Drive-By Truckers’ new double CD Southern Rock Opera is the most daring and developed expression of rock and roll attitude since the Clash’s Sandinista. The subject of the Truckers’ Opera is the “duality” – their word – of life in the land where blues began.
Like (Rhythm &) Blues people, white folks in the South feel they’re different from mainline Americans. Their country and Southern Rock musics have celebrated that difference and registered the Great Shame of the South as well. All those cheating songs hint that white Southerners knew they were guilty a generation before the Civil Rights Movement. Though they weren’t trying to hear that unless they’d had a drink and even then their favorite singers had to slip around the truth.
Which was never the whole truth. White southerners were mocked and demonized as arch-bigots by the rest of country at a time when their racial attitudes weren’t much worse than those of most other white Americans. And the society’s moral condemnation of them was often polluted by culture vulures’ less-than-righteous contempt for “backward” populations below the Mason Dixon line. In the mid-60’s, Okie country rocker Buck Owens sang right back at all the icy people looking down at him from El Norte.
You don’t know me
But you don’t like me
Say you care less how I feel
How many you that sit and judge me
Ever walked the streets of Bakersfield
I walked a thousand miles upon it
I’ve worn blisters on my heels
Trying to find me something better
Out on the streets of Bakersfield
I once heard Dwight Yoakam sing a cover version of “The Streets of Bakersfield” live a couple years ago. I was sitting behind a white country boy with a crew-cut who’d been up dancing – shaking a leg like a little Elvis – through most of the show. When Dwight sang “Streets,” the kid turned around and wailed the chorus back at all the so-phisticated New Yorkers sitting in the balcony. “You don’t know me, but you don’t like me!”
A scene in the documentary Elvis 56 helped me understand the root of southern boys’ defensiveness. Elvis is being interviewed by a 50’s tv personality named Hy Gardner (who apparently sold his audience on a mix of venality and hauteur – think Cindy Adams crossed with Philippe de Montebello). As the writer George Trow has explained, Gardner was a figure in 50’s CafÈ Society – a representative of the reigning paradigm of New York urbanity. Gardner’s tone in the interview makes it clear that he thinks Elvis is – and Trow rightly apologizes for using the phrase – “white trash.” The subject of Elvis’s movie career comes up in the course of the interview. And Elvis is supremely modest even though he had to know what kind of mimetic talent he possessed. He indicates he’s off to Hollywood to LEARN. And he wasn’t lying. When Elvis arrived on the set for his first movie, he had memorized not only his own part, but the whole script. He quickly found out, though, that no-one, as Trow puts it, “was going to address his needs as a learner.”
I don’t know that Elvis ever talked back to the Hy Gardners of this world. