DRIVE BY TRUCKERS fans, UNITE!!!

(I did enjoy the show, which was great - they even covered Springsteen's "State Trooper.")

First time I saw them was ... 2001? Maybe the year before? Whenever it was, it was pre-Isbell. They're a good enough band that they were great before Isbell and have been great after, and always good live.

Among albums since 2007, I found The Big To-Do musically refreshed, also liked The Unraveling, which seemed a better balance of topical lyrics and music than American Band, and especially liked The New OK (English Oceans was alright too). Haven't listened to new one yet, but if you do want the uncut club rowdiness they're apparently nostalgic for, by all means check out Alabama Asswhuppin'.

I'm pretty sure that's the first one I heard. I want to say the first time I'd even *heard* of the band was when their van was robbed and they lost all the music they'd been listening to, so solicited mixtapes from fans.

Where are the rumors Re: Cooley and the wagon? When did he get on it? I saw him in 2014 and he definitely wasn’t on it then.

Been a hardcore DBT fan since I was in high school back in 2002/2003 — Brighter Than Creation’s Dark was the last time they were a great band in the studio in my opinion, though. I liked English Oceans and the Unraveling, I can tolerate portions of Big to Do/Go Go Boots and American Band, I thought the New OK was godawful, and the new one is alright at times but I won’t ever be reaching for it.

I think I had seen something on one of the fan boards, people claiming to have witnessed Cooley being kind of sloppy and forgetting lyrics and stuff. But there were also people who countered that, basically saying, he's almost 60, there are a million songs and no setlist, so mistakes will be made. Anyway, just gossip, I've never seen it myself.

I thought I heard Cooley got on the wagon ... maybe around Brighter? Maybe when he had a kid (which I think was before that)? I can't remember, but it was somewhere around the end of Isbell. Of course, Isbell's relationship with drinking, etc., was more extreme, but I think the stress of the band was leading Cooley to drink a lot more. They used to pass around a bottle of Jack on stage, can't remember the last time I saw that. (Though I did see them do that once in Los Angeles, where they passed a bottle to Luther Dickinson, who himself was then, iirc, formally on the wagon himself.)

Just finding out that playing the bass 2+hrs a night and riding in a van/bus 6-12 hrs a day for 20 years can give you spinal lumbar spondylosis. Dr asked me if I was a gymnast :)

— Shonna Tucker (@ShonnaTucker) July 11, 2022

follow-up: no more touring for a while.

However, there are consolations at home:

View from the toilet ♥️ pic.twitter.com/xXD78oVWib

— Shonna Tucker (@ShonnaTucker) July 24, 2022

Sometimes a band is more than just the people who make the music. @drivebytruckers and other artists’ glorious visuals were made by artist Wes Freed, who died today. pic.twitter.com/J35OoIiA4L

— Record Store Day (@recordstoreday) September 5, 2022

Damn. Salut, Freedbird, heading toward Autumn, dispensing Southern Gothic trick-or-treats along thee way.

RIP

we still have a faded peeling Cooleybird decal on the rear window of our car at the moment, we were planning to scrape it off & replace it w something else but I guess it’s staying a while longer now <3

He was their Neon Park or Pedro Bell. RIP

Interview w Wes, mentioning his book, new to me---here's cover:

https://www.al.com/resizer/UnRQAhqg9wOhy-Bn-l6lPuVhx4o=/800x0/smart/arc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-advancelocal.s3.amazonaws.com/public/DEI42TIMDRFCVC5CSESRBRU4BQ.jpg

if that goes away, it's also displayed in interview:
https://www.al.com/life/2019/12/the-secrets-of-drive-by-truckers-trippy-album-covers.html

holy shit, I only saw the most recent post and was going to say something about the book, then googled to look something up and saw that he had died. I am literally wearing a Wes Freed Truckers shirt right now.

https://i.imgur.com/7BqmrwO.jpg

bands more closely connected to a particular visual artist than DBTs / Freed ... what's the list? can't be too many.

Pedro Bell, Pettibon, Saville ...

RIP Wes Freed, always one of my favorite things about DBTs

XP Neon Park & Little Feat, maybe Stanley Mouse & the Dead.

I've got a copy of Brighter than Creations Dark that lives in my car for those times I don't feel like listening to the radio. I put it on this morning for the first time in a while and damn if some songs still don't give me the chills. If Soringsteen in his formative years captured something about the death of the American dream, this band, better than most, possibly better than any, really captures the stench of its decaying corpse. And does so through humor, through character studies, through daydreams and nightmares put to song.

