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...