Drive by Truckers: Go-Go Boots

Drive by Truckers: Go-Go Boots

2011

ATO Records

Format I Own it on: Compact Disc

Track Listing: 1. I Do Believe  2. Go-Go Boots  3. Dancin’ Ricky  4. Cartoon Gold  5. Ray’s Automatic Weapon  6. Everybody Needs Love  7. Assholes  8. The Weakest Man  9. Used To Be A Cop  10. The Fireplace Poker  11. Where’s Eddie  12. The Thanksgiving Filter  13. Pulaski  14. Mercy Buckets


Eh. Out of all the Drive by Truckers albums I own, this is probably my least favorite one...I mean, it's DBT so it can't be bad, but it feels a bit long and labored to me, despite some fantastic songs...

The album's M.O. becomes apparent immediately on the opening track, "I Do Believe." The song starts out with an acapella Patterson Hood insistently singing, "I do believe, I do believe," and you expect the big rock to roll in any second, but instead it gently unfolds into starry-eyed emo-country...Alright, I got it...This is going to be a gentler, slower DBT album....I can handle that, especially if everything is going to be as good as that opening song...

But it isn't...The title track and "The Fireplace Poker" kinda feel like Murder Ballads number 1000 and 1001, since they both appear to be based on the same murder..."Dancin' Ricky" is easily the worst DBT song I've ever heard...The music is so halting and clunky and the lyrics are terrible! Terrible lyrics? On a Drive by Truckers album?!?! I loved Shonna Tucker's contributions on "The Big To Do," so it's hard to say what went wrong exactly..."Assholes" seems like less a song and more an excuse to air some dirty laundry... After listening to it, I don't think I can bear to hear the word "asshole" even one more time...I'm also not too crazy about "Mercy Buckets" where Patterson sounds like he's trying to convince himself too hard that the song is uplifting, so it comes off kinda strained...

The good news is everything else rules...The two Eddie Hinton covers are incredible and add some much needed soul to the album...Want to hear an uplifting song? "Everybody Needs Love"...Man, I wish they'd do more stuff like this...They should become an Eddie Hinton cover band! "Where's Eddie?" is endlessly fascinating from a songwriting perspective....Basically it's sung from the point of view of a woman running around town trying to find Eddie, voicing her regrets about how she's treated him...That takes some balls...I can't imagine writing a song called, "Where's Jamin"....(answer, he's probably either watching TV or sitting on the can)...

Mike Cooley seems to be best suited to the album's low-key mood and delivers everything in a Johnny Cash boom-chicka-boom-chika country manner which turns out to be a brilliant move. "Pulaski" is one of his greatest and most understated songs...An easy flowing melody and gentle acoustic picking outlining the story of a homesick small-town girl...It's so so vivid you can practically feel the country breeze blowing out of your speakers...They should have just made the song one hour long and filled the whole damn CD with it...I'm calling Mike Cooley and the ghost of Eddie Hinton the album's Most Valuable Players...

 Although, Patterson gets in "The Thanksgiving Filter," which is one of  my favorites...It's one of those rare DBT songs where the music and melody is so good that you don't even care about or notice the lyrics...Just a top-notch example of pop-rock songwriting...

This would probably be a great album by any other band's standards, but I've come to expect a lot from the Drive by Truckers at this point...They've been so supernaturally consistent that a minor entry in their catalog can seem like a big deal...After my initial lukewarm reception of the album, I thought to myself, "Huh. Maybe I'm just burned out on the band"...But then "English Oceans" proved that wasn't the case (but we'll get to that later)...Still, if you're a DBT fan you must own this for the highlights...Not to mention all the neat artwork...

Here's "The Thanksgiving Filter" by Drive by Truckers...Enjoy...

Christmas 2014!

Merry Christmas everybody! I'm celebrating this year with:

A 12-pack of Sam Adam's Winter Classics...Although it sucks they only do 4 different beers in their variety packs now rather than the old 6....I can't believe there wasn't drunken rioting in the streets when they made that decision...

