DRIVE BY TRUCKERS fans, UNITE!!!

Those shows are pretty futhermucking loud, though. On night two I occasionally popped in earplugs, which I never do. Do I smell a thread? "Earplugs at Shows?"

She had three televisions just like Elvis, the King, used to have...

1. The Company I Keep
2. Love Like This
3. Whiskey Without Women
4. Sink Hole
5. Wife Beater
6. Dead Drunk & Naked
7. Nine Bullets
8. Guitar Man Upstairs
9. Margo & Harold
10.Marry Me

>Playing the new Drive By Truckers album *Dirty South* now. It sounds even more tired than their last one; they've totally given up on trying to be Skynyrd, which sucks. Not horrible, though. Better than Patterson Hood's solo CD, I guess. So I bet it gets very good reviews.<

I'm now convinced, by the way, that *Dirty South* is their worst album ever, by far. The first song rocks okay, but just about everything else drags drags drags, almost 100 percent ballads, damn near no fucking memorable melodies, no fucking energy, nothing. Track #4 is okay, probably some others here and there, I forget which ones. Sometimes the high singing is kinda pretty, and the thing definitely is better to play at work than in a car, since the record does not move AT ALL. "Carl Perkins' Cadillac" strikes me as pandering bullshit. Track #9, "Cottonseed," is one of the most tedious, interminable songs I've heard all year. If somebody really believes I'm missing something, I wish they would explain what it is. Their three EARLY albums (as in pre Southern Rock Opera) blow this one out of the water, if anybody's curious.

Chuck's description doesn't worry me one bit if he really thinks "Cassie's Brother" is better than Decoration Day.

And yes, JMod, I agree - one of the loudest (and best) live shows i've ever seen.

Now, I haven't heard the Dirty South yet so I guess I can't sufficiently respond, but what I'd heard live sounded terrific.

Mr. Deeds 100% OTM about "Daddy's Cup" - blew me away live, and honestly unless they TOTALLY changed the demo version on the website and the way they play it live for the record, I'm really surprised Chuck wouldn't like "Carl Perkins" 'cause it's got such a GREAT poppy riff on it, one of the catchiest I've heard all year.

"Where the Devil Don't Stay" was a great rocker live as well, and "Danko/Manuel" was a terrific ballad to these ears. I will admit that Patterson's songs did sound kind of weak in comparison to Cooley and Isbell, and of course again I haven't actually heard the album so I might be totally off base altogether.

I will say however that I agree with Chuck about missing the humor and playfulness of the first three rekkids, the Truckers definitely do take themselves a little too seriously from time to time nowadays and I'd sure love it if they'd inject a little bit of that Panties in Your Purse/Steve McQueen/Too Much Sex (Too Little Jesus) spirit into their newer stuff.

the key line

I'll agree with this. Ah well, can't really argue with Chuck on this until I gets me a copy of Dirty South myself.

And I really like Isbell BTW, I thought his two contributions to Decoration Day were among the best on the album, and at least when I saw it performed live, I thought "Danko/Manuel" was absolutely haunting.

I can see Chuck's point about pandering as far the Dixie Chicks are concerned b/c that song did seem specifically geared to orient themselves in the "don't make 'em like they usedta" camp, but I don't see it with "Carl Perkins' Cadillac" - I mean, that's what the song's about, y'know? It doesn't seem to me to be contrived in the least, certainly it is a "history lesson" and maybe that's a bore for some, but I don't see it as pandering at all.

Funny you mentioned "Long Time Gone" Chuck b/c I referenced that song in my Stylus review of Gretchen Wilson today, how she's big-upping Bocephus while the Chicks prefer Hank Sr.

http://www.stylusmagazine.com/review.php?ID=2093

I might not think the history lesson was such a bore if it was, say, "Michael Murphey's Cadillac, actually -- which would be way more clever, too, given Geronimo's and all. (Plus, the Kentucky Headhunters did a better song about Carl Perkins on a way better Southern Rock/country album LAST year. And it was easily one of the lesser songs on *that* album.)

