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Drive-By Truckers: Voodoo Music Experience: City Park, October 28
A Blessing and a Curse is the title of the Drive-By Truckers’ most recent album, and the phrase could refer to almost every phase of the band’s career. The band formed in 1998 and had a cult following until 2001’s Southern Rock Opera marked them as a band that demanded greater attention. The two-disc concept album used a retelling of the Lynyrd Skynyrd story to explore the band’s real and mythic southern cultural heritage. They added a third guitar to mimic the Skynyrd sound, but in doing so, they invited an association with southern rock that they’ve had a hard time shaking since.
“We studied Lynyrd Skynyrd to make that record,” singer/guitarist Patterson Hood says. “But none of us sit around listening to Molly Hatchet. We’re more influenced by punk rock and music that came from the south—country and soul.”
They’ve made the association easy, to be fair. The centerpiece of 2003’s Decoration Day was singer/guitarist Jason Isbell’s “Outfit,” with the line, “Don’t worry about losing your accent / a Southern Man tells better jokes.” Then the remarkable The Dirty South from 2004 examined southern mythic figures including Buford Pusser, and in singer/guitarist Mike Cooley’s “Carl Perkins’ Cadillac,” he pays tribute to producer Sam Phillips.
On A Blessing and a Curse, though, there are few monster guitar riffs that could be construed as southern rock. From the Replacements-esque “Feb. 14” to the slow, airy “A World of Hurt,” the band sounds musically and lyrically at home in this infant century.
As Todd A. Price reported last issue, the Drive-By Truckers have the distinction of being the last touring band to play New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina, performing at Tipitina’s on the Saturday night. After their set at Voodoo, they’ll be back at the club to perform a benefit for Tipitina’s Foundation.
Hood is talking from home the night after watching Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke with his wife.
It’s about the most horrendous thing I’ve ever seen. When it was over last night, both of us sat on the couch crying for 30 minutes. There were times when both of us were yelling at the TV, especially every time that cocksucker from Washington, D.C. was on the screen. Goddamn him.
Anyone with the criticism that (Lee’s film) said the same thing over and over, and that it could have been two hours instead of four—I think that’s an important part of what it was about for people who were far away from New Orleans. The relentlessness of it. After four hours, you’re drained, and you go, “What if I was there and this was every day of my life?”
I read a story the other day that sounded like something out of one of your songs. People broke into Six Flags to try to get one of the FEMA trailers that was stored there. It’s got to a point where the situation is making criminals out of honest people who just want a place to live.
I’ve been working on a song about the whole thing, but there’s a weird kind of guilt that accompanies writing about something like this. Who am I to write about something like that? At the same time, it’s constantly on my mind, and it has been since we left Tipitina’s the last time (Sunday morning, August 28, 2005). I don’t know if it’s worth a shit or not, but I worked on it last night after I stopped crying. I don’t know if writing makes me feel better or not, but it at least channels some of my anger.
You tend to tell stories in your songs, and they’re often the stories of people in hard times. Do you ever stop to think about the ethics of telling these people’s stories and talking about their hard times?
I grapple with that all the time. As I get older, it gets harder. When you’re younger, you go with the inspiration and don’t think about it. Not to mention, for years and years nobody heard anything I wrote. I wrote 3,000 songs before anybody heard a single song of mine other than close friends who couldn’t get me to shut up when I wanted to play at a party. Now, there’s a fairly good chance that if I write something, a good number of people will hear it, which comes with a certain responsibility. Irresponsibility is good for artistry, so it’s a delicate balance you have to strike.