A 12-pack of Leinenkugel's Cranberry Ginger Shandy...I like this stuff even though it's so damn sour...'Twill be a jolly, jaw-clenching Christmas...

Hot, Buttered Rum! The holidays are the only time of year that it's 100% acceptable to drink butter! (My Doctor does not agree with my expert medical opinion on this)...

A big, processed box of meat, cheese and crackers to cleanse the arteries after drinking the rum...

And while we're stuffing and drinking ourselves silly, let's put on some music....Here's a list of Christmas songs I like (to view last year's list, click here: http://fridaynightrecordparty.blogspot.com/2013_12_01_archive.html)

Drive by Truckers; Mrs' Claus' Kimono

US Bombs: 12/25

Fear: Fuck Christmas

Lillingtons: Alien Girl

The Fall: We Wish You a Protein Christmas

Bob & Doug McKenzie: 12 Days of Christmas

I hope everyone has a happyass holiday!

Drive by Truckers: The Big To-Do

Drive by Truckers: The Big To-Do

2010

ATO Records

Format I Own it on: Compact Disc

Track Listing: 1. Daddy Learned to Fly  2. The Fourth Night of My Drinking  3. Birthday Boy  4. Drag the Lake Charlie  5. The Wig He Made Her Wear  6. You Got Another  7. This Fucking Job  8. Get Downtown  9. After the Scene Dies  10. (It's Gonna Be) I Told You So  11. Santa Fe  12. The Flying Wallendas  13. Eyes Like Glue


Here are some more old cartoons Tony and I did back in the 90's...This one is called "Slice's Endless Torture"...

And this one is D.B.'s Endless Torture"....

Alright, enough cartoonin' around...Let's get to Today's record..."The Big To Do" by the Drive by Truckers....

I like this one...It feels like DBT was going all-out for their new label...The rock is a little harder, the melodies a little poppier, the stories are a bit more gripping...And the recording sounds fantastic, with the three guitars simultaneously chiming and crunching... So yea, it is a big to-do...They even have a  big opener with "Daddy Learned to Fly," which if you just read the lyrics is a sad song about a Parent dying, but their delivery is so life-affirming that you feel ready to take on the world after listening to it...Hey, I just had a scary thought...What if the Drive by Truckers were actually a band of murderers that went around killing people so they had new dead people to write songs about? Maybe we should get the cast of Law & Order: SVU to look into this...

...I've counted a total of 8 deaths during "The Big To-Do's" 53-minute running time (9 if you count "the scene" dying)...

1. The daddy in "Daddy Learned to Fly."

2. Charlie, in "Drag the Lake, Charlie," which is a song I love, despite it sounding exactly like the 90's Tom Petty stuff I was complaining about a couple days ago...

3.The husband in "The Wig He Made Her Wear"...Is this a true story? Is the "wig defense" a valid legal move now? Love the creepy, shadowy vibe on this one...

4-8. The remaining casualties occur in "The Flying Wallendas." I don't know how I feel about this one...I think they do as good a job you can do at turning "circus music" poignant, but I 'm not sure how great an achievement that really is...The lyrical imagery is too great to pass up, however:

"In Sarasota as a child my grandparents lived next door,
To the surviving Wallendas and their amazing wild stories,
I was stunned and astounded that the old lady who was out,
Pruning her orange trees had flown to the heavens and back..."

Oh yea, this album marked the first time that I had ever run across a Shonna Tucker composition (who joined a couple album's earlier on one of the DBT records I don't own), and these ones are very good...I think her contributions serve an important purpose on this album, since they help me remember that DBT actually plays music...Sometimes I tend to overlook the instrumentation, due to the band's text-heavy approach drawing my ear mostly to the vocals and lyrics...But Shonna's lyrical approach is much simpler with repetitive, sing-songy melodies. This approach lets the instruments carry more of the burden for a change, resulting in the music subtly morphing and changing color during "You Got Another"...Astounding playing...

Best track? I'm going to have to go with "The Fourth Night of my Drinking"...A spooky rocker that finds Patterson hazily picking details from a long bender and recounts the personal and emotional toll:

"On the first night of my drinking I was looking for my keys,
I was half blind and stinking and bloody at the knees,
I had a built in fever and bright red cheeks,
My checks and balances up shit creek..."

