Drive-By Truckers – Southern Rock Opera – Deluxe Edition
What’s past is prologue. – Shakespeare, The Tempest
We go through reactionary phases in America, and we are most definitely deeply in one now. It’s hard to pinpoint the exact beginning of it – was it the Tea Party movement that began in 2009? Or a 2015 escalator descent that announced a presidential candidacy? Hell, we’ve even experienced a new wave of it over the past week, as a woman of color had the “temerity” to announce her own run for the nation’s highest office. Each time we reach a certain level of enlightenment in this country, some unprecedented force seems to drag us back into primordial ooze of bigotry. I’ve been thinking about this a lot as I’ve been listening to Drive-By Truckers’ seminal work, Southern Rock Opera, over the past few weeks. That album was first released on Tuesday, September 11, 2001 – an awful day on our nation’s history, but also one that caused a wave of anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant hatred that rivals (in depth, if not length) the one we currently find ourselves in. That initial in-store date was an unhappy coincidence (and the album did find itself a second, wider release nearly a year later on Lost Highway Records). In 2024, however, Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley are being VERY purposeful in electing to release an expanded box set, Southern Rock Opera – Deluxe Edition. These dark stories of the Dirty South aren’t relegated to the past, and they’re not to be forgotten.
To get the full story behind Southern Rock Opera, you’ll want to read the excellent new liner notes from Hood (the full history of DBT can be found in Stephen Deusner’s 2021 book, Where the Devil Don’t Stay, a detailed, geographically-arranged history of one of this century’s most important bands). VERY briefly, the idea began as a prospective screenplay about the “fictional” band, Betamax Guillotine, which was named after the mythical cause of Ronnie Van Zant’s death (more on that in a bit) and happened to bear a more-than-passing resemblance to our now-beloved Truckers. Eventually (and fortunately for us), the guys remembered that they’re songwriters, so it would be better (and, quite honestly, cheaper) to change this concept to an album instead. Recorded during the dead of summer in an airless room above a store and crowd-funded before anyone knew what that meant, the album centered loosely around “The Three Great Alabama Icons” – Crimson Tide football coach Bear Bryant, longtime governor George Wallace and Van Zant’s Lynyrd Skynyrd (a band with its origins in Jacksonville, Florida but its heart and fanbase in the Deeper South). All told, the double album came to reflect all of the worst – and some of the best – of the post-Jim Crow South.
Southern Rock Opera begins with “Days of Graduation,” an(other) adapted Hood screenplay that became an apocryphal spoken-word song involving late-night joyrides, horrendous car crashes and the interminable nature of “Freebird.” This leads into “Ronnie and Neil,” which destroys the myth of a hateful rivalry between Skynyrd and Neil Young, but, more importantly, sets up the contrast of what Hood later calls the “duality of the Southern thing” in Alabama, contrasting the racial violence in Birmingham with the beautiful (and often beautifully Black) music made up in the Shoals region around the same time. This internal conflict (with very external consequences) reaches a head in “The Southern Thing.” Often mistaken as an anthem of Southern “pride” (to the extent that Confederate battle flags were waved by audience members at early shows, forcing the band to shelf the tune for a while afterward), the song is actually defiant in its love of the Southern people while not backing down one bit from the region’s horrific history – “Proud of the glory, stare down the shame/Duality of the Southern Thing.” It is, without a doubt, the song that defines Southern rock in the 21st century.
One of the things I realized during three straight weeks of listening to this record is how much of a Mike Cooley fan I’ve become. Early on in my own Trucker days, I gravitated toward the Hood songs (and “The Living Bubba” still makes me cry – every damn time), but the Cooley songs – both on The Southern Rock Opera and across the band’s catalog – continue to grow on me. Maybe it’s because he’s the quieter of the two self-described Dimmer Twins. Maybe it’s because Cooley (and it’s always just “Cooley”) is, at any point in time, one of the five coolest people on the planet. But two of my favorite racks on Opera are “Women Without Whiskey,” with its undeniable truths about drinking (“It don’t make you do a thing, it just lets you) and “72 (This Highway’s Mean,” which appeals to anyone who grew up in a small, forgettable town, North or South. Side note – the band has been throwing “Ramon Casiano” into the middle of its Southern Rock Opera Revisited Tour shows, even though it’s from 2016’s American Band. It fits in thematically (a racist asshole killing a young person of color) and time-wise (from a record released just before Donald Trump’s election, it eerily syncs up with the Opera’s all-too-memorable release date). It might be my favorite Truckers tune, and, naturally, it’s a Cooley song.
