Americana Music Reviews

Drive-By Truckers
Southern Rock Opera
Soul Dump Music

by David Pilot

He starts having re-occurring dreams about arena rock. Perhaps he's being visited by spirits from his past. Now he wants to remember. He wants to re-connect with whom he once was and what he used to dream. When it was OK to be a little barbaric. When it was OK to turn your three guitars up to 10.

When it was OK to ROCK!

So begins Act I of the Drive-By Truckers' epic Southern Rock Opera, a two-disc history of the New South's future as it struggles to come to terms at the intersection of mythology, gentility, and guitars screaming ferociously in the humid summer nights.

Since Appomattox. . .no, scratch that. Since the day the War and the Southern way fell into the mud with Stonewall Jackson's riddled body, the states of the Confederacy have struggled to find their identity and rekindle the fires of barbaric gentility that once held sway through Alabama and beyond. There was the Klan, right next door to the Lions Club so the gentry could check their terror hoods at the door and serve fried chicken to the community's downtrodden. There were two World Wars, full of heroes and legends from Southern states helping root out and destroy the original Axis of evil along with the little Japanese bastards at Iwo and Tarawa and Guadalcanal. Route 66. George Wallace. Lynyrd Skynyrd. Muscle Shoals.

The South is a lot of things, stupid and boring most certainly not included. The Drive By Truckers know that better than anyone since Ronnie van Zant and David Allan Coe, and with the SRO they make it unrelentingly clear.

But when the story was told the next day at
The graduation ceremony
Everyone said that when the ambulance came
The paramedics could hear "Free Bird" still
Playing on the stereo

You know it's a very long song. . .

From the spoken word description of the fatal car wreck chronicled above in "Days of Graduation," the SRO kicks into gear full-throttle. Sometimes detailing the career arc of a fictional guitar god obviously intended as Ronnie van Zant, sometimes staring social truths down across an empty bottle, the ride is unsettling and addictive and stimulating all at once.

"Ronnie and Neil" makes no bones about blowing holes in the old legends about the bad blood between the kings of Southern rock and the father of grunge, stating for the record that "Ronnie and Neil/Rock stars today ain't half as real," and digging into the relationship between the California songwriter and the boys from Alabam.

Now Ronnie and Neil became good friends
Their feud was just in song
Skynyrd was a bunch of Neil Young fans and
Neil he loved that song
So he wrote "Powderfinger" for Skynyrd to record
But Ronnie ended up singing
"Sweet Home Alabama" to the Lord

"72 (This Highway's Mean)" paints a piercingly clear picture of the drifting way of life, while "Dead, Drunk and Naked" gets right to the heart of the debate between the blue-collar man's brittle honesty and the church's ideas on life:

Me and old Jack Daniel's became the best of friends
We got all them Baptists to die for our sins
I know the Lord is coming
The South will rise again!

There's revenge for lost love on "Guitar Man Upstairs," and the twenty-first century's ongoing struggle with the legacy of Reconstruction makes "Birmingham" a story to be reckoned with. And on "The Southern Thing," James Byrd's all-too-recent death in Jasper, Texas earns derision ("Ain't about no foolish pride/Ain't about no flag/Hate's the only thing/That my truck would want to drag") just two stanzas before the heart of the Southern man's pride makes things pretty damned clear:

I heard the story as it was passed down
About guts and glory and Rebel stands
Four generations, a whole lot has changed
Robert E. Lee
Martin Luther King
We've come a long way rising from the flame
Stay out of the way of the Southern thing

"Wallace" is a strikingly different take on the Alabama governor's legacy, finding lead singer Patterson Hood hoping that as George approached the Pearly Gates a black man stood in his way ­ and claiming that these days the Devil's sporting a Wallace bumper sticker. "Zip City" breaks down every high school relationship between the local bad boy and the preacher's or deacon's daughter; it's the stuff of Americana legend in a five verse song. The first disc of the SRO then ends with "Moved," a beautiful and slow-paced little number making it clear just how far our mythical Southern boy has fallen and just how many bridges he's burned.

