Over the past 10 years, the Drive-By Truckers have defined the new sound of southern rock, building upon the tradition and their own roots while also steering conceptions of the genre into altogether new directions. With their 2001 double-album Southern Rock Opera, loosely themed around the career of Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Truckers shot to national prominence behind Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley’s literate, rural narratives. After several year’s of intense touring and last year’s release of A Blessing and a Curse that have showcased the band’s no-holds-barred, raucous energy, DBT’s current tour changes format to an intimate, seated showcase, with the legendary Spooner Oldham also joining the band. Austin Sound’s Nate Kreuter spoke with the Drive-By Truckers’ Patterson Hood about the Dirt Underneath tour, Jason Isbell’s departure from the band, a couple of new solo albums and an upcoming documentary about DBT. The Drive-By Truckers play two shows next week at Antone’s on Tuesday and Wednesday May 1 and 2.
AustinSound: Thanks for answering a few questions for austinsound.net . We really appreciate it, and your coming to town to play.
Patterson Hood: Well, the pleasure’s all ours. We love Austin.
AS: Could you explain a bit how the Dirt Underneath tour is different from the Drive-By Truckers’s previous tours?
PH: Well, you know, the Rock Show that we’ve been doing for the past several years is big and loud. So, we wanted to do a show that was a bit quieted down and put the emphasis in a different place. For starters we’re going to have a bunch of new material and kinda try that out in front of an audience. It also gives us a chance to . . . Well, if you listen to our records, they’ve got big, loud songs, then kinda quieter songs. But on tour those quieter songs get pushed aside. You know, we might end up playing one of those a night. We’re between albums here and it’ll give us a chance to go into some towns that we might not normally get to play, give us a chance to play some different versions of some songs and some songs that don’t get played too much. And, as I said, we’d like to work in some new songs and also tell some of the stories behind the songs.
AS: That’s what I was intrigued by, having the chance to hear the stories and thinking behind some of your material.
PH: That’s the hope. We’ve booked everything so that all the shows are seated in the hopes that it will be a quieter scene. If people get to talkin’ we could end up turnin’ up our amps and all hell could break loose. The whole idea came from somebody sending me a bootleg tape of a show we did in 2001 at a house in North Carolina, right after Southern Rock Opera had come out. It was a very informal atmosphere and we were all sitting with a semi-circle of people around us. We can’t really take that experience on the road because so much of it was about the house, but I wanted to bring as much of it as we could. I listened to that bootleg, and it was hilarious, because we were definitely drinking a lot, and cuttin’ up, and there was a kind of a back-and-forth between us and the audience and it was really fun. So we decided this year to capture as much of that as we could and take it to a few other towns, particularly some of our favorite towns, like Austin and San Francisco, towns that have been really good to our band, and just experiment and try this. It’s a big experiment.
AS: It occurs to me after listening to you guys over the years that a lot of the songwriting is pretty personal and emotional, both for the band and in a way for the audience too. How do you all get on stage and pour your guts out 200 nights a year? Where do you get the energy?
PH: I don’t know. [laughs] You know, I think that to some extent it started taking its toll, which is why we’ve taken a lot of time off this year. This is the most time we’ve had off since ‘98, and even with that we have a two week tour here this summer and we’ll probably book a few more shows this summer and maybe even do another leg in the fall. If it goes well. We’re also about to make a record. Since 2001 it’s been like one long tour. And every year and a half or so we print up new t-shirts and change the name of the tour. So, we were all ready to take some time to re-evaluate and figure out where we want to go next and spend some time with our families. I’ve got a daughter that’s two and Cooley’s got two boys and we’re all in pretty different places than we were when this really long tour started in ‘01. To get back to your question, we definitely do connect really closely to the material in the most personal ways and it amazes me to what extent people in the audience connect to it. We’ve been doing this for a long time and for a long time there wasn’t anyone connecting to it.
AS: Well, along those lines, I’ve always seen your band as sort of a defender of poor rural people, maybe not glorifying them, but at least telling their stories. Do you think that might have something to do with the connection you make with your fans?
