) Their songs and vocal styles are completely distinctive, yet somehow mesh perfectly together.
(Jason Isbell, the band’s third singer in the early 2000s, has gone on to carve out a nice little career for himself. The Truckers’ two lead voices, Hood and Mike Cooley, trade songs on this and every album. After three albums of searing political rage and protest, DBT opted to go back to their roots this time around - literally, in the case of the title track, a tribute to the nasty little concrete-walled bar in Muscle Shoals that they used to play back when they were known as Adam’s House Cat. The Truckers just released their 14th studio album, “Welcome To Club XIII.” I stayed up late Thursday night so I could stream it the moment it hit Spotify at midnight - you know, just like our grandparents used to do. Which brings us back around to the headline of our story. Instead, they took their act on the road - hundreds of dates a year, every single year - and built a fan base one blissful, ears-ringing audience member at a time. The DBTs never did get their “Born in the USA” to vault them to megastardom. Here’s a 14-song, 70-minute DBT primer I whipped up just for you, a healthy compilation of wall-rattling rockers, contemplative storytelling and family reckoning, capped off with two epic meditations on What It All Means, with guitar solos.
Jay busbee 31 thoughts how to#
They’re Southern guitar rock with deep roots in Nashville country and Muscle Shoals soul, crafting operatic, epic-length tales of ecstasy and desperation and salvation about the kinds of people who live on society’s invisible edges, people who want their lives to change but don’t know how to make it stick. ġ ) The Truckers were every bit as serious about deconstructing the mythologies of the South as Springsteen had been about celebrating the common man in New Jersey … the main difference being, the Truckers didn’t exactly become world-famous telling their tales of Alabama back roads and bad choices in the small hours.īorn in Athens, the creation of a couple Alabama musicians who’d seen dream after dream stomped flat year after year, the Truckers have spent the last quarter-century wrestling with what Hood, in his most-quoted lyric, calls “the duality of the Southern thing” - trying to figure how to reconcile all the region’s beauty and grace with its deeply ugly history and still-flawed present. (For the record, DBT front man Patterson Hood now concedes the name was a stupid joke that got way out of hand. Drive-bys are an LA gang thing, see, and truckers are rural white Southerners! Get it? It’s so IRONIC!īut the goofy-stupid band name - right up there with “Pearl Jam” and “Limp Bizkit” - turned out to be a false flag. So when I first heard of the Drive-By Truckers, I assumed they were a one-joke band in that same vein, slapping a coat of white paint on a Black genre. (The always-brilliant Atlanta skewered the trend with one word: “Nope.”)
Jay busbee 31 thoughts full#
You had genius piano maestro Ben Folds crooning Dre’s “Bitches Ain’t Shit,” country jam band The Gourds sawing through Snoop’s “Gin and Juice,” and a this-never-would-happen-in-2022 folk cover of “Straight Outta Compton.” When a dewy-voiced white woman is dropping the full hard-r n-word in a song that sounds like it could be played at a wedding, well, things have gone a wee bit sideways.
Let’s talk about the Drive-By Truckers.īack around the turn of the millennium, there was a brief, cringey trend of white artists doing ultra-white covers of rap songs. It’s alchemy that’s as close to magic as you can get in a place where beer is ten bucks a pour.Įnough blather. Those people there onstage are creating something that wasn’t here before and won’t last, something just for you and the lucky few around you.
Jay busbee 31 thoughts professional#
There’s something sublime about the community at a concert, the way that hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of people come together for a couple of transcendent hours, a moment in time that won’t ever come around again, a moment that neither audience phone pics nor professional soundboard recordings can truly capture.
0 kommentar(er)