 Just plain ol' classic DBT...This doesn't displace "Decoration Day" or "Southern Rock Opera" as my favorite of their albums,  but this still shows the band going strong a decade later...Nothing wrong with that...

Here's "Birthday Boy" by Drive by Truckers...Enjoy...

Drive by Truckers: The Fine Print: A Collection of Oddities and Rarities

 Drive by Truckers: The Fine Print: A Collection of Oddities and Rarities

2009

New West Records

Format I Own it on: Compact Disc

Track Listing: 1. George Jones Talkin' Cell Phone Blues  2. Rebels  3. Uncle Frank  4. TVA  5. Goode's Field Road  6. The Great Car Dealer War  7. Mama Bake a Pie (Daddy Kill A Chicken)  8. When The Well Runs Dry  9. Mrs. Claus' Kimono  10. Play It All Night Long  11. Little Pony And The Great Big Horse  12. Like A Rolling Stone


 Somehow I lost touch with the Drive by Truckers for awhile...I still loved their music and listened to "Southern Rock Opera" and "Decoration Day" but it was kind of like liver pate'...Their albums are so rich that a little goes a long way (that's right....I basically just called DBT "chopped liver")...I plain ol' wasn't done listening to those two albums and by the time I was ready for some new DBT three albums had passed and their lineup had shifted considerably...

I don't know why I chose a collection of outtakes and compilation tracks as a returning point...It seemed like it might be a decent overview of what I had missed and what the different line-ups sounded like...And it is good...

 One-third of it consists of cover songs which range from ass-blastingly awesome to okay-ish... In the ass-blastingly awesome category we have their version of Warren Zevon's "Play it All Night Long" that, although it was recorded a little later,  would have sounded great on Southern Rock Opera...It would have fit so perfectly:

"'Sweet home Alabama,'
Play that dead band's song
Turn those speakers up full blast,
Play it all night long..."

I'm tempted to sequence myself an alternate version of "S.R.O" that cuts out the Rob Malone songs and uses this one instead...It might even put it ahead of "Decoration Day" at that point...

The other killer cover is Tom Petty's "Rebels" which fits the band so perfectly that I had no idea it was a cover until I read the liner notes...I remember liking Tom Petty as a kid (the video's for "Don't Come Around Here No More" and "Running Down a Dream" probably had a lot to do with that), but during the 90's I grew to deeply despise Tom Petty...

To this day, "Mary Jane's Last Dance" and "You Don't Know How it Feels" make me want to puke...But "Rebels" almost makes me want to check out some of his older stuff...Did he write other songs this good?

In the okay-ish cover category we have Tom T Hall's Vietnam-era oldie "Mama Bake a Pie (Daddy Kill A Chicken)"...I can imagine that someone who is more into more straight-up, non-alt-country or war-time dramas might get more out of this than I do...The repetitive melody kind of drives me nuts after awhile but the story somewhat holds my interest, so I'm throwing it in the okay-ish pile... It does make me hungry for chicken and pie, though...

The Bob Dylan cover is a real skipper...The band pretty much admits in the liner notes that it's impossible and pointless to cover "Like a Rolling Stone," and I agree...It's the most Dylan-ish Dylan song and as you listen to their version it's impossible to not just wish you were listening to the original instead...They do make it somewhat interesting by giving each verse to a different vocalist...Eh, I usually just stop listening to the album after "Little Pony...."...

The other 2/3rds of the track listing consists of alternate versions of previously released tracks and outtakes....In the alternate version category we have "Uncle Frank" and "Goode's Field Road," both of which I've never heard the original versions...I should check those out on Spotify real quick so I can do some comparing and contrasting...

"Hello, Kristy...It's Uncle Frank...Come to daddy!"

Uncle Frank: Both versions sound very similar, except the "Fine Print" version is a bit more guitar-heavy than the "Pizza Deliverance" take...Too close to call...Both versions are good...

