This is going to be about The Bottle Rockets, the other alt-country band from St. Louis, that graced the cover of the original magazine twice (even though the second time we all knew the futility of the gesture).
But it's going to take a while to get there. Because first we have to talk about clothes.
I come from grunge. Flannel is not a costume. It's what we wore — what I still wear — because it was cheap and it stayed warm when damp, and it lasted. Same with jeans and Doc Martens, though Docs never quite fit my feet. I have never owned a tie. I have never had a proper job interview. I have never worked for a company with more than 50 employees, unless we really have to count when I went door to door for the Fuller Brush Company in the summer of 1977. Clothes make the man, right?