PH: We certainly come from that. We come from North Alabama, which is about as poor as you can get, an area that was left behind in a lot of ways, and a lot by its own making too. So, while we may tell those stories, we certainly don’t glorify it. Until recently people in my own home town hated us. It’s only been in the past year or two that we’ve begun to get a little bit of acceptance back home, and, you know, I’m still not moving back there. So, it’s kind of a sore. On the one hand we’re telling stories that some people there would just as soon not have told. When The Dirty South came out I got nasty letters from people who said, “Our area has enough economic hardship, why do you have to talk about the unemployment here?” And one person wrote me a letter saying “You make Huntsville out to be some grim hell-hole.” And well, I thought it was. [laughs] My county is still a dry county and I was already playing with Cooley [22 years ago] before you could buy liquor without driving to the state line. It’s definitely a different slice of America.
AS: I have a couple hypothetical questions for you. First, if you could tour with any band, who would you tour with?
PH: I don’t know. I would love to have played with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Or of course Neil Young and Crazy Horse would be fun. The bands you’d probably think we would say, for obvious reasons. It would be fun to play with REM. We live in the same town and we’re pretty friendly with them and they were a huge influence that probably doesn’t get noticed, and certainly not written about.
AS: Well, that’s funny, because it leads directly to another question. I know that you guys are very up front about who your influences are and some of your songs name them outright. But are there any influences that you have personally or that you all have as a band that you think people might be surprised to hear about?
PH: Personally, I’m sure I have a lot of them. I’m a huge Todd Rundgren fanatic. That probably doesn’t get noticed. I could probably go through our songs and point to a hundred places where it shows up to me but no one picks up on it. We don’t sound anything like that. But in the song writing particularly he was a big influence on me. I started writing songs in elementary school. And I was in the sixth grade when I became a huge Todd Rundgren fan. So that was a big influence. Cooley’s influences are more from bluegrass. He grew up playing bluegrass, with great Old Time bluegrass folks, when he was a little kid. He took his first guitar lessons from sort of an unknown legend, a guy named Al Lester. He was good friends with Bill Monroe and Doc Watson and those folks, but he didn’t tour. He didn’t want to be on the road because he was a family guy. He had a barbershop somewhere not far from Tuscumbia and taught guitar lessons and had a mornin’ TV show that would come on in our area around six or seven in the mornin’, “The Al Lester Show,” and when Cooley was like ten years old he would be on that show. We’ve actually tried to see if there’s any tapes of those out there anywhere, but we think that when the station got bought out in the ‘80s their tapes got destroyed. I would love to find footage of ten-year-old Cooley playing with Al Lester and some of those people all playing fiddles and shit. [laughs] He was a really good guitar picker at a really young age and then he went to high school and discovered rock and just went to shit. And the rest is history. There’s a lot of that kinda stuff. Shonna started playing at a really young age. She has a big background in bluegrass and then her passion became Muscle Shoals soul music. She has an encyclopedic knowledge of that stuff, which is of course what a lot of my heritage was because my dad was one of those musicians that I grew up lookin’ up to. That’s how I heard about her. My dad actually told me about her before I ever met her. Punk rock was a big influence on Cooley, Brad and I for sure. Especially Brad and I. Brad played in punk bands from a really young age in South Carolina, a band called The Dog Killers in high school.
AS:> I wonder since you all do tour so much if there are any up-and-coming bands that people might not have heard of that you think we should keep an eye out for.
PH: Yeah, but I have to say that I have a vested interest—the Dexateens from Tuscaloosa. They had a record come out a couple years ago that was definitely in my top five. I became friends with them after that and they asked me to co-produce their next record, which just came out. So actually David Barbe and I just produced that album and I don’t think that me co-producing has anything to do with the album being great. The Dexateens are great and from Tuscaloosa, not a great town to launch career from, but they write great songs and they’re a guitar band and a fun band to play live with. They played live with us last weekend in Charleston and did a great job. Our audience loved them. That’s one. There’s a lot of great stuff around. The past few years have been great. Record sales may be goin’ down the toilet but there’s a lot of good creative shit goin’ on.
AS: How has satellite radio affected you guys?
PH: It’s certainly helped. Regular radio, you know, ain’t done shit for us. Or really for anybody else trying to do anything different, anything off the beaten path. So satellite radio has been good. And the internet. You know, I’m old, so I look at all that MySpace shit and go “God, it’s just creepy as shit.” But I can’t deny that it helps and it’s a good way of networking, because record labels don’t really know how to keep up anymore and I think they’re playing catch-up and are behind most artists right now as far as figuring out how to maneuver the new business model. So all of those things certainly help. More than anything, when all else fails, we just get out on the road. We’ve always built things one person or one hundred people at a time.