Goode's Field Road:  No contest...The alternate version is much better...Faster and rocking-er...The "Brighter Than Creation's Dark" version is smoother and sluttier, if that makes sense...

The rest of the album is outtakes from "The Dirty South" and "A Blessing and a Curse" (but mostly from "The Dirty South")...I can see why some of them would be outtakes...Some are overly jokey like the Holiday song "Mrs. Claus' Kimono" (that I realized I forgot to put on my list of Christmas songs last year about a day after I posted it, but maybe I'll do a new list of Christmas songs this year)...It's pretty funny to hear DBT give Santa their usual Southern Gothic, murder-ballad treatment...And the parts about filling up the toy sack with heroin and Santa getting it on with a female reindeer always crack me up...Alright, I'm declaring this my official Christmas song for the 2014 season...Cooley's "Little Pony and Great Big Horse" and Patterson's "George Jones Talkin' Cell Phone Blues" were also probably both a little too wacky or weird to go on one of their proper albums despite being good songs...

However, I have no idea why the two Jason Isbell songs never appeared on any album...I've never heard the "Dirty South," so who knows...Maybe it's the most amazing album ever made and these two songs would have been obvious low-points but I seriously doubt it..."TVA" is a delicate little acoustic ballad that's a nice counterpoint to "Uncle Frank" where the song's narrator thanks God for the Tennessee Valley Authority as opposed to "Uncle Frank" where it ultimately leads to Uncle Frank's suicide...Apparently "TVA" and the alternate version of "Uncle Frank" were intended for a scrapped single...Holy shit, would that single have ruled the world...

"The Great Car Dealer War" is a quintessential, detail-heavy Patterson Hood story-song that sets an elaborate crime drama against smoldering country rock...It slipped past me the first few listens but it eventually sunk in and now it's one of my favorites on the album, coming in just behind Jason Isbell's "When the Well Runs Dry"...

I guess ultimately this worked...I haven't missed a single DBT album since (although there's quite a few I should go back and check out at this point)...I wouldn't recommend this as your first DBT album, but I think established DBT fans would find this interesting...

Let's check out "When the Well Runs Dry" by the Drive by Truckers...Enjoy...

Drive By Truckers: Decoration Day

Drive By Truckers: Decoration Day

2003

New West Records

Format I Own it on: Vinyl

Track Listing: 1. The Deeper In  2. Sink Hole  3. Hell No, I Ain't Happy  4. Marry Me  5. My Sweet Annette  6. Outfit  7. Heathens  8. Sounds Better in the Song  9. (Something's Got to) Give Pretty Soon  10. Your Daddy Hates Me  11. Careless  12. When the Pin Hits the Shell  13. Do It Yourself  14. Decoration Day  15. Loaded Gun in the Closet


My DBT collection is pretty spotty, but out of the ones I have heard, "Decoration Day" is my easy favorite..."Southern Rock Opera" was such a triumph that back in 2003 I kinda figured that they were never going to top it...I just had this strange feeling that the band would spend the rest of their career standing in the shadow of their previous achievement...Still, when I heard they were putting out a new record, I was interested to check it out...

"Decoration Day" is an album that will always take me back to a very specific place and time in my life...I moved to Arizona back in July 2001 but still managed to make it back to my hometown of Hale, Michigan every coupla years...One of those trips happened to occur right around the time this album came out and I remember picking up a copy of the CD at the West Branch K-Mart (along with a copy of Jesse Malin's "The Fine Art of Self Destruction")...

The CD kinda sat around my Mom's house during that vacation, but one night I went out with some old friends for a night of bonfires and beer drinking...I was pretty buzzed-out when I went returned to my Mom's house...All the lights were out and everybody else was asleep, but I wasn't ready to crash out yet...So I went back to the old bedroom I grew up in and noticed there was a stereo in there, which I promptly hooked up....I remember sitting on the bed all night, playing the album over and over...Just soaking it all in and it was so amazing...The sweet spectral steel guitar on "Heathens" cutting through my drunken haze...I'll never forget that...

