-door porches were "snapshots" of the typical mid-Western town they'd all grown up in.
And while some of it may have been vicarious for 20-year-olds, some of it seems to have been informed by direct, personal experience. Alcohol - in both its destructive and palliative forms -- courses thematically through Uncle Tupelo's first album, "No Depression" as though the group were hell bent on a collective lifelong bender. In fact, Heidorn's one lyric contribution to the band's catalogue - I got drunk and I fell down - became one of the band's song titles and is now featured, for the first time since it was a 7-inch vinyl single, on the new Anthology.
"I don't think it was biographical," Heidorn said of the alcohol themes, but admitted that in their early 20s, like a lot of other folks that age, there "was always a six-pack involved."
Those themes were prevalent on "Still Feel Gone," too, the band's second effort. The group honed its punk edge on powerhouse numbers like "Postcard," "Punchdrunk," and their tribute to the Minutemen's recently departed front man, "D. Boon." In a surreal twist, the little independent band practiced the songs on a gigantic soundstage the Rolling Stones had built in a Massachusetts barn for their "Tattoo You" tour.
"There was a Keith Richards' room," Heidorn remembered. "It was very dark. I think there was no natural lightÉat the same time John Belushi was visiting and he had his own room, and it was all windows. Apparently he didn't need to sleep."
There was another room, too, he said, a 70s-style, plush carpeted, fully cushioned one in which the band recorded subdued songs like Farrar's "Still Be Around" and Tweedy's "Watch Me Fall," tunes that hinted at the band's direction on their next album.
But "March 16-20", the group's gentle, mostly acoustic masterpiece, would mark the end of Heidorn's association with Uncle Tupelo, except for one live date. Heidorn told his band mates two weeks before they had booked studio time that he was going to quit, and after their initial disappointment, Farrar and Tweedy happily insisted that he take part in the recording. And though he played a limited role on it, Heidorn - like Farrar and Tweedy - cites it as his favorite Uncle Tupelo album.
"I just thought the tones and the sounds of the songs were so well done from (engineer) John Keane and (producer) Peter Buck's end, and just from our end playing," Heidorn said. "It was a good moment to have the 'record' button on."
Heidorn said he had no regrets at all leaving, at least at the time. He was getting married to a woman with her own child, and needed the stability, not to mention money, that the band, touring, and Rockville Records could not provide. He assumed he was doing Farrar and Tweedy a favor.
"With the way they were writing songs, I felt like they needed to get a touring drummer that was just ready to go, to Japan or wherever, on a moment's notice," he said, as he remembered how Farrar and Tweedy would be working on songs and waiting for him to get off work at the newspaper to play them. "After that, they never really did collaborate, just from what I've heard...I don't think there was ever much sitting around and working a song out together, from that point on, as when I was playing in the band."
This is not a conceit of Heidorn's, whose humility is evident the moment he speaks. DeCurtis correctly points out - and Farrar and Tweedy confirm it - that the band dynamic was shifting right around this same time, and Heidorn saw it, even if it chose not to register until later.
But when first Bill Belzer, then Ken Coomer, later replaced Heidorn, and the group added John Stirratt on bass and multi-instrumentalist Max Johnston, Farrar decided that he'd had enough. He announced that he was quitting the band right after its fourth record, the major label debut, "Anodyne."
"That was a shock to me, believe it or not," Heidorn said. "I thought they were going to keep on going, from what we had done from the time we were 16, we were always hanging out and playing music.
"Although now, looking back, it probably should have been obvious that it was just two separate people."
Whatever his role, Heidorn came to terms with it long ago. Now he's enjoying re-living those days and half-wondering what all the hoopla is about. Of particular pleasure is seeing his old band's material being handsomely packaged on the same label that one of Uncle Tupelo's idols also calls home.
"I do distinctly remember me and Jay, when we were probably 19 years old, in my parents' basement, thinking about the Byrds," he said, "and I remember saying to him, 'I wish I was 19 back in 1969,' when we were first listening to those Byrds' records...but the Byrds have kind of been a theme throughout."
It's a theme that Heidorn said should be remembered when his old band's fans are claiming Uncle Tupelo invented the country rock wheel.
"I'm astonished that people consider us the place where alt-country started," he said. "I always thought that was misleading because of all the records that we were listening to, including the Byrds records from the 60s', and the bands that we would go drive three hours to see, Jason and the Scorchers and stuff like that."
It's probably more accurate to say that Uncle Tupelo helped re-ignite interest in the country form among kids who, at the time, weren't interested in what super-slick Nashville country acts had to say, and shared the band's disdain for commercial rock.
"In the late 80s, early 90s, it was kind of a weird radio time," Heidorn said. "What we played, or listened to, was nothing like you'd hear on the radio."
That's the legacy Heidorn is most proud of. With three, and possibly four, more re-issues ahead in the next year, Uncle Tupelo finds itself in the strange position of never having been more popular, almost a decade after they ceased to exist. Heidorn, who has been kept abreast of the project's progress but was not involved in specific song selections, won't reveal exactly what's coming up when the band's entire Rockville catalogue resurfaces with extra tracks; he's not beyond teasing the faithful, however.
"You'll hear different versions of songs no one's really heard, maybe I haven't heard them yet, and then, if possible, some of these live songs that are floating around, if we could actually find a good take that we wouldn't be afraid to let other people hear," he said. "Maybe some songs from that final tour, or that final set. Or maybe something from early, early on that actually came out funny and good, maybe a cover of something. But it'd be mere speculation at this point for me to say.
"I don't know how many we sold before now, I don't think we sold very many, but I feel it's in good hands now, and I'm really proud to be associated with it because it gives these songs a chance to be heard again."
(Thanks to Mark Janovec for sending this in.)
[Go to the Uncle Tupelo page]
[Go to The Gumbo Pages' Home Page]Chuck Taggart (e-mail chuck)