AS: I know the band is headed back into the studio soon. Can you give us any hints as far as what to expect from the new album?
PH: We’ll be pullin’ some of that stuff out by the time we get to Austin hopefully. Cooley just sent me a five song demo of some new songs he four-tracked in his basement that are great. He’s not real prolific so five new songs from him is a pretty big deal to me. Over the past three years he hasn’t been writing a lot, which is why he didn’t really have anything on the last album. I’m excited to be starting a project with that many of his songs, and maybe he’ll even have more by the time we start recording in June. I’ve been writing more than I’ve gotten to in several years too, thirty-one songs since Thanksgiving. So we’re gonna go in and see what sticks together and let it form itself.
AS: I want to follow up by asking about Jason Isbell’s departure, which I know is bittersweet to a lot of fans, bitter because he’s leaving and sweet because he’ll be doing more solo work. I know you’re parting ways amicably, but is there anything you want to add about that situation?
PH: It’s bittersweet to us too. There’s not much to add. It’s not any big drama or any big thing. I feel like it was an inevitable thing and this just seemed like the time for us to part ways and move on. He’s on tour right now touring with Son Volt. He has a really hot band of his own, his own agent, a contract with New West and he’s working on getting a manager. All of that was already happening and it was going to be a pretty big juggling act to tour with us and he really needs to give his record a fair shot. He’s been sitting on it since before I met him. Our first conversation was about that record, a year before he joined the Truckers. His record is finally coming out and he’s put a lot of heart and soul into it and he needs to get out and work it. He’s a really active writer. I bet he writes a hundred songs a year and he’s lucky to get two on our records because there are two other very active writers in the band, so he needs to do this for himself. I’ll be at his shows and he’ll be at ours. When he joined us he made a pretty good band a much better band. We made three records that I’ll be forever proud of. I’m a better player for having played next to him and I hope we’ve helped him too.
AS: Well, all thirty-one of your new songs are obviously not going to make in onto the new album. Do you have any plans to follow-up your own solo album?
PH: I’ve got a record finished that’s gonna come out. I don’t know where or when. It’s more a matter of me not wanting it to conflict with the band or Jason’s new album. I don’t want every review of both records to be stuck together like the Kiss solo records or something like that. But I made a record I’ve been working on off-and-on for a while. Will and Scott and Centro-matic are all over it and David Barbe, who co-produces the Truckers records and also plays bass on it. My dad is on it, giving us a chance to work together after all these years. And it’s a little different. There’s probably a couple songs that would fit on a Truckers records, but the rest is pretty different and it’s gonna come out at some point, maybe in the fall. I’ll even tour with it when it comes out, with Will and Scott [of the Centro-matics] and David Barbe, who hasn’t toured since Sugar broke up. It’s a side project compared to the Truckers though. It could be a good twelve months if I can get Murdering Oscar out sometime this fall plus Jason’s album this summer and the next Truckers record should hit sometime early next year. There’s also a documentary about the band that’s been filmed and will probably be coming out somewhere in there too.
AS: I wonder, because being Southern is such a big part of your band’s identity, I wonder if it’s different playing for audiences outside of the South than it is playing for audiences in what you might consider your home turf.
PH: It’s easier. Might be easier. I know that we were, not counting Austin, which is a lot like Athens but bigger, in that it’s a liberal oasis in a conservative part of the country, generally, not counting those towns, the places where our band really caught on first were the bigger cities, and particularly on the two coasts. We were sellin’ out shows in New York and Baltimore and places like that and then comin’ back to our own region and playin’ for twenty people in Birmingham on a Friday night. So, we were embraced for years and years in other places, not counting Austin and Athens and Atlanta, before we were ever embraced in the South.
AS: Sadly, that’s how it seems to be for a lot of Southern artists.
PH: Yeah, it’s been that way forever. It was that way for The Allman Brothers. The Allman Brothers’s live record was Live at Fillmore East, not Live in Birmingham. They’d go up to New York and be treated like rock stars and come home and be playing for dinner at Muscle Shoals, literally. Same for REM. And The B-52s. All the Southern bands that made it to national prominence had it that way, even Lynyrd Skynyrd. Before the plane crash they were bigger on the West Coast than they were in the South. After the crash they became martyrs and were a really, really big deal in their home region.
AS: We’re really glad you haven’t had to be martyred to reach the success you’re having now.
PH: We are too. Knock on wood. [laughs]
Websites:
www.drivebytruckers.com
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