Cool shirt!

Wes Freed’s artwork, including the “Cooley Bird,” was synonymous with the Drive-By Truckers https://t.co/9wyDwWst9P

— Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) September 5, 2022

Tweeted by Stephen Deusner, author of xpost Where the Devil Don't Stay: Traveling the South with the Drive-By Truckers:

Incredibly sad news today. Wes Freed, the artist who has been painting album covers for the
Drive-By Truckers and who donated the cover image for my book (wouldn't take payment
either, just gave it to us), passed away. | don't even know where to begin, but he was one of my
favorite visual artists, with a distinctive style that was surprisingly complex the more you
looked at and thought about his images.

Like the Truckers and like me he had a conflicted love for the South and his work embraced
the beauty of the place and rejected the ugliness and especially the hate. He used his powers
for good. And he populated his fantastical landscapes with Southern artists -- not just the
Truckers, but Hank Williams, the Allmans, Skynyrd, Gram Parsons, and so many anonymous
troubadours who strummed guitars for the same reasons he wielded a brush.

To have his image on my book, binding my words, is an honor | can't quite find any words to
express. The writing process was filled with so many doubts, so many uncertainties and a
whole lot of wondering whether or not | was capable of doing justice to my subject. But he was
so generous when we talked on the phone, and when I finally saw the image he donated, it
made me feel legit. It was overwhelming. It made me feel like a real writer. I never got to tell
him how much that image and all of his work meant to me, precisely because | always thought I
would have the time. His art has meant the world to me as much as the Truckers' music has
meant to me, and it will continue to inspire me and I'm sure many others even now that he's gone.

Dunno what changed, but they were as good if not better than ever last night. That is, they're always good, but last night was them at their best. Tonight I get to see them again at a club smaller than anything they've played in maybe a decade.

This band is so goddamn good. Can I just say, there is literally nothing better than seeing one of your favorite bands play at a tiny club down the street, with an open bar, all you can eat pulled pork, standing next to the president of the Illinois State Senate and rocking out to Buttholeville, All in service of raising enough money to provide 500,000 meals to the hungry.

i havent seen them live in almost 10 years, i definitely need to correct that

https://i.imgur.com/NBy5HNl.jpg

who are the dudes on the left?

Jay Gonzales on the far left has been their keyboard player/second guitarist/backing vocalist since ... 2008 (lol Veggie). The guy with the beard/awesome hair is their roadie, who got to come out and play for "Buttholeville/State Trooper" and "People Who Died."

Gonzalez (sorry Jay Gonzalez)

oh cool! i didn’t recognize Jay with bigger hair i guesz

Wow, this changes everything for me:

Separate phrases. At that point I didn’t have the skill to make it obvious I was 21 https://t.co/OGPaNa0zWP

— Jason Isbell (@JasonIsbell) January 27, 2023

I *always* thought this was one phrase, not two, as in, the dad knows he's bigger than Jesus but is telling him to let people figure that out on their own.

The Drive-By Truckers will release The Complete Dirty South on June 16, 2023, via New West Records. Originally released in 2004 to wide acclaim, The Dirty South explores the mean highways and dark hollers of what the band called the “Mythological South,” a tornado-ravaged landscape populated by bootleggers and small-time criminals, everyday folks just scraping to get by and looming icons like Sam Phillips, John Henry, and Sheriff Buford Pusser. The album is a reckoning with the place they call home. Pitchfork sang its praises: “The Drive-By Truckers’ Southern rock always sounds homemade, and like liquor from a still, it’s extremely potent… (They) find the connections between these larger-than-life figures and the life-size experiences that shaped them. For them, the South is a stretch of highway where many have died, an ordinary place made extraordinary by human tragedies. The Dirty South is their homemade roadside memorial.”

The ground-breaking album has been re-sequenced and expanded to the band’s initially proposed 17-song track listing. It includes 3 bonus tracks that were left off the original album, 4 remixed songs, and 2 featuring newly updated vocals. Also included is a 32-page book featuring original and new liner notes written by the Drive-By Truckers’ Patterson Hood, track-by-track descriptions written by Hood, Mike Cooley and Jason Isbell, never-before-seen photos, and updated artwork by the late Wes Freed. The Complete Dirty South was remastered by the legendary Greg Calbi. This definitive version of the album will finally be available as the band intended.

