The Drive-By Truckers, the Southern Thing, and Me

Southern Rock was the first genre of music I got into when I started exploring music for myself, rather than just listening to whatever my parents had on the radio. For as long as I can remember, I have been extremely proud to be a Southerner, I can even distinctly remember pretending to shoot Yankees from my tree house when I was a kid. The battle over the Confederate flag was also the first issue I really started caring about. Southern Rock, music explicitly about and celebrating something I loved so dearly, immediately caught my attention and I was hooked.

Not just by the “big three,” Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Allman Brothers Band, and The Marshall Tucker Band, but also the other bands that were around during the genre’s 1970s heyday – i.e. Black Oak Arkansas, Molly Hatchet, and even several bands that are all but forgotten today, such as Doc Holliday. I loved them all. The problem was that during that time of my life, a period when I was maturing with music, the late 1990s and early 2000s, Southern Rock as a genre was as dead as disco. Most of the bands had broken up and those that hadn’t were either pale imitations of themselves, had gone over to Country, and more often the not, both. Death also took its toll on several bands. ZZ Top was one of the few bands that had achieved much success after the 1970s, but they did that by moving away from the Texas Blues to a sleeker, more polished sound that fit better during the MTV era. And, even they were getting long in the tooth at that point.

Forget February 3, 1959. For me, October 20, 1977 was the day the music died.

That’s why discovering The Drive-By Truckers was such a breath of fresh air. Here it was, a modern rock band making music that was proudly Southern. Keep in mind that at this point very few artists that weren’t Country were embracing much Southern imagery, and those that were, like Mojo Nixon, Reverend Horton Heat, Southern Culture on the Skids, did so in a joking way. Not that there is anything wrong with that per say, I like those bands, but the fact that DBT was serious when they did it, despite their name and a few more comedic songs from their early years, seemed too good to be true. I found Southern Rock Opera and fell in love immediately, and to this day I am pretty sure I’ve listened to that album more times than any other album. They had a hard rock edge that I loved, combined with a punk attitude (a genre I would fall in love with in a few years). But, they also had a strong, almost Dylanesque quality, to their lyrics. These weren’t simply songs about partying and getting drunk, these were stories featuring well-developed characters. Within a few moments, the people they were writing about would almost come alive. These felt like real people, people I could have known.

I eagerly awaited their follow-up, A Blessing and a Curse, and while it was a stepdown from SRO, it is still a very good album. At the time, I really didn’t appreciate just how rare it was for a band’s follow-up, especially after their first big hit, to be that good, and it’s an album that ended up growing with me over time. Still, I wasn’t prepared for their next album, The Dirty South, which exceeded all my expectations and then some. To this day, I still think it’s their best work and one of the best albums of the 2000s. And, I wanted more.

It was around this same time that they re-released their first two albums, Gangstabilly and Pizza Deliverance. I like both albums, especially Pizza Deliverance. I even hunted down Adam’s House Cat, a punk band that featured a young Peterson Hood and Mike Cooley. That’s how hooked I was.

They followed that up with four more albums and they were, at the very least, solid – A Blessing and a Curse, Brighter Than Creation’s Dark, The Big To-Do, and Go-Go Boots, of which Brighter than Creation’s Dark is the best. The South wasn’t quite the lyrical obsession that it once was, but it was still present. What’s more, the band started getting more attention. They weren’t exactly mainstream, but they were no longer the band that no one else around me listened to, as they had been in 2001. If I was talking to someone “into” music, I had a reasonable expectation that they would have listened to at least one DBT album.

It would be incorrect to blame everything that would later ensue with my DBT fandom on the events of June 17, 2015 in Charleston, South Carolina. After Go-Go Boots was released in 2011, it would take the band three years to make a new album, and in that time my love of the band had cooled off. I still liked them, but my tastes had changed and they were no longer my favorite band of all time. When English Oceans was released in 2014, it received a simple “meh” from me and I never felt the need to listen to it all the way through again. But, yes, the events of that day were still a major turning point as it helped launch a war against all things Confederate and Southern. Of course, DBT, a band know for relishing in Southern imagery, joined in on the dogpile with an op-ed.

The op-ed wouldn’t have been that bad had it not been accompanied by a shift in the band’s style. I know it’s become popular for the band’s rightwing and pro-Dixie fans to now refer to them as “The Drive-by Cuckers,” but I’m not sure that’s completely accurate as “cucking” refers to a betrayal of principles for short-term or personal gain. For one, though the band was lyrically obsessed with the South, they never used much Confederate imagery (long before Charleston the band stopped playing “The Southern Thing” because fans were waving the Confederate flag during it) and two, it has long been obvious, from certain songs to interviews, that the band were men of the Left and far from being Dixian Nationalists.

I’m not sure if “Cuckers” is the right word, but still, after Charleston, the band changed and their next album made that clear. Gone was the always excellent album art from Wes Freed, replaced with a really generic (and boring) black and white picture of the Yankee flag. But, the problems of American Band were deeper than that. Obviously, DBT was always a political band, so it wasn’t simply the politics, it was how they were presented. One thing I always admired about DBT, and especially Patterson Hood, was his ability to write sympathetically about people he didn’t agree with. Doing so is very hard and is, in my mind, the mark of a great writer. And, all that was gone in favor of being preachy.

I’d like to be flippant and say that Patterson Hood has no issues writing sympathetically about a man lusting after his 14 year-old step-daughter, but can’t do so for a good old boy who loves the Confederate flag, no doubt like many of the people he grew up with in north Alabama. Songs like “The Man I Shot” (about a soldier in Iraq) and “Used to be a Cop” (about a fired cop) illustrate that he can write songs sympathetically from rightwing Dixians. Honestly, I think the band knows that to write a song like that requires nuance and the leftwing mob doesn’t do nuance. If they were to write a song about a man who still proudly flies the Confederate flag, and he’s more than a mustache-twirling villain, it would result in the mob going after them.

Today, the band stands as an almost sad monument to all that we’ve lost since 2015. They’ve released two more albums since and have just doubled down on all the problems of American Band. As if to spit in the eye of the fans who helped build them up, largely because they were drawn to the focus on the South, the band did bring back Wes Freed to draw the album art for The New OK – depicting a vandalized Confederate monument.

The Drive-By Truckers are hardly alone in doing this. A lot of Alternative Country bands have done the same in the past few years, which for me, and many others, is kind of ironic. We embraced those bands because they had a rawer, more authentic sound, far away from the slick sounds of Mainstream Country. They felt more like, both in sound and spirit, to the Outlaw Country movement of the 1970s. They were, or at least appeared to be, more Southern.

As it turned out, those bands turned tail and ran as soon as the going got tough, or, even worse, joined in on hating the South. The bands we were rebelling against, though far from perfect, do have a better record on that matter. Such is the duality of the Southern thing.

-By Harmonica