Truckers Rule!

A friend at NewsGator turned me onto a live Drive-By Truckers show, which reminded me that I haven’t posted this piece about a Truckers show I attended at the Fox Theatre in April of 2005 after falling in love with their music during my DJ stint on KCUV. Since this was written, one of the major players, Jason Isbell, has left the Truckers and embarked on a solo career.

I never actually saw Lynyrd Skynyrd perform. But my first interview assignment as a green-behind-the-ears reporter was to talk to Ronnie Van Zant before a Kansas City show. It was May 11, 1976.

I had no idea what to expect when I arrived at 5 p.m. at the elegant, now-demolished Muelbach Hotel downtown on Twelfth Street. After being ushered into their inner sanctum on the seventh floor – I had to give the password “narum sin” – someone informed me that Van Zant had the flu and that the date was being rescheduled. Next thing I knew I was moved into another room with guitarist Gary Rossington.

Rail thin, his hair curled like Amy Irving, who was starring in Carrie at the time, Rossington was still nursing a hangover but was gracious as I droned through my perfunctory young-rock-crit litany of questions; “how would you describe your music?” etc.

He was proud of their success as a live act, adding that they rarely had to cancel dates and that the band always made them up. I asked how long he thought the band could continue at its present frenetic pace, and a gleam came to his eye. “I’ll keep doing it as long as I can,” he said with an “I get laid more in a week than I thought I ever would in my entire life” smile.

In October 1977, less than a year and a half later, the frenetic pace caught up with Skynyrd and exacted a particularly harsh penalty. Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines and singer Cassie Gaines would die in a plane crash Rossington and the rest of the band would survive. A decade later Rossington reformed Skynyrd with the still-living members and Ronnie’s younger brother, Johnny. They are now Southern Rock’s elder statesmen.

I thought about that twinkle in Rossington’s eye while watching the Drive-By Truckers at the Fox Theatre the other night.

I was turned onto the Truckers when G Brown added five songs from The Dirty South to the KCUV playlist last spring.

The first one that caught my ear was “Carl Perkins Cadillac,” a well-crafted revisionist history that attempts to place Perkins’ star a little higher in the Sun Records firmament. All three guitars are in play, and the song just fucking rocks.

Another, “Tornadoes,” tells the story of a funnel cloud that swept through a small, Great Plains town. The guitars are marvelously sinister, portraying a Midwestern storm rolling across the prairie. There were references to Oz and a line that said the tornado “sounded like a train.” I knew those references and remember that sound all too well.

The songs generally told stories, and with three writers, the subject matter was all over the place. “Daddy’s Cup” was about car racing, “The Sands of Iwo Jima” concerned World War II vets. There was a song about John Henry and another about Buford Pusser. It suggested that all were well-read and in touch with their culture as well as their heritage.

My favorite was “Never Gonna Change,” a head-banging, careening redneck manifesto powered by a three-guitar assault on the senses. Don’t tell John Hayes, but I traded it out in place of other songs more than once ’cause I just had to hear it again when it was on KCUV’s A-list. I haven’t tired of it yet, a year later.

Listening to The Dirty South, it wasn’t hard to understand why the Truckers were being compared, fairly and unfairly, to Lynyrd Skynyrd. Fairly because they share similar fascinations with the South and rock’n’roll, and unfairly because to portray them as second-generation Skynyrd is selling them off far too cheaply.

The live show fleshed out the band members and their individual contributions. Patterson Hood, son of Muscle Shoals class-act David Hood, commands center stage for his own songs and moves into the background when somebody else’s turn came up. His enthusiasm for his song, “Buttholeville,” which I imagined as some kind of twisted response to R.E.M.’s “Never Goin’ Back to Rockville,” was a genuine surprise and delight.

Though each member brims with self confidence, everybody seems to know his/her place. Jason Isbell – he’s the one behind “Never Gonna Change,” which they did early in the set, hooray — and Mike Cooley have distinct styles, Isbell with a harder metal edge and Cooley often veering into country rock. You never know who’s gonna play the next lead break. Shawna Tucker and Brad Morgan seem perfectly happy holding up the bottom end on bass and drums.

Hood introduced the band members fairly early. As each was announced, a bottle of Jack Daniels was passed around, and they swigged from it. The Black Jack bottle continued to make the rounds all night. Like I said, they know their culture – and their audience.

Many Truckers adherents totally buy into the middle-finger arrogance that gets more pronounced as the Black Jack works its way into the brain cells. “Some people are asking for rock and roll. Fuck ’em. I’m going to do a country song,” said Mike Cooley at one point to wild cheers.

The biggest applause came from over to my right, courtesy of the Trucker Boys, eight or ten male twentysomethings, several with well-worn band T’s high-fiving, swigging drinks and passing the pipe. The Trucker Boys know all the songs; they high-five each other and start singing along every time a new one begins.

Next to me, Baseball-Cap Dude sang along with all the choruses and most of the verses and held his right arm skyward while he mouthed the words, sometimes flashing his Bic – a rock tradition now in its fourth decade.

Then a large fellow moved in next to Baseball-Cap Dude. He’s obviously pretty stewed and digging the band. Suddenly, out comes a little notebook and pen from his tattered coat pocket. The guy with the Bic moves in to help him see what he’s writing.

Like the ghost of rock’n’roll past, it was like looking back at myself on so many hundreds of nights scrawling in my notebook in the dim stage lights.

I have always been semi-fascinated observing the relationship between guitarists and their cigarettes. Cooley is a major player in this department; he has spent too many hours watching old Rolling Stones videos perfecting the Keith Richard/Ron Woods ciggie-moves and hand poses. He’s got them all down cold.

At one point, Hood does a particularly infectious song that somehow puts me in the mind of the pre-Born to Run E-Street band. Another, about how goddamned happy he is now, engages the audience in a kind of “Blinded by the Light” fervor. During a couple of the harder-rocking songs I closed my eyes while the guitars screamed and fed back at each other and imagined I was at a Derek and the Dominoes show and Gregg and Eric were blazing away at each other again.

Their emotional tribute to the Band’s Rick Danko and Richard Manuel seals the bargain with even a skeptic like me. The Truckers understand the stakes, and if they can keep the Jack under control, they will keep doing it, like Gary Rossington, for as long as they can.