The first time I had to come to grips with that was “The Living Bubba,” which is probably the best song I’ve ever written. [It’s a dramatic monologue written in the voice of Athens, Georgia musician Gregory Dean Smalley, who died of AIDS. It’s hard to imagine a more plaintive expression of the will to live than the chorus, “I can’t die now / ’cause I’ve got another show to do.”] It’s the most important song I’ve ever written, at least to me. When I wrote it, it was six months before I’d let anybody hear it because I was wracked with guilt. What right did I have to write about this guy? We weren’t close friends. We were very friendly acquaintances, but I wrote it because I was so moved by what I saw. I wrote the song right before he died, but I was so scared about what his friends would think that I wouldn’t let anybody hear it. “Who the fuck are you? You weren’t at his bedside when he died. You weren’t an old friend.” And I wrote it in first person from his point of view.
So he never heard the song?
He did not ever hear it. About a year, later the Drive-By Truckers played Bubbapalooza, which was a festival he started. His mom was there and all his friends were there, and by that time I had been playing it a little bit and people knew of the song. When I started the song, I guess someone told his mother that was the one and she walked right up to the front of the stage and she just stood there and stared me down while I did the entire song. To this day, it was the most intense thing that’s ever happed to me onstage. And when it was over, she came up there and she hugged each one of us with tears in her eyes and she told me I did her son proud. From then on, I never had any kind of remorse about playing it out. But there are songs that didn’t turn quite like that.
I got a really nasty letter from Buford Pusser’s daughter when The Dirty South came out. I mean really nasty. She called me every name in the book, and I don’t think she spelled one of them right. But it made me feel like shit, you know? I wrote that song [“The Boys From Alabama”] expressing a point of view. It’s not necessarily my point of view because I didn’t know him. I wrote that song in character from the point of view of the people who wanted him killed. And there was already a movie made about him, so I just told the other side of the story. But I don’t think she is someone you can really explain that to.
It’s an uncomfortable part of the job., so you’ve got to have thick skin, but you don’t want your thick skin to be at the expense of other people and their feelings.
Who are you singing to or about in “A World of Hurt”?
A close friend was having some pretty serious marital problems and it started out being about him and ended up being about me. And that was a little uncomfortable. The person it’s about never seemed to mind; I don’t know if he realized he was involved or not. That’s probably after “The Living Bubba” the other song I’m most proud of.
The half-whispered “It’s good to be alive” is the most tentative endorsement for living I think I’ve heard.
It is weird because live, it is different than that. Live it is a ruckus and live, the end of the song becomes bit of a celebration. When we were making the record, we toned it down because I was afraid it would cheapen the song and it would come off as grandstanding. There is such a distinct difference between the records we make and the live show, and I would love to make a record that bridges that. That’s my dream for our next record, to somehow make a record that captures how much fun our show is. That’s probably the hardest thing in the world to do. We always look for the next big adventure, the next big goal you know, and that might be the one that I’m not sure we can accomplish. It is really tough. Some of my favorite artists in the world have had that same problem. Bruce Springsteen has made some great records, but he has never made a record that captures how fun the show is. The catharsis of the live show. And certainly not his live record; live records aren’t necessarily the answer there.
The Dirty South comes close.
“Lookout Mountain” is one of mine that I think kind of nails what I’m talking about better that anything I can think of that we’ve done, at least of my songs. Coming back to what you said, on “World of Hurt,” that is such a key part of that song, that last line. Maybe I erred on the side of taste to the point of it not quite coming across.
On A Blessing and a Curse, it sounds like the band is coming into its own. It doesn’t wear its southern influence nearly as prominently.
I feel like the band came into its own with Decoration Day, and I’m real happy with the last three records. Those are the first things I’ve ever done as musician that came out like planned. Everything else was an attempt to do what was in our heads, and we did the best we could either from our limits as musicians or limits of budget. We made Southern Rock Opera for $5,000. It was recorded in a warehouse during a heat wave in downtown Birmingham while we were all getting divorced. We survived it and it actually did come out more or less like a rough sketch of what we envisioned. And that got the job done. I’m real proud of it, but I can’t listen to it.
Is “February 14” on the new album your attempt to write a Paul Westerberg song?
