Drive-By Truckers reach artistic peak
by Scott Hall
Still bent on restoring Southern rock’s good name, the Drive-By Truckers compromised authenticity in making their latest album, Decoration Day. “It was the first time we ever really got to record in the studio, and we had air conditioning, and that in itself made a big difference,” bandleader Patterson Hood said. “Recording with air conditioning was just a great idea. I believe in that.”
The Drive-By Truckers perform Thursday at Birdy’s with special guests Citizens Band..
The process was a far cry from the making of 2001’s Southern Rock Opera, the ambitious double-disc concept album that put the Georgia-Alabama-based band on the national map. At that point, the Truckers had no label support and would spend three months on the road to scrape up enough money for a couple weeks of recording, which took place in the upstairs of a Birmingham uniform shop during a heatwave. “We couldn’t even turn fans on when we were rolling tape because the microphones would pick them up, so it was like 95 degrees with no moving air in this sweatbox,” Hood recalled. “We would go in at night, and we would get piss-drunk, and we would crank up our amps and just record until we dropped, and it was just pure hell. And I’d call home, and the soon-to-be-ex-wife wasn’t speaking to me, and it was just a miserable time.” The grueling process ended two marriages and one long-term relationship for the band members, and it nearly tore the group apart, too. But the eventual response to the album — a 20-song examination of Southern culture and politics built around a loose retelling of the Lynyrd Skynyrd saga — included critical raves from all corners, mainstream press attention and a contract with alt-country powerhouse Lost Highway Records. The vindication was rewarding, Hood said by phone from Nashville, where the band was editing its first-ever video. “Making the record, everybody told us we were crazy, and that it wouldn’t work,” he said. “It was a pretty fucked-up concept, but that was part of the point of it.” Decoration Day has less of a formal concept but remains as rooted in geography as a Faulkner novel. With tales of blood feuds, foreclosed farms, jilted brides and, ahem, incest, the new album doesn’t exactly shatter stereotypes, except for the notion that such issues can’t be handled with intelligence and sincerity. Like most great rock and country music, this material wallows in the gutter and finds transcendence. The album borrows its title from guitarist Jason Isbell’s song about a Southern church tradition, a day spent placing memorial items at cemeteries. The 15 songs give it a sprawling feel for a single disc, and the stylistic sweep from full-tilt rockers to weepy country ballads to dissipated acoustic hymns creates a vibe not unlike the Stones’ Exile on Main Street. Hood thinks the band finally hit its stride with this fifth album. “They’re all your children, but this one’s the one that did me proud,” he said. “It’s mostly first and second takes. We generally went with the take that had the spirit as opposed to the one where we played everything perfect, and I think that serves us well. Perfection is overrated.” The men behind the band’s three-guitar attack — Hood, Isbell and Mike Cooley — prove themselves to be exceptional songwriters, probing the human condition with uncommon wisdom, grit and grace. “Something about the wrinkle in your forehead tells me there’s a fit about to get thrown,” Hood sings in “Heathens.” “It gets so hard to keep between the ditches when the roads wind the way they do.” Tackling the same subject matter from different angles, Hood and Cooley each draw from personal experience to explore the topics of suicide and disintegrating relationships. “Dreams are given to you when you’re young enough to dream them, before they can do you any harm,” notes the sad protagonist of Cooley’s “Sounds Better in the Song.” “They don’t start to hurt until you try to hold on to them after seeing how they really are.” Oddly enough, after re-releasing Southern Rock Opera and putting the band in the studio for the new album, Lost Highway grew cold after hearing the results. The label reps thought the disc ran too long, a point Hood does not dispute, and they also were put off that the band sequenced and mastered the album before letting them hear it. “They said we could make the record we wanted to make, so we took them at their word,” Hood said. “We’ve got three songwriters in the band, and one song kind of flowed into the other, and the obvious places to cut it would have meant cutting some of my favorite moments on the record.” Another possible point of contention was the opening track, “The Deeper In,” which Hood based on an Esquire magazine article about a couple who are serving prison terms for brother-sister relations. Like the other songs on the album, however, the story is told with sensitivity and compassion. “Aside from the initial cringe factor of it, the article was beautifully written and took pretty much the same point of view that I take in the song,” Hood said. “It was kind of sympathetic, while at the same time acknowledging that it’s not really a good thing to do.” As Lost Highway repeatedly pushed back the release date, the band got the message, bought back its album and found a new home at the Austin-based indie New West Records. The Truckers got to keep their 15 songs and their 16-page booklet of lyrics and gothic cartoons by Wes Freed, who also illustrated the Southern Rock Opera packaging. The road has indeed been a winding one for these Truckers, but careers and personal lives seem to be back on track, Hood said. “It’s worked out for the better all around,” he said. “We’re all in happy relationships and trying not to repeat the same mistakes to the best of our ability, but at the same time, we’re all still in the same occupation.”
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