Southern Rock Opera concludes its epic reach with three songs that, well, conclude the meaningful existence of Lynyrd Skynyrd. “Shut Up and Get on the Plane” and “Greenville to Baton Rouge” are punk-inflected barnburners that foreshadow what we all know is about to happen. “Angels and Fuselage,” though, is like nothing else ever written. Honestly, I’d become so used to the dreamy, almost serene version of Van Zant’s last moments that’s featured on the band’s 2015 triple live album, It’s Great to Be Alive, that I’d almost forgotten how unnerving this original take is. With spare, discordant electric strums and Patteron’s sounds-like-he’s-in-another room vocals, this slow motion telling of the plane’s ultimately violent end has Van Zant fully aware of his fate – “The engines have stopped now/We all know we are going down” – and wondering where his next destination will be – “And I’m scared shitless of what’s coming next” – but hoping that it won’t be the same fiery place (as we learn earlier in the album) that George Wallace will end up – “These angels I see in the trees/Are waiting for me.” Here, the song, and the album, end on solitary piano notes. In concert (in 20001 and ‘02, as the album was first played live, and now, on the Revisited Tour), the band, one by one, lay down their instruments until all that’s left is a fading wall of feedback and Brad Morgan’s drums, until the last heartbeat ends.
So, any good box set worth its price tag has some juicy extras – what does this updated Southern Rock Opera have to offer? Other than a remixing and remastering that leaves the record with the original level of grunginess that the band originally was after (and, in particular, makes the backing vocals absolutely pop), there’s a resequencing, one newly discovered song, and four intriguing live takes. Hood states that the original album needed to lose a couple of tracks for vinyl fidelity reasons that nerds nerdier than me will understand, so “Birmingham” and “Moved” were, well, moved to a third disc to sandwich a brand-new track, “Mystery Song.” This new tune was discovered – really! – in the process of digging through the original recordings – no notes, no commitment to paper (or, apparently, to the band’s memory). It rides on a very Crazy Horse-ish riff, and it makes me wish I’d been a witness to some of these sessions, even in the grime and sweat of a Southern summer night. The second side of the bonus record is four live tracks from the first leg of the albums tour. Most notable are “Don’t Cockblock the Rock,” which Hood says was cooked up to reflect the style of the (barely) fictional Betamax Guillotine, and a scorching live version of “72 (This Highway’s Mean).” “72” features a guitar solo from one Jason Isbell, who’d joined the band roughly three weeks before. He’d eventually be invited to leave the band and, as legend has it, go on to a solo career of some note.
I got the chance to see Drive-By Truckers in Denver in July, and, amazingly, they just keep getting better. They tore through the whole of Southern Rock Opera and, fittingly in a night that began with “Ronnie and Neil,” wrapped the encore with Neil Young’s own “Rockin’ in the Free World.” Even while staring down Social Security age, they have somehow remained the loudest, most fiery, plain ol’ best rock band in America in 2024. Let’s hope it doesn’t take another edge-of-abyss socio-political moment to squeeze yet another classic rock record out of them. Then again, it is what they’re the very best at.
Go here to order Southern Rock Opera – Deluxe Edition (out July 26): https://drivebytruckers.shop.musictoday.com/product/D2LP28/southern-rock-opera-deluxe-edition-3lp?cp=407_72977
Check out the Southern Rock Opera Revisited Tour through November: https://www.drivebytruckers.com/shows.html