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...