Bruce Tull, guitarist and pedal steel player for the Nineties alt-country outfit Scud Mountain Boys, has died. He was 71.
Tull died on June 22 in Tulsa, Oklahoma after a brief illness, according to a statement shared with Rolling Stone.
Joe Pernice, frontman of Scud Mountain Boys, shared a tribute on Instagram last week, writing, “No combination of words will ever accurately describe the beauty of Tull. Someday I’ll try. But today Stephen [Desaulniers], Tom [Shea], and I are just hollowed by his passing. In our grief we send our love to Nancy, the entire Tull family and to all who loved Bruce and the music he made.”
Tull was born and raised in Midwest City, Oklahoma, and was working on his PhD in economics at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst when he met his future bandmates in 1991. Originally known as the Scuds, the group started off playing pretty standard early Nineties alt-rock. But they got tired of hauling their gear around, and were enjoying the acoustic country tunes they played around the kitchen table at Tull’s house much more.
Soon, instead of bringing amps to shows, they were bringing their acoustic instruments, and the kitchen table, to recreate the experience for audiences. Their 1995 debut, Pine Box, was recorded around the table, too, with Tull recording and mixing the live-to-four-track cassette tape. A follow-up album, Dance the Night Away, was also released in 1995.
The band garnered the attention of indie luminaries, with the Silver Jews’ David Berman providing the liner notes to Pine Box. “I had begun seeing the Scud Mountain Boys around town with their Baltimore haircuts, the guitarist’s guitarist carrying his trapdoor Springfield rifle, the progeny of the muzzle-loading French Charleville muskets that had whacked so many Redcoats around these hills,” he wrote. “I had heard it was the band’s tradition to lay dinner on the table and then set the table on fire.”
Scud Mountain Boys scored a record deal with Sub Pop, who released the band’s most well-known album, Massachusetts, in 1996. The album earned strong reviews and favorable write-ups, including a year-end blurb in Rolling Stone that declared: “The real beauty of Massachusetts … is not the dreamy melodies; it’s the dark-edged, often downright bleak lyrics about obsession and disaffection.”
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Massachusetts also featured the song “Lift Me Up,” which received some attention after MJ Lenderman and Waxahatchee covered it during a show in Boston this spring.
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After Massachusetts, the Scud Mountain Boys disbanded, though they eventually reunited to release a fourth album, Do You Love the Sun, in 2013. The band returned to the stage, too, bringing their kitchen table along with them again.
Beyond the Scud Mountain Boys, Tull was a fixture in the Western Massachusetts music scene for years. Per the Valley Advocate, the Northampton-based alt-weekly, he produced and played on “countless local records,” including albums by acts like Lo Fine, Haunt, and Goldwater the Second.
