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Review: Drive-By Truckers, “Southern Rock Opera.” Lost Highway.
The late Jim Shepard once opined to me that “One of the few bad things to come out of punk rock was that it made you have to hide half your record collection when you had a party.” If you’re trying to be hip, I expect the last band whose records you’d want to be caught dead with (apart from Great White, sorry) would be Lynyrd Skynyrd. But if you remember the first couple hundred times you heard them, before the term “classic rock” had been invented, back when radio was programmed by humans instead of machines…if you remember that far back, you know in your heart that Skynyrd rocked. All of which is why I think my buddy Roy Gittens likes to blast a couple tracks off the Drive-By Truckers’ “Southern Rock Opera” CD when he’s DJ’ing a trendy rock show in Hollywood or Echo Park. “Southern Rock Opera” is certainly an ambitious concept album, if not quite an opera in the sense of, say, “The Barber of Seville” or even “Tommy.” It has several stories here, one a young man’s coming of age story and his further adventures with the fictional band “Betamax Guillotine”--sort of southern-fried combination of “Ziggy Stardust” and “Quadrophenia.” Mixed in with that is a meditation on the legacy of the south and the real life stories of Skynyrd, George Wallace and also the Drive-by Truckers themselves. Sometimes it’s hard to tell exactly which story they are trying to tell at a given point—and I would imagine that such a blurring of the lines is largely intentional. Neil Young plays a part in the story also, as principal songwriter Patterson Hood not only talks about the relationship between Young and Skynyrd (as well as the relationship between Young and some of Skynyrd’s overzealous and underinformed fans) but evokes him musically at key moments: Hood reads “The Three Alabama Icons” over the borrowed tune of “Danger Bird,” and the album’s finale “Angels and Fuselage” features a harmonica break that Mr. Young himself would be proud of. The Truckers
are a southern band, and their music embraces the tradition of southern
rock without sounding like they are stuck in a time warp, unaware of
punk rock and the other musical developments of the last twenty-thirty
years. The band does feature the requisite three-man “guitar army,”
yet the guitar sound is modern. In keeping with the theme of the record
they do play with some of the clichés of southern rock, but even
a song like Mike Cooley’s “Guitar Man Upstairs,” which
musically and lyrically suggests “Gimmie Three Steps” from
a different perspective, comes across as, at worst, a loving parody.
Play it pretty for Alabama. And turn it up.
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