Act II unleashes a supernova trio of guitars exploding through "Let There Be Rock," one of the most unabashedly straightforward throwbacks to the days when bands filled arenas with high school kids who didn't have a clue what the fuck "angst" was. According to Hood, this is a fairly autobiographical cut that pretty much recaps his personal take on growing up Southern. Next up is "Road Cases," a quieter but stinging cut about those little suitcases rock stars cover with their logos and bumper stickers from all the places they play while they're big. The kicker? The band knows all along that one day they'll be nobodies again, and the road cases will be up for sale so's the coke dealer can be paid when it's all in the can. Then there's a dead-on killer of a song, one that could have easily come from David Allan Coe or Ronnie van Zant or even the Hag, but it's DBT guitarist Mike Cooley who filled "Women Without Whiskey" with lines like these:

You know the bottle ain't to blame
And I ain't trying to
It don't make you do a thing
It just lets you
When I'm six feet underground I'll still need a drink or two
And I'll sure miss you

"Plastic Flowers On the Highway" covers exactly the ground you think it does, only this time it's personal ­ the song's a tribute of sorts to an old friend of the DBTs who was killed in a car wreck just a week or so prior to his scheduled debut as part of the band in their very first gig. Songs like this one, songs that find ways to make statements without judgments, are the sort of thing that MADD should consider if they'd like their campaign to really finally hit the nerves that matter. This is also the human awareness sort of message that U2 only wishes they really knew how to offer. Come to think of it, let's all chip in and send Bono a copy of the Southern Rock Opera right now.

The last five songs on the SRO, while still supposedly describing the fictional band the two-disc set is about, are in fact a chilling and historically accurate account of the thoughts and circumstances and lives that were snuffed out when the Skynyard plane hit swamp on October 20th, 1977. "Cassie's Brother" (about guitarist Steve Gaines, whose sister and Skynyrd backup singer Cassie was also on the plane that day), is a loose and free-spirited jam that does justice to the Skynyrd legacy. "Life in the Factory" covers the truth about Skynyrd's origins and motives, and, for that matter, pretty much every other successful band out of the South in the last 50 years as well.

They hit the road doing ninety
Leave them steel mills far behind
Ain't no good life at the Ford plant
Three guitars or a life of crime

"Shut Up and Get On the Plane" wreaks havoc on the senses, since the listener already knows the ending. Death's on that plane, but those who don't know that for sure already lay down the one line that best describes the Southern Rock Opera and Southern folks in general:

Dead is dead and it ain't no different
Than walking around if you ain't living
Living in fear's just another way
Of dying before your time

In short (heh, length of this windy writeup notwithstanding), the Drive-By Truckers, in their efforts to pay tribute to those they term America's greatest rock and roll band, have instead served notice that they themselves are the ones to be reckoned with now. Throughout this review you've seen a pretty solid sampling of the lyrics and depth available on the Southern Rock Opera. What's the music sound like? Like the kind that needs to be played LOUD. You want a description of the Drive By Truckers? Take equal parts Skynyrd and Marshall Tucker, mix with a healthy dose of .38 Special and set finished product at a poker table with Willie Nelson. Have Johnny Cash cheat, and let Ronnie van Zant catch him. Then throw the whole mess out in the alley with Coe and Neil Young and a couple of Louisville Sluggers and some tire irons. That's what the DBTs sound like. Three screaming guitars that never learned how to cry, backing a strong, ferociously ragged voice that learned too well. Want to know what it's like living in the South, both good and bad? Go get the SRO and learn. Already live here and pretty damn happy about that? Go get this and blast it loud. All your new anthems are here, on two CDs.

The DBTs are online at www.drivebytruckers.com. They're on the road like mad. And they're singing the sort of songs you'll never hear on the radio but need to hear if you're really gonna be alive.

Contact David Pilot at: tailgunner-at-rockzilla.net

 
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