Today, the Drive-By Truckers shared the remixed & remastered “Puttin’ People on the Moon,” which features new vocals. Patterson Hood says, “I wrote ‘Puttin’ People on the Moon’ in the passenger seat of our van driving through western Tennessee and northern Georgia in late 2003. At the time I was angry about the recently started war in Iraq and the polarization President Bush and his cronies were unleashing on our country, but also drawing a parallel to the policies of President Reagan, who at the time many still viewed as a grandfatherly presence despite his enacting so many policies that had major negative ramifications on our future, a future we’re still living through now. The song was probably the best political song I had ever written at that time and unfortunately is more timely today than it was in 2003.” Hood adds, “We recorded it in Muscle Shoals (in one take) in January 2004, but by the time the record came out, I had already begun to regret the vocal take, which attempted some things I hadn’t yet really learned how to do at that time. As the years have passed, it is one of two on that album that has always really bothered me when I hear it played, while live it has morphed into a truly powerful song for me to sing. When we were given the opportunity to do a ‘Directors Cut’ version of what many consider to be our masterpiece, I wanted to take another stab at that vocal and nailed what I believe to be a definitive version of it in one take. One that truly captures the inherent anger and despair of the song as written and played by the band. The scream at the end might be the most primal recording of my voice anywhere in our catalog and I’m very proud to have this version out there after all these years. The Complete Dirty South might indeed be DBT’s masterpiece.”

In the newly penned liner notes Patterson Hood writes, “The period from 2002, a few months after we self-released our breakthrough album Southern Rock Opera, through the end of 2005, when we wrapped up The Dirty South Tour, is widely considered to be our band’s glory days. It was certainly exciting… In January of 2004, the label realized that we had a new completed album and were hoping to release it that summer. Not only that, it was to be another double album. They weren’t too happy about any of this. We took their unhappiness as an insult and so it went. In the end, a sort of compromise was reached and New West agreed to release the album and we agreed to shorten it to fit on one CD. The Dirty South came out in August of 2004 to wide acclaim and went on to be the best selling of our albums at the time.”

Hood adds, “A lot has happened in the nearly twenty years since The Dirty South was released. All of these years later, it is still considered one of our best albums… Shortly after we left (New West), they restructured the label and the source of our turmoil moved on to other things. We are on excellent terms with the powers that be now and we were happy when they reached out to us about the idea of reissuing The Dirty South, enabling us to put out the album the way we had originally intended it to be. We have reconstructed the original sequence and concept as it was conceived. Where possible we preserved the original John Agnello mixes but remixed the bonus tracks and also fixed a couple of vocal issues that I have always regretted about the original version (for purists, those versions still exist out there, but this gave us a chance to present it the way I’ve always wished it could be)… This version finally allows it to be heard and seen the way we had always hoped and intended.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiDs_Rr6YDk

This song gives me the chills.

This is a touchy subject for me because this band meant more than any other to me from roughly the very long years of 2002 to 2010 but the new vocal sounds horrible in comparison, sounds like they re-recorded it recently rather than using an alternate track from the era.

one of my favorite songs off the album & from their catalog

i dunno if i am ready to hear the reworked vocal. will have to work up to it maybe.
the imperfections is part of what i love about the original.

Yeah, I haven't been a place where I can listen to that, but I was really excited about the reworking - until I got to the part about redone vocals.

It sounds fine. Changes a couple of words here and there. Loses the falsetto bits, which I guess Hood didn't like but which I never minded. And minus a full re-recording it still (imo) fails to nail the way the song sounds live.

Horrible might have been too strong but the beginning is out of sync and there are plenty of places in the second half where he’s just overdoing it a bit. Sounds like someone swiped the vocal track from one of their live performances and pasted it on the original. Just have a hard time imagining this as the ‘definitive’ version and will sound a bit out of place in the middle of the other original studio tracks. Of course I’ve heard the original a thousand times and anything different probably wouldn’t have sounded right to me.

Yeah, that's fair. If you're going to re-do it, re-do it. Swapping in a new version of a song for the old, for mostly cosmetic reasons is, as the kids say, sus.

if Pat’s happier doing it this way i’m happy for him, and on its own merits he does a good job of recreating the anger

but i don’t need it to be at a 10 the whole way through. it needs the quieter bits to make the yelling parts pay off

imo

also lol @ jason

No not at all- Hood sent me mixes as soon as it was done and it’s fantastic. Which record did Ozzy cut me out of though that sucks https://t.co/PuODlIqSio

— Jason Isbell (@JasonIsbell) April 11, 2023

lol call him Pat at your own risk ...

Jason just consistently proves himself to be one of the best dudes - funny, great songwriter, standing up for the right things and completely unafraid to push back against trolls and actively piss off "fans" by telling him he doesn't want their hateful views around.