I spent the entire plane ride home spinning it on my discman and to my surprise the album got better and better everytime I heard it...Here's a partial list of the great things about it:

• The twist ending in "The Deeper In," where Patterson flips the script on us Yankees by revealing the whole incest story took place in Michigan and not the South like we had assumed...Although as a long time resident of Michigan, it didn't surprise me that much...I've been pretty deep south and I've found the redneck-iness to be on par with rural Michigan...

•   Hearing Jason Isbell steal the album with his very first contribution to the band...Who was this new guy? And how in the hell did he write these songs that rivaled Patterson and Mike's best work...I still think "Outfit" might be my all time favorite DBT song...A freakin' brilliant country rock waltz where a Father bestows some blue-collar wisdom to his son:

"Don't call what your wearing an outfit
Don't ever say your car is broke
Don't worry about losing your accent
A Southern Man tells better jokes...

So don't let him take who you are boy
And don't try to be who you ain't
And don't let me catch you in Ken dale
With a bucket of wealthy-man's paint..."

• Overall the album is a lot mellower than the previous stuff, but when you have such stunning, laidback songs like "Heathens" and "My Sweet Annette" you don't particularly notice or care...

• ...but when it does it rock, it ROCKS! I hardly ever hear anyone single it out as a highlight, but "Careless" is probably in my top five favorite DBT songs...I don't know if they ever rocked out harder or more recklessly than they did here..."Marry Me" comes pretty close, though...Plus "Marry Me" sounds like it could be the greatest Lynyrd Skynyrd song ever...I'm telling you, if Doc Brown were to get in his Delorean and take a copy of that song back to the 70's for Skynyrd to record, it would be playing on classic rock radio every hour...No joke...

• I like the final stretch of the album where the different songwriters look at a suicide from a bunch of different angles, with Cooley's hushed "When the Pin Hits the Shell" hitting the hardest...I think I've said this before, but these DBT records always have a high body count...

And those are just the high points..I played that old CD so many times and it spend so many hours in my car that it eventually got scratched up to the point of unplayability...Then one day I get in a hefty package in the mail from my good buddy Joe and what's inside?  A DAMN DOUBLE VINYL COPY OF "DECORATION DAY"!!! Joe is the officially the coolest....

This record still gets me..."Southern Rock Opera" was a lot to live up to and against all odds they knocked it so far outta the park...As a result, nobody's doubted them since...

So let's check out some DBT...Here's "Heathens"....Check it out....

Drive by Truckers: Southern Rock Opera

Drive by Truckers: Southern Rock Opera

2001

Lost Highway Records

Format I Own it on: Compact Disc

Track Listing: Disc One: 1. Days of Graduation  2. Ronnie and Neil  3. 72  4. Dead, Drunk, and Naked  5. Guitar Man Upstairs  6. Birmingham  7. The Southern Thing  8. The Three Great Alabama Icons  9. Wallace  10. Zip City  11. Moved

Disc Two: 1. Let There Be Rock  2. Road Cases  3. Women Without Whiskey  4. Plastic Flowers on the Highway  5. Cassie's Brother  6. Life in the Factory  7. Shut Up and Get on the Plane  8. Greenville to Baton Rouge  9. Angels and Fuselage


This is it...This is where I (and I'd imagine the majority of the band's fanbase) were introduced to the Drive by Truckers...An album so ambitious and near-perfect that there was no way it could stay underground for long...I remember every music mag you ran across in 2001-2002 went apeshit over the thing, so eventually my curiosity was piqued and I caved in and bought a copy...

I still consider this the one of the greatest rock operas ever made... Outside of The Who's "Quadrophenia" (and maybe a couple of those 80's King Diamond albums), I can't think of an instance where band and subject matter were so perfectly matched...The simple explanation is that it's a conceptual album about the life and death of Lynyrd Skynyrd but in reality it's about so much more than that, encompassing what Patterson Hood describes as "The Southern Thing"...It's also about  a fictional bar band, it's about George Wallace, it's about Neil Young,  it's about folks ashamed to have a Southern accent, it's also about Bear Bryant (Who "wore a cool lookin' red checkered hat and won football games"), ...Like he said, the whole Southern thing...

