RIP Jeremy Tepper, Who Knew It’s the Music That Matters, Not What It’s Called.
The tragic death of music producer and musician Jeremy Tepper earlier this month called to mind a conversation several years ago in a downtown Manhattan coffee shop with Joe Ely — another musician with whom most music fans, to their detriment, are likely not familiar.
Ely was talking about how the music industry liked his eclectic music — a marvelous intertwining of country, folk, rock ’n’ roll, bluegrass, punk, Tejano, jazz and flamenco, among other styles — well enough to record it without ever figuring out how to sell it.
Jeremy Tepper, who was just 60 when he died on June 14, knew that dilemma and did something about it. He formed a record label, Diesel Only, to record folks like Joe Ely (though not Ely himself) and for years he programmed those kinds of artists on SiriusXM’s Outlaw Country channel.
It was a modest blow against the empire. As a musical statement, it was and is a refreshing breeze.
Ely, whose music is frequently featured on Outlaw Country alongside John Prine, Emmylou Harris, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Muddy Waters, Hank Williams, Willie Nelson and contemporary country artists with an edge — employs the simple trick of putting all the music he loves into the music he writes and sings. People who hear it like it. A few tours back, Bruce Springsteen brought him on stage to join the E Street Band in a blistering rendition of Ely’s “Settle for Love.”
Nor does interweaving genres make Ely a unicorn, since most musicians do not limit their appreciation to their own nominal genres. Paul McCartney wrote a classical suite. Springsteen recorded with a raucous folk band. Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson have recorded everything this side of sitar ragas. Rappers listen to rock. So does opera star Renee Fleming. Bluegrass wizard Alison Krauss grew up loving Led Zeppelin. Beyonce’s recent country hit wouldn’t surprise anyone who remembers Ray Charles’s classic 1962 album Modern Sounds in Country Western Music and it doesn’t take a musicologist to hear rock, folk, country and pop in the music of Taylor Swift.
None of this bothers fans. While we all know people who relish vowing that they hate country or hip-hop or whatever, most serious music listeners enjoy music from more genres than they may realize.
Who it does bother is the music industry, because it screws up marketing.
From the time recorded music first became available on cylinders well over a century ago, the industry has assigned genre slots to all releases. Classical, popular, jazz, foreign language, etc. In the 1920s, when the fledgling music biz discovered that black folks and rural white folks would buy their own styles of music on expensive 78 rpm records, it created slots for “race” and “hillbilly” music, ancestors of R&B and country.
When records got affordable and popular enough so that whole stores began selling only records, those stores divided their bins and shelves the same way. But then, 30 or 40 or more years ago, we started getting a wave of really good artists whose music bled into multiple genres, from Emmylou Harris to the varied likes of Guy Clark, Lucinda Williams, Nanci Griffith, Townes Van Zandt and Ely’s buddies in the Flatlanders, Butch Hancock and Jimmie Gilmore.
This confused not just record stores, but almost all radio stations, which didn’t want to risk losing listeners with music that fell even a little outside their carefully and narrowly defined formats.
Back in those pre-Internet times, it was almost impossible to get mainstream traction for a record without radio play. Therefore, Ely was explaining in the coffee shop, those artists moved to an alternate promotion universe, relying on avenues like concerts and fans who told their friends.
Jeremy Tepper did some of that. He put together musical ocean cruises and convinced SiriusXM to let him program what he called “Big Rig” music — songs that would keep a trucker entertained through hours on the road. Outlaw Country music is lively. It keeps you awake. It also doesn’t hurt that it’s presented by non-traditional DJs like Mojo Nixon.
Tepper didn’t play too much from his own band, the World Famous Blue Jays. He did, sensibly, feature his wife Laura Cantrell, a first-rate Americana artist (listen to “Kitty Wells Dresses” or “All The Girls Are Complicated”) who has balanced a paying career as a corporate executive in New York with the avocation of promoting and creating lovely hybrid music from the folk roots of elsewhere.
While SiriusXM doesn’t release listenership numbers, Outlaw Country seems to be one of its more popular channels. So there’s every hope that what Jeremy Tepper nurtured will live on.
We know that’s true of the music, which existed before there was a music biz and will continue after. It’s just nice to have it available in a place where even old-school listeners who don’t get all their music from their phones can, you know, find it.