I honestly can't remember the last time I was actually excited to meet a band - comes with the territory of being a rock journo I guess

Anyway, I wholeheartedly disagree with chuck upthread - and if you miss the lighthearted stuff, well, there's two songs about Walking Tall, fer chrissakes!! What do you want?? What's more lighthearted than Walking goddamm Tall? :)

They were on Conan last night and they did an Isbell song I think. How old is that kid? His lyrics are just too much. So well written and so fucking defiant. He was all dressed up and looked like an American Idol contestant singing about his sort of fucked up/backwoods life and how he doesn't (or can't, I guess) give a shit. It was pretty perfect.

He knows his southern writers I guess.

god, i love them truckers.

(judging from the song samples I heard on Northern State's site he's dead on about that album though)

Clearly "Let There Be Rock" is probably the most fun (ingeniously downer subtext aside).

Not even the most fun song on SRO! (Or in the top half of that album IMO)

shut up and get on the plane!

Weird, I think of "Let There Be Rock" as a linchpin of that record, and long one of their surefire live songs. As is "Shut Up," though that one, as it is on the album, feels even more like a victory lap designed for the encore.

i do truly love let there be rock though

one of the first songs that hooked me when i first saw them -i had never heard of them & saw them open for black crowes in 06, no one in the amphitheater but their diehard fans in the first couple of rows
saw the devotion of the fans & was intrigued

let there be rock was def THE song that hooked me. reminded me of the way my husband and i & our friends talk about music, ie experiences tied to live gigs, tagging a good show story with a related story about a similar band/show

i was like “oh yeah, these are my people”

Listening to the Complete Dirty South and I was almost totally overwhelmed by the flood of memories of all the dozens of times I've seen this band and they were exactly what I needed. Or I guess more specifically the first time I ever heard songs like "The Day John Henry Died," "Where the Devil Don't Stay" or "Puttin' People on the Moon." Or the rest it, really. The most remarkable thing to consider is how different Isbell sounds here when he sings lead, like he's already older than his, what, 22 years? 23? What a band.

Oh, and I do like the new remastering/mixing/re-recording/tracklist of "Dirty South," too. It's still too long, but this band (especially this era of the band) does shaggy and shambling almost as well as Crazy Horse.

Yeah it’s pretty great

I’ve come around on the re-do of Sands of Iwo Jima … him dropping the falsetto does make the heartfelt lyrics go over a little better. Maybe he just felt it was weird to sing about his grandad in a high pitched voice lol

I saw Hood a couple of times last weekend (Cooley was actually playing the same night across town one of the nights, but I opted for double Hood). Good mix of old and new, a nice refresher that early tracks like "The Company I Keep" and (always) "The Living Bubba" show how good he was out of the gate. Best of all I brought three people with me, my pal who is a fan, his sister (who had never heard of Hood) and my friend's 70-year old dad, who came away converted. It's always great to go to shows with blank-slates, people not hindered by baggage or snobbery. They loved it.

A case of sterling bigmouth

i sneaked up them stairs

and puked in the toilet

lol

“Don’t call what you’re wearing a sterling bigmouth”

BUT I SURE SAW OZZY OSBOURNE
WITH RANDY RHOADS IN 82
RIGHT BEFORE THAT PLANE CRASH

I like how he's occasionally changed the bands over the years. I've heard him talking about seeing the Clash, and seeing the Replacements, and seeing Springsteen, etc.

it’s one of the first songs i remember from the first time i ever saw them live back in 2006 i think

part of what grabbed me was how this song so perfectly reflected that universal language (well within my friendship circle) the way my friends & i talked to each other, and mr veg and i - the stories that go with those great concerts you saw, or the ones you never get to

I was drinking with my ex and the “scared shitless of what’s coming next” came on and she

*driving
And she cracked up

hood turned 60 today : /

They are touring Southern Rock Opera this fall.

yes! we put in ticket requests for one of the SF Fillmore shows :D

can’t wait

ticket prices seem ... weird.