Oh, kind of. It’s as much a tribute to Westerberg and the Replacements as probably Southern Rock Opera was about Skynyrd. That was definitely part of it to me. I don’t know about anyone else in the band because I’m the big Replacements head in the band. I don’t think it’s even in the league of what he was doing in his heyday, but it’s a nod to it.
Am I right in hearing a Faces’ influence on “Aftermath USA”?
Absolutely. When it came out, the Faces box set [Five Guys Walk Into a Bar] was on heavy rotation [on the bus]. We just worked up a cover of “Glad and Sorry” recently. It was certainly influenced.
That song was a total accident. The riff itself was something [producer] David Barbe captured on tape as we were warming up to record a different song. We weren’t even playing together, which is why it sounds the way it does. Everybody was getting their shit together and then we cut the song. And when we got through listening to the song we cut, Barbe’s like, “You know y’all, there’s something y’all need to hear.” And he went back on the tape and played us this like 25, 30 second little thing that happened that he captured on tape. He heard it and pushed the button real quick and grabbed it. We were all, “So what? Yeah, we’re warming up.”
He felt so strongly about it that after we left, he stayed that night and fucked with it, looped it and made it play over and over. The next day we come in and he’s like, “Now listen to this,” and by that time I was starting to see what he meant. I adapted some lyrics off of a country song I had been working on then wrote a chorus, and we recorded that and then he put it all together. Which I guess is how people make records nowadays, but we’ve never done that. We’ve never ever done that, and it was really fun because it took an accident and made a song from it.
That’s why it sounds so Faces; Cooley was playing a totally different song in his head than what the rest of us were doing, which is why that guitar has that dissonance thing which is the hook. Barbe said, “That is really good” and Cooley said, “That’s the sound I hear in my head every morning when I take a shower.”
I’ve been obsessed with the Faces’ “Too Bad” recently.
That box set is just The Shit. And you know what’s knocking me out right now? The Rockin’ Bones box set [Rhino’s recent rockabilly collection]. It’s great. I had a lot of those songs on cassette compilations that got stolen, and it was one of my favorite cassettes. I’m really enjoying that. I’m a sucker for those Rhino boxes because I love packaging. I wish I had the money to really package our stuff the way we want to. We get it as close as we can get the label to do. It’s more than a lot of people do now days.
The one that’ll blow you away is the packaging for the Willie Nelson Atlantic Records box.
My dad [bassist David Hood, from the Muscle Shoals rhythm section] is on Phases and Stages [collected in the box set]. I looked for that yesterday when I went and bought the new Dylan, and the store was out of it. That’s probably my favorite Willie record, and one of my favorite things my dad was ever on was Phases and Stages.
One of the bizarre things about that album is that everyone at Atlantic thought Jerry Wexler was crazy to take the album to Muscle Shoals and that it would be an R&B album, when Shotgun Willie before it was much more of an R&B album.
Wexler left Atlantic Records over that record. He’s my godfather, and it broke his heart when Atlantic let that record die. He took it as a personal slap in the face to him, and he took it as him being involved in fucking over Willie Nelson, who was one of his idols. It was one of the biggest disappointments of his illustrious career.
One of the weaknesses of a lot of current pop music is that the singers all seem to be singing about their lives in the spotlight and how hard they are. To an extent, your recent records could be heard that way, particularly A Blessing and a Curse, though you do it more effectively. Do you think about how to comment on your life in your music?
I try not to think about it. I think the songs are best when there is not too much conscious thought involved. “World of Hurt,” I could have never have sat down and intentionally written that song in a million years. There is no way. I wouldn’t be capable of sitting down and creating that song. If I had, it would have been a different song and it wouldn’t work. For starters, it wouldn’t be so structurally flawed, which I think is one of the strengths of the song. It meanders, and starts out about one thing and becomes something else. Just like a rambling drunken conversation can do. I could never sit down and create that in a conscious state; the song just has to write itself.
Editorial assistance by Richard Giraldi.
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