 (Here's Bear Bryant with his cool checkered hat...It doesn't look very red though...)

You know how on most rock operas there are the obvious songs people enjoy hearing and then there are the annoying "connection" tracks that whose only purpose is to move the story along (see The Who's "Tommy" and the Kinks 70's "Preservation Acts 1 &2")?  Well, this is the area where DBT has the big leg-up...Remember when I was talking about how even the stage banter on "Alabama Ass Whuppin'" was tolerable because they always had something interesting to say? Well, that's how it is here too!  Tracks like "The Three Great Alabama Icons" and "Days of Graduation" should theoretically be skippers, but Patterson Hood's storytelling is so engrossing that I end up getting sucked in every time...Really, the only tracks I skip are the ones that feature Rob Malone on vocals...For some reason he kinda sounds like he should be the vocalist for a soulful southern/hair metal band like Cry of Love or something...A lot more standard and forgettable than Mike Cooley's craggy deep delivery or Patterson's raspy whine...

Disc one seems to be a bit more wide-ranging in its subject matter...I'm a major admirer of "Ronnie & Neil" which provides the most level-headed discussion of the legendary Skynyrd/Neil Young rivalry/friendship I've ever heard. This is also where you find "The Southern Thing," which works as the band's mission statement and a fairly convincing argument that the whole thing might be a bit more complex and fraught with political grey area than us Yanks like to make it out to be:

"My Great Great Granddad had a hole in his side
He used to tell the story to the family Christmas night
Got shot at Shiloh, thought he'd die alone
From a Yankee bullet, less than thirty miles from home
Ain't no plantations in my family tree
Did not believe in slavery, thought that all men should be free
"But, who are these soldiers marching through my land?"
His bride could hear the cannons and she worried about her man...

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 the way of the southern thing..."

Lyrics aside, if I had to pick an ultimate side one favorite, I might have to go with Patterson's  "Dead, Drunk, and Naked" which shows the group's always appealing mellower side and is more sweetly nostalgic than the title would probably indicate...At the same time, it's hard not to choose "Zip City," where Cooley works himself up a mean pair of blue balls and we all feel his ache...An underage deacon's daughter,  shadowy relatives, dead end drives and triple guitar fireworks...Damn, this one might win, actually...

Apparently, Zip City is a real place in Alabama...

 Here's the church where the girl's dad works (is "work" the right word? Preach, maybe?)...


Disc two opens with "Let There Be Rock" which is surprisingly not an AC/DC cover, but instead a song about AC/DC's "Let There Rock":

 "So I never saw Lynyrd Skynyrd but I sure saw Ozzy Osbourne,
with Randy Rhoads in '82 right before that plane crash.
And I never saw Lynyrd Skynyrd but I sure saw AC/DC,
with Bon Scott singing,"Let There Be Rock Tour" ...
With Bon Scott singing, "Let There Be Rock"..."

Disc two is where the bulk of the Skynyrd stuff happens, with the last 5 or so tracks functioning as a straight retelling of the band's final days...Following the path of "Cassie's Brother," where Skynyrd's backing vocalist gets her brother a job in the band and ending with the harrowing "Angels and Fuselage" where the band finally accept their fate as their plane is going down...A mix of calm acceptance and pants-shitting terror...Given my intense fear of flying, just listening to this scares me shitless too...Remind me to never listen to "Southern Rock Opera" on a plane...

"Southern Rock Opera" is one of those albums I can talk about all week...So much to take in...The band sets their ambitions sky high and still somehow exceed their mark...I don't bust this one out as much as I used to, since the idea of it seems so daunting, but listening to it again is a breeze...The two hour tracklisting somehow flies right by...Like a good long movie, or a nice thick book that's always a joy to get lost in...Can't praise it enough...

 I feel like I should also mention this is the first album that comes wrapped in one of those amazing Wes Freed covers...Whenever I even hear the name "Drive by Truckers," my head is filled with those knotty Wes Freed images, full of two-lane highways, crow/pterodactyl hybrids and redneck headgear...Actually, quite a few different artists contributed to the interior art, but it's Wes' stuff that really stuck in everybody's mind...

