I was struggling to find my way into this intro to CREEM’s country issue when a startling bit of news came to my attention:

SiriusXM program director Jeremy Tepper, perhaps the greatest expert on outlaw country music I’ve ever come across—and just the nicest guy you could run into at a Dwight Yoakam concert—had died suddenly at 60 of a heart attack.

I mention Jeremy here not just in tribute, but because he was one of a few influential music lovers who set me on the bottle-strewn path to the artistic love of my life: country music. Around the turn of the millennium, when I was fumbling to assemble a country four-piece of my own called the Sharky Favorite Band and he was DJ’ing a Country Night on Mondays in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, as DJ RigRocker, we shared a bond as a couple of urban cowpokes living in a Strokes world. Sure, people dug what we were doing, but because of the NYC post-punk revival lapping up all the oxygen, we were never at the front of the line.

We were basically a country section in America’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll Magazine.