From blog notes soon after first release:

...14 songs, 8 damn good, 2 pretty good, 4 too tawky, and the tawk aint that stimulatin'...Patterson's the culprit, as always, but more so here. Ideas, or at least topics, or at least *words,* don't lead the music, or follow it either. And that tight dry little cigarette voice, which can/could be effective, kind of in there between mosquito zingers of Eddie Hinton and 5 0'clock-shadow-tonsils of Steve Earle, but here it's closer to not-so-Mighty Mouse (and a cracker-barrel-retiree-Steve E.). Still and yet and yet and still more than compensated for/effectively contrasted by the sinuous writ x performance of Jason and Cooley. Brad's big bass drum, Shonna's bass guitar (and her voice, back there in the mix, but adding good thin sharp edge thereby, *when* audible: I keep listening for it, never taking for granted), also mucho gracias.
...Supposedly (according to some sources), DECORATION DAY was a "follow-up" to PIZZA DELIVERANCE, this 'un a f.-u.to SOUTHERN ROCK OPERA. And, before I heard about those alleged relationships, was already thinking how several songs from DS would go good on a really deluxe personal burn of SRO. But *way too many* good'uns to fit that, strictly squinting.
...(later) I was (somewhat) too hard on Patterson. "Tornadoes" is as eerie as Jason's songs, and it's not like PH hasn't done eerie before.And part of that's his voice, which is *not* shot, as I seemed to imply, without meaning to. It will be shot, or shite, if he keeps squinching it as much as he does on some other tracks. Guess I'm mainly frustrated/spoiled cos of their usual standard, but they're always a bit uneven (as I should've said in the Voice re SRO), so should've been ready to listen around the lesser without shortchanging *some* of the gooder. Frustrated here by the expectation-whettin' way PH presents a triptych of songs re the late hickory-stick totin' Sheriff Buford Pusser, of WALKING TALL mythology. WT was based on BP's *account* of his great deeds, otherwise largely unverified by others, or so I remember reading in the 70s, not too long after film came out. Most impressive aspects: a)Manager of one of the theatres showing it in B'ham taped unique-for-him radio endorsement,"and let me reassure all parents that the 'R' rating is for Violence, not Sex." Also (b) the ending, when Buford has finally been brought low(est).(He started seeming kinda sadie-maso, like Evel Kneivel or latterday Mel G.)Courtesy his old main squeezers the State Line Gang, and congregation runs out of church, to destroy the Gang's main den of iniquity. Somehow seemed prophetic to see them in their Sunday best, ripping that place to shreds, and, though I forgot about it, remembered when Moral Majority first burst through my haze, to hold rally on steps of our nation's Capitol. Well! Patterson, who is younger than me, but writes that he saw the movie back then, and who says he likes to do research, and also make up good stuff, really doesn't follow through. Good spoken intro, good snarly vignette, then Cooley's effective "Cottonseed," then whole subset *ends* with the PH tawky-boring bit of the kind I complained about below.However: one of Cooley's is boring me too (although his have grown on me before, so won't name it yet.) And! PH's "Lookout Mountain" does hold its own with Cooley's and Jason's, in the kill-No-Dozin finale totalizm. But "Lookout" is a pre-DBT, and the latter have recorded it before, haven't they. Still!

what many consider to be our masterpiece,

I would have guessed Southern Rock Opera was the consensus masterpiece

I would go for either SRO or Brighter Than Creation's Dark

Yeah, I woulda thought SRO, though still wanting to add for inst "Danko and Manuel" for the roots rocker doom theme, and end it all with "Never Gonna Change," which always seemed Lynyrdly as hell, too bad Jason wasn't in the band yet.
Let's see what did I say about Brighter:

The Truckers' latest roadkill is uneven as ever, but the best songs are good and numerous enough to put it in my Nash Scene Top Ten…Brighter Than Creation's Dark is not full of sweetness and light, and it is a little too long, like most of their albums, but does seem reinvigorated, after getting past whatever tensions re resulted in the slammed doors and illin' irresolution of A Blessing And A Curse. Also, we got the unexpected emergence of bassist Shonna as songwriter and lead singer on some tracks, a welcome respite from the broody testosterone, and even a few songs, especially the one set in the Grand Canyon, where the drivers-by get out of their truck for a while, and actually seem to enjoy doing so.

"Three Dimes Down" is the most fun DBT song ever, "Bob" is the worst, in summary Cooley's songwriting is a land of contrasts