Alright, let's listen to some DBT...Here's "Zip City"...Enjoy...

Drive by Truckers: Alabama Ass Whuppin'

Drive by Truckers: Alabama Ass Whuppin'

2000

ATO Records

Format I Own it on: Compact Disc

Track Listing: 1. Why Henry Drinks  2. Lookout Mountain  3. The Living Bubba  4. Too Much Sex (Too Little Jesus)  5. Don't Be in Love Around Me  6.18 Wheels of Love  7. The Avon Lady  8. Margo and Harold  9. Buttholeville  10. Steve McQueen  11. People Who Died  12. Love Like This


Here are a couple of cartoons to give you a moment to grab some popcorn before the main feature begins...

Here is "D.B's Cartoon"...

Here is "D.B. & Slice Fight a Dragon:...

 

And here is an old Family Circus strip I dd while Bil Keane was on vacation...

,,,and here's a Garfield strip I did while I was filling in for Jim Davis...

Alright...Now onto "Alabama Ass Whuppin'"...

This is a live album by the Drive by Truckers that's pretty interesting for being recorded before the band's breakthrough third album "Southern Rock Opera"...To be honest, I've never heard the band's perennially out-of-print first two records, which tend to be written off as jokey juvenalia ("The Living Bubba" being the exception) ...So I didn't really know what to expect when this reissue came out...

Surprise, surprise...It's great...If they didn't quite have it all figured out on the recording front, they sure as hell had their sound down in a live setting at this point...If'n you're not familiar with DBT, they have an FM-radio southern rock sound with a good amount of Crazy Horse roar tossed in to put it over the top...When they rock, they rock mightily, when they slow down, they slow down beautifully...Another signature of the band are their deep, rich lyrics packed with intricate storytelling...Even if you're not a big fan of the music, I'd imagine the lyrics would be enough to suck you in...Sometimes these live versions go straight up into spoken word territory ("18 Wheels of Love" and "Avon Lady")...This Patterson Hood guy likes to talk...Fortunately, he's interesting....

The only downside I can find is the lack of Mike Cooley vocals...He gets the big closer "Love Like This" and that's about it (I demand nothing less than a 3:1 Patterson Hood to Mike Cooley ratio)...Otherwise, this is a good introduction to early DBT and it also gives you a bunch of songs that don't appear on any of their albums...I'm not sure where they dug up "Don't Be in Love Around Me" (maybe a more knowledgeable DBT fan could tell me if they ever did a studio version) but it's become my go-to DBT track when I'm not in the mood for something wordy....Just a simple southern rock/punk rock hybrid with a chorus too big for whatever small club it was recorded at...

"Steve McQueen" is my other favorite...Just a sheeyit-kickin' good time that calls out Alec Baldwin for being a pussy in the Thomas Crown Affair remake...Awesome! Y'know, I'm not so sure I've ever seen any Steve McQueen movies outside of The Blob and The Towering Inferno...Still, this song convinces me Steve McQueen was badass, so good job...

The song that best points the way to their later material is "The Living Bubba" with its darker, plainspoken tone and high mortality rate...It tells the true story of a local musician with a terminal diagnosis giving it one last go and busting out show after show, song after song...A story that most other bands would turn into some manipulative, overbearing sentimental weeper, but to Hood's credit there are no tears here...Bubba's just a guy who chooses to face oblivion smoking, drinking and playing music...He seems to be resigned to his fate while simultaneously refusing to face it without distraction...It kind of comes across as a grim, good time, which is how I would categorize a good chunk of the band's discography...

This album was out of print forever but was recently reissued by ATO records, which is a pretty big-time operation, so hopefully this release sticks around awhile (as opposed to the 2005 reissues of "Gangstabilly" and "Pizza Deliverance" which went right back out of print before I could even get a chance to pick them up), cos there's a lot of stellar performances here for DBT  fans...Although some folks might balk at the fact that about a quarter of the running time consists of talking...

