Jeremy Tepper, who over a protracted and different profession as a journalist, singer, file label proprietor and radio producer championed anarchic, high-energy music that crossed the traces between nation, rock, punk and outdated tradition American, died on June 14 in Queens. . He was 60 years outdated.
His spouse, the musician Laura Cantrellmentioned the reason for loss of life, at Elmhurst Hospital, was a coronary heart assault.
Born in upstate New York and educated in Manhattan, Tepper was maybe an unlikely apostle for a method of music known as different or outlaw nation, however which he most popular to name “rig rock”—the form of sound favored by a very long time. truck drivers.
Removed from the large hats and ostrich-skin boots of Nashville’s Decrease Broadway, it’s the music one can hear coming from horns, jukeboxes, truck stops, and mass radios, the greasy corners of Americana that Tepper celebrated with none-the-ironic . happiness.
“It’s taking all that truck-driving music — stripped-down, guitar-based nation rock — and dragging it onto the trendy interstate,” he informed Newsday in 1990.
Mr. Tepper was rig-rock’s largest fan and largest supporter. He wrote about it for publications resembling Pulse and The Journal of Nation Music, and for his personal journal, Road Beat, which was devoted to jukeboxes and the music present in them.
Your file label, Diesel only, promoted the careers of artists resembling Dale Watson, Ms. Cantrell and his personal band, the World Famous Blue Jays. He additionally launched compilations of truck classics by artists resembling Buck Owens, Marty Stuart and Steve Earle.
“Jeremy was at all times cheerful, sort and gracious along with his effort and time,” mentioned musician Jason Isbell. “Many people would by no means have discovered our audiences with out their tireless work and curiosity.”
Tepper was finest identified for his roles at SiriusXM, first as a number within the early 2000s and, since 2004, as a programmer, producer and entrepreneur behind the Outlaw Nation and Willie’s Roadhouse channels.
He introduced musicians as DJs, together with Sniper Jennings, Elizabeth Cook It’s Mojo Nixonto play an eclectic mixture of Jimmy Rodgers, Jerry Lee LewisLucinda Williams and the outdated 97s.
“Jeremy championed artists working inside and outdoors the traces of mainstream music,” mentioned Emmylou Harris, one other artist with heavy rotation on Tepper’s channels.
A ubiquitous presence at bars, festivals and awards reveals, Mr. Tepper made connections and performances, uniting a neighborhood round his favourite music.
“He was the primary to take me to Willie Nelson’s bus and introduce me to him,” musician Margo Worth wrote in an e-mail. “It was at Farm Support in 2016. The primary time I smoked a doobie with Willie, Jeremy Tepper was the one different individual on the bus with us.”
Over the previous decade, he has gathered a lot of his favourite artists to hitch the Outlaw cruisea raucous nine-day journey across the Caribbean together with 1,200 enthusiastic followers – though nobody was extra excited to be there than Mr.
“Jeremy cherished music greater than anybody I’ve ever met,” Earle mentioned in an e-mail.
Love went past music. Tepper appreciated the blue-collar tradition of the American freeway. Whereas attending school within the Eighties, he labored part-time for commerce magazines that might be discovered at interstate pit stops throughout the nation, resembling Principal Occasion, about skilled wrestling, and Merchandising Instances, centered on pinball machines, jukeboxes and all kinds. of issues that use cash. operated.
Throughout that point, he fronted the World Well-known Blue Jays, a rustic band that grew out of the anarchic mixture of punk, rock and roots music that emerged in Manhattan’s East Village within the Eighties. He was, as Spin journal wrote in 1992, “an enormous 28-year-old man with a voice as thick as tar.”
Their songs celebrated working-class life on the open roads, particularly the women and men who rode 18-wheelers forwards and backwards throughout the nation.
In a single track, “Good Morning, Mr. Trucker,” Mr. Tepper exclaimed, “It’s not that I like driving — it’s the one factor I can do.”
Jeremy Evan Tepper was born on November 18, 1963, in Poughkeepsie, NY, to Elly (Zeitlin) Tepper, an artist and educator, and Noel Tepper, an lawyer.
His ardour for Americana blossomed in highschool, when he labored part-time at a file retailer and likewise delved into his dad and mom’ nation album assortment. Like many suburban youngsters of the late Nineteen Seventies and early 80s, he was drawn to the manic energy of punk and post-punk music and located an analogous power within the likes of Johnny Money, Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams.
He studied journalism at New York College. At the moment, he was editor of Fashionable Truck Cease, a commerce journal, in addition to Merchandising Instances, the place he grew to become senior editor after graduating in 1986. He based Diesel Solely in 1990.
He married Ms. Cantrell in 1997. Alongside along with her, he’s survived by his daughter, Isabella; two grandchildren from a earlier relationship; his dad and mom; and his brother, Anderson.
Tepper remained a fixture on the choice nation scene till his loss of life. On June 12 he was on the Rock & Roll Corridor of Fame in Cleveland for the opening of an exhibition devoted to his shut buddy Mojo Nixon, who died in February throughout an Outlaw Nation cruise.
And he continued to take the stage, within the crouched, microphone-in-mouth pose of a punk rocker, singing gleefully unusual songs about alien craft, barbecue and large rigs.
“This isn’t tenting,” Tepper informed Spin. “That is different nation music.”
