Getting Big, Staying Small: Alt-Country, Indie Rock, And Beyond
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At some point in 1991, a 17-year-old kid from Jacksonville, North Carolina, named David Ryan Adams psyched himself up to approach one of his local heroes, Mac McCaughan, the frontman for indie-rockers Superchunk and the big chief at Merge Records. McCaughan “sat on the edge of the stage at a Dinosaur Jr. /Finger concert at the Cat’s Cradle. I was seriously starstruck but so young and totally naïve as to how to appropriately talk to someone who represented so much to me. I walked up, introduced myself, and slowly but surely asked him a million questions … I got lucky. He answered them all right there as I asked.”
That’s Adams reminiscing in his introduction to the 2009 book Our Noise: The Story Of Merge Records: The Indie Label That Got Big And Stayed Small, and he describes perhaps the most Carolina moment in the Carolina indie rock scene. McCaughan was a central figure and arguably the most popular musician around. In 1989 he co-founded Superchunk, whose gnarly, catchy punk anthems would all but define the indie-rock scene for the next decade. That same year, he and ‘chunk bass player Laura Ballance started Merge Records as an outlet for their band and their friends. Most of their first signings were local, but Merge would bloom into one of the most revered indie labels in America. In the 1990s it bolstered its roster with a diverse set of acts, including Lambchop, East River Pipe, The Magnetic Fields, and Neutral Milk Hotel. In the 2000s Merge released albums by Spoon, Destroyer, M. Ward, and a little band from Canada called Arcade Fire. Its continued success has inspired a number of indie labels to hang their shingles locally, including Yep Roc, Holiday for Quince, Trekky, and Paradise of Bachelors.
When Adams first introduced himself to McCaughan, both Superchunk and Merge were still in their infancy, and Adams raved about local acts like Bricks, Wwax, and especially Erectus Monotone. Adams’ own enthusiasms would come to fruition in the mid-1990s when he formed Whiskeytown in Raleigh with Caitlin Cary and Phil Wandscher. They quickly became one of the most popular acts of the alt-country movement, thanks to Adams’ facility with a pop hook and his insightful lyrics about dead-end life in small towns like Jacksonville. As he sings on “Too Drunk To Dream,” off the band’s 1996 debut Faithless Street:
Do you hear that lonesome shuffle
Of my feet walking out of the bar
And I stumble down the same damn streets
My daddy done stumbled before
And then there is the backdrop, the Cat’s Cradle, a small club in Carrboro that might just be the center of so many scenes in North Carolina. It’s one of many rock clubs in the Triangle – including Local 506 in Chapel Hill and Kings in Raleigh – but few have been booking bands longer or are as storied as the Cat’s Cradle. It holds less than 1,000 people, which means that shows will always be intimate, whether it’s a local act still cutting their teeth or a national act passing through town on their way up or down the East Coast.
In its 40-year history, the club has witnessed the explosions and implosions of countless musical acts, and its roster contains a history of regional indie music. In the 1980s it hosted shows by Polvo and Superchunk (who recorded a live album there in 1999). In the ’90s Ben Folds Five and Whiskeytown took the stage. In the 2000s, acts as diverse as Tift Merritt, The Rosebuds, Mount Moriah, The Old Ceremony, Bowerbirds, and DeYarmond Edison (which included members of Bon Iver and Megafaun) have made the Cat’s Cradle their homebase.
Approachability may be the scene’s greatest quality: Even its superstars have time to take questions from gawking teenage boys. But what makes the current scene so interesting – and what bodes well for the future of Carolina music – is that all of these disparate artists have a deep understanding of regional music, from Piedmont blues to bluegrass to indie rock and alt-country. They make music not in opposition to local traditions, nor in slavish devotion to the past, but as an extension of regional history. In other words, they make music today that will inspire the pickers, strummers, drummers, singers, and writers tomorrow.
This article appears in our September/October 2014 issue. Buy it here or download it here. Or better yet, subscribe.