Here's "Don't Be in Love Around Me"...Enjoy...

DRI: Thrash Zone

DRI: Thrash Zone

1989

Metal Blade Records

Format I Own it on: Compact Disc

Track Listing: 1. Thrashard  2. Beneath the Wheel  3. Enemy Within  4. Strategy  5. Labeled Uncurable  6. You Say I'm Scum  7. Gun Control  8. Kill the Words  9. Drown You Out  10. The Trade  11. Standing in Line  12. Give a Hoot  13. Worker Bee  14. Abduction


Here are a couple more old D.B & Slice cartoons...This one is called "D.B. Devours Slice"...

 

Now for "Slice & Slice Go for a Walk"...

Let's move onto today's record..."Thrash Zone" by DRI...Although I should probably step back a bit...There were two albums in-between "Dealing With It" and "Thrash Zone" that I don't own, but are important in the band's evolution...After the straight hardcore of the first two records, on 1987's "Crossover" the band went into a much more thrash metal direction, lengthening the songs, adding more complex song structures and heavy metal guitar heroics, but keeping the punk attitude resulting in the crossover-thrash genre...

"Crossover" is a great record and probably the band's most seamless mix of punk and metal...I've been feeling pretty nostalgic for it lately, so I'm hoping to score a copy again, so I can do a post on that one too...To be honest, I haven't ever heard their "4 of a Kind" album...I think I might be a poseur or something...

By the time DRI  got around to "Thrash Zone," they were pretty much just a straight thrash band with a more down to Earth vocalist than most other metal bands...Focusing on more street-level concerns like gun control and partying than the usual heavy metal D&D/"Paradise Lost" imagery...

 "Thrash Zone" was my introduction to the band via "Beneath the Wheel" which gained the band a lot of attention...It hit all my "fuck yea" spots as a kid...Bratty delivery about falling asleep at parties and getting crushed under the wheels of an adult society that's completely out of your control...Slow mosh riffs giving way to fast thrash... And one of the defining lyrics of my High School days:

"Run! Make the grade,
School's a job you don't get paid..."

Being a 14 year-old fuck-up, those lyrics represented some of the most profound wisdom I'd ever heard ...My "Siddhartha," if you will...But I have a feeling this is one of those albums where my nostalgia might be getting in my way...It's hard to say what I would think of it if I was hearing it now for the first time...I think it might be one of those "you had to be there" things....To be honest, some of the lyrics are so dopey that they're LOL funny (see the invocation of Woodsy the Owl in "Give a Hoot")...

But for those of us who look back fondly on the era, this thing is a blast...Album opener "Thrashard" reminds me of "Toxic Waltz"-era Exodus or something...The kind of loving ode to a moshpit that they just don't make anymore:

"A boot to your forehead,
A knee in your face,
Your nose and lips start to bleed.
Like a wild Indian
From outer space,
Drunk and high on weed..."

I'll be damned if this doesn't make me want to run around in a violent circle with a bunch of sweaty strangers....

(Here I am in the pit! The pit! The pit! The pit! IN-THE-PIT!)

Despite "Thrashard" and maybe grand finale "Abduction," I can't help but feel that the real reason to buy this album is for "Beneath the Wheel"...The other songs are alright, but there's a by-the-book thrashiness to a lot of them that make for some good slamming but I not too many transcendent moments...I think modern hardcore fans would enjoy the first two albums over this and I can imagine heavy metallers getting more out of  "Crossover"...This oddly sterile late 80's metal sound probably only appeals to class of '89-ers...I still enjoy it anyway (except those endless sirens and gunshot sounds in "Gun Control" which continue to drive me flippin' nuts)...

It thrills me to no end that there have been some recent bands resurrecting this style...It only lasted a brief period of time, but it was a great era for fast, aggressive music...Before the wrestling attitude shit, before the Nu-Metal daddy issues, there used to be bands whose only goal was to have a good time, tossing a few socially conscious messages in here and there, and trying their best to make the kids in the audience lose their damn minds...A noble cause if I've ever heard one...

Let's check out some DRI...Here's "Abduction"...Enjoy...