$40 each for standing room at the Fillmore felt kinda normal or at least less upsetting than Pearl Jam

Bought my tix. They were $45 plus $20 of extra BS for House of (fuckin) Blues. Early all ages show, which is odd. Seeing the second night, because Adrian Belew et al. are the night before, and I am the weirdo that is seeing King Crimson and DBT on back to back nights.

nice!

Southern Rock Opera is the third studio album by Drive-By Truckers...New West Records is proud to present a remixed and remastered deluxe edition LP featuring a resequenced record as well as a third disc with multiple bonus tracks including a song “Mystery Song” that was recorded one night in Birmingham. Lead Singer Patterson Hood explains,
“Birmingham” and “Moved” were originally part of Act I on original CD release. This is the first vinyl version to feature “Moved” and we felt that “Birmingham” would be the best other song to move without messing up the story element of Betamax Guillotine. We moved them here to keep the vinyl sides within time of maximum high fidelity.

In the process of re-mixing the original tracks for the album. We stumbled upon a mysterious track that was recorded late one night in Birmingham. None of us have any memory whatsoever of recording it. The song itself was never even written down, just made up on the spot while the tape was rolling. We’re calling it “Mystery Song.” It’s actually a keeper.

3-LP Deluxe Edition Includes:
- Foil stamped slipcase
- Original album packaged as 2xLP gatefold
- Bonus 3rd LP in separate jacket
- 28 page book included with newly released photos & an historic look back at Southern Rock Opera.

“If you’re living badly, tell you how to live: dead drunk and naked”

I saw Hood a couple of times last weekend (Cooley was actually playing the same night across town one of the nights, but I opted for double Hood). Good mix of old and new, a nice refresher that early tracks like "The Company I Keep" and (always) "The Living Bubba" show how good he was out of the gate. Best of all I brought three people with me, my pal who is a fan, his sister (who had never heard of Hood) and my friend's 70-year old dad, who came away converted. It's always great to go to shows with blank-slates, people not hindered by baggage or snobbery. They loved it.

― Josh in Chicago, Tuesday, December 12, 2023

On Patterson Hood's Murdering Oscar (And Other Love Songs), the narrator of the first and title song celebrates his victory over Oscar and those who proffered/remonstrated re salvation, "I saved me, and life forgave me." He may be on Death Row or wherever, but he still

insists, a little too insistently somehow. Ah yes, the well worn Unreliable Narrator device, but it works here. Notes stretch and trail and hold.

He can't let it go, can't let cruel Oscar go, and vice versa. It's an

Oscar-winning performance. Clear enough, but more subtle/subject to interp than expected, and the dramatic stasis that Hood evidently tends (so often) to go for on Truckers albums works here, the sense of somebody rattling his chains and shivering his freezeframe, as we're kept watching the figure's deep focus/fixation.

Which is overtly the point of the next track, "Pollyanna", and Hood (with

another surprise move, making seemingly unprecedented use of his voice's high end,

by simply chirping) goes from rolling Neil Truckers doom of "Oscar" to Who Sell Out pop scenario over expansive, open-G-sounding Stonesiness, as Pollyanna rolls on(or has rolled on, since all of these songs are aftermath, ho get it Stones/Aftermath), having gathered his mossy heart. "It's a little sticky,she's

a little sticky, I'm a little sticky too, I was just something stuck to her

shoe, now I'll have to find something else to stick to." His characters are

always doing or getting themselves ready or not to do the aftermath, and "Pride of The Yankees" in a third stylistic change, starts as a ballad raising a mug to Lou Gehrig, then without a blink to King Kong falling off the building, to passing mention of 9/11, and wishes he could go hide in the mall, and indeed he sounds like he's swaying along in an echoing mall with a hole (and a nice breeze) in it, talking to his little daughter about carrying, clutching "packages so shiny, and you're so tiny," and it's all the tenderness and fuckedness of and in the world, in him as he's somehow unsurprised(it fits with the fuckedness previously experienced, after all or a while) if in a bit of aftershock, afterglow, afterlife, half-life; the next sudden transition being the next song o course."I Understand Now" is shorts-deep in the midst of domestic battlegrounds, old and moldy and comfortable for the moment anyway, as the narrator gets some kind of 40 watt insight, and really the cumulative thing in just these

