Robert Loss on Ugly Stick

Robert Loss, writer, educator, cultural critic, and musician, wrote up a piece in 2011 for Ghettoblaster which he reposted to his website in 2014 on Ugly Stick. Here's a bit, worth the whole read:

When you're ambivalent about the "cowpunk" label, being a band from a city referred to as "Cow Town" doesn't help you avoid the tag. Of course, Ugly Stick is not from Columbus, Ohio, per se, but a rural college town just to the north, Delaware, known for its annual Little Brown Jug (the second leg of the Triple Crown of Harness Racing) and for birthing Rutherford B. Hayes. Neither of which helps much, either. 

Twenty years down the road, Ugly Stick is still making music, and it still has mixed feelings about the "cowpunk" label. With a hint of exasperation, bassist Ed Mann says, "The whole description bothers me because I don't get the 'cow' part. We thought we were punk rock. 'Look, X does these interesting things with their songwriting where they drop down a half-step. Or the Minutemen have these weird parts that don't seem like they should fit together, but who cares, that's the song.'" 

Ugly Stick's best bet for shedding the label is simply that you listen to their wild and idiosyncratic music. On their first two recordings—a self-titled debut in 1989, and the 1991 follow-up Shaved, both recently reissued by Hovercraft Records as the two-disc set Pick Up the Hatchet—what you'll hear are yelping cries of dissent and freedom from four late-teen friends hearing themselves for the first time. Ugly Stick crossed the boundaries between Delaware's farmland, diners, and night-time philosophy classes, borrowing the language of country and punk, yes, but adding in early R.E.M., the Minutemen and the Pixies. Nothing else sounds like it.