As a journalist, singer, label owner and radio producer, he fostered a community of musicians on the outskirts of Americana.
Jeremy Tepper, who over a long and varied career as a journalist, singer, label owner and radio producer championed the anarchic, high-energy music that straddled the lines separating country, rock, punk and plain old Americana, died on June 14 in Queens. He was 60.
His wife, the musician Laura Cantrell, said the cause of death, at Elmhurst Hospital, was a heart attack.
Born in upstate New York and educated in Manhattan, Mr. Tepper was perhaps an unlikely apostle for a style of music variously called alt- or outlaw country, but which he preferred to call “rig rock” — the sort of sounds favored by long-haul truck drivers.
Far from the big hats and ostrich-skin boots of Nashville’s Lower Broadway, it is the music one might hear coming from honky-tonks, jukeboxes, truck stops and big-rig radios, the corners of Americana that Mr. Tepper celebrated with unironic joy.
“It is taking all that truck-driving music — streamlined, guitar-based country rock — and dragging it onto the modern interstate,” he told Newsday in 1990.
Mr. Tepper was rig-rock’s greatest fan and biggest booster. He wrote about it for publications like Pulse and The Journal of Country Music, and for his own magazine, Street Beat, which was dedicated to jukeboxes and the music one found in them.
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Source: Music - nytimes.com
