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....