first four songs also has me thinking of foo like "9/11 changed everything"

and "All is fair in love and war" and how they're part of the wadding of

changes and transitions, not that all his situations x moments shown don't have their own internal detail and framing distinctions/lifespans, as characters try to get creative in doing the aftermath on the train or frame or sidewalk crack, or playing in bedhead traffic etc It's all about their and their creator's wise use of familiar and strange elements, reshuffling or ripping or lurching or padding or jangling along.(Those last two just listed: "She's a Little Randy" is the stealthy passage of a cougar and the male person studying her, getting her number sympathetically and then some, as Hood makes good use of the high voice again, not chirping this time but like a little tight, mostly dry smoker's voice, with some rheum around the corners, emph by guitar, as he squints over his cig, and maybe drops it to approach her after that last line (steps out of his frame, as can be tricky/lacking in Hood songs) "Foolish Young Bastard" ruefully/hopefully jangles along with a banjo almost hitting him in the nuts, empty canteen percussion def tapping his butt (a bit envied perhaps, by the somewhat exasperated but unsurprised, family-type person watching him go) then "Heavy and Hanging" and "Walking Around Sense" are expressive but stuck inside

a way too familiar Neil Truckers doom (which the title song redeemed and

"Range War"("with you") took to maybe non-doom,[as expressed in playing]more about rich shifting currrents of tenderness/fuckedness and war again) Like "Heavy and Hanging" and "Walking Around Sense" heavy up because he thought he needed something between "Foolish Young Bastard" and the young heart who sings about writing you

a love song in the "Back of a Bible" (not to be eveel, but cos "there were

some blank pages") A shuffle mainly suggesting white boys of 50s til builds

seamlessly to a solo that obliterates the pro forma of the past two tracks, and in

call and response with other instruments. This final passage is brief but

deep, like the best bits of most of the other songs ("Screwtopia" trails the

afterglow through basically obvious faster/softer recurrences, and makes it work;

makes me think of the traces of "Grandaddy" 's innocently plotted future and "Belvedere" 's twisted past, and the other character's traces, notions, smoke) Didn't think he'd carry a whole album without other writers, but he does, given that it's also got a couple of duds like Truckers albums, and most of the Truckers are here, and that certainly helps, and he's seamlessly joining a set of songs from 1994 to much more recent ones (each set or subset benefitting from proximity to the others, for the most part) with accumulated experience as writer, player etc as well as other aspects of life, and that comes across in the adjustments, inclu disruptive moves, within the plot lines and performances of songs (Oh yeah, this album also features really apt and startling use of piano which he says startled him too)

Fun anecdotes from a review of last night's show in Houston (https://www.houstonpress.com/music/the-drive-by-truckers-at-the-house-of-blues-18363591)

While introducing “Life in the Factory,” Hood reminisced about the band’s early years playing Houston. Usually “Upstairs at Rudyard’s to very few people.” But he said they got their first positive local press notices in the ‘90s from none other than the Houston Press’s own John Lomax, who died last year. “He was a great writer and he was royalty, but he didn’t act like it. I miss him,” Hood told the audience.

He also recalled how Lomax had taken him to eat “the best tacos he ever had,” but for the life of him could not recall the name of Mexican restaurant. “I’ve been thinking about it all day but can’t remember,” he noted. “It was a taco place across from a pizza place!”

Went to the Fillmore SF show and it was fucking great

They left out the Malone-penned songs, shifted the running order slightly & mixed in a few newer songs here & there which worked fine but i was kinda lukewarm on personally
(my cynical take based on nothing but speculation is Cooley wanted more of his songs includex since SRO is pretty Pat-heavy)

But it fucking ruled.
Reminded me of seeing them back in the early 00’s - minus of course the super-drunk passing the bottle of Jack lol

https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/driveby-truckers/2024/the-fillmore-san-francisco-ca-1357818d.html

Think I'd like them to keep those Malone songs, but def bring in some from other albs, like "Never Gonna Change" as finale:it's always sounded like a natural for that, Skynoid as hell.

Band was good in Milwaukee last night, though playing "SRO" (more or less) in its entirety throws things off a little.

Anyway, I have a pair of tix to the Saturday show here. I can't make it, and was planning to just eat the cost, since secondary is pretty low and I don't feel like dealing with selling for so little a return. But ... if any of you in or near Chicago want them I'm happy to send then over for *nada*. Because ILX, and Drive-By Truckers fans unite, and all that.

Drive-By Truckers co-founder Patterson Hood has announced his landmark new solo album, Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams, arriving via ATO Records on Friday, February 21, 2025. Pre-orders are available now.

Produced by Chris Funk (The Decemberists, Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks) at various studios in Hood’s current hometown of Portland, OR, Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams marks the singer-songwriter-guitarist’s most expansive and ambitious extracurricular effort to date, supported by a stellar cast of friends and fellow musicians including Waxahatchee, Brad and Phil Cook (Megafaun), Kevin Morby, Wednesday, Brad Morgan and Jay Gonzalez (Drive-By Truckers), Steve Berlin (Los Lobos, The Blasters), David Barbe (Sugar, Mercyland), Nate Query (The Decemberists), Steve Drizos (Jerry Joseph and The Jackmormons), Daniel Hunt (Neko Case, M Ward), and Stuart Bogie (The Hold Steady, Goose). The 10-track collection is heralded by today’s premiere of the first single, “A Werewolf and a Girl,” featuring additional vocals from Lydia Loveless, and is available everywhere now.

any good?

the song that is

It's on a landmark solo album.

Lydia Loveless, who I have never much liked, sounds great on this. The song isn't much, though

It felt like it was all intro, shocked me when it ended.

I'm been a fan for many many years, seen them maybe 50 times, but this summer tour ... it might be the first I sit out on purpose because tickets are $75. I get times are tough for bands, but with (even modest, in this case) fees, two tickets come out to $163.00. Thats steep.

These guys travel like they're a much bigger band than they are. Remember when someone stole their big-ass backdrop they were carrying around from club to club? That shit ain't free.

I think honestly it's probably a combination of things. They are getting older, they have families, it's getting harder for any band to tour and they probably figure they got to get paid now while they can. I noticed them playing more small venues at higher prices than usual. Last year for that southern rock Opera tour they played the House of Blues here twice. I know they can play bigger, and what a lame venue, but I bet it paid well.

Wow, was not expecting to see that venue for them this summer. They seem like more a Salt Shed level, but maybe it's tough to get on that schedule.

Tix at the House of Blues were going for $4 on stubhub a couple of weeks before the show...

Yeah. But that could have just been because it was a ticketmaster show and bots automatically bought up all the stock.

They usually play Salt Shed or Thalia, or have been playing there recently, but I think they've upped their touring even more, so maybe have to mix up their venues a bit. FWIW, it's the outdoor space at FitzGerald's, which holds a lot more. It's where X and Big Star* played last summer.

I saw Hood play FitzGerald's two nights (inside) last year, Truckers played a benefit there the year before. Hood is playing Old Town School this spring. Truckers played those two nights at HoB last fall. So that's a lot of Truckers in a relatively short span. Feels a bit like when they were first breaking out in the early 2000s when it seemed like they played Chicago 3 or 4 times a year.

I’m really surprised they’re increasing ticket prices because the last few times they’ve come around it seems like they’ve had a hard time selling tickets…the last shows were offered up at a 2 for $20/each discount or something for weeks before the date.

I saw them in 2008 and they played to a room that was 1/3rd full.

I was being nice earlier when I said they travel like a much bigger band than they are. That's true, but what I really mean is they believe they're a much bigger band than they are. Always have. It's not becoming, imo!

Houston show in May (co-headlining w/Deer Tick) is at an SRO G/A venue and is fairly cheap: $35-40 a ticket, depending on the 'tier,' which I guess is when you can come in?

I don't really know how "big" the band is, but I've never seen them given less than 100%, no matter the size of the venue. I'd say they can fill places that fit 1000-3000, give or take. That's not bad. Like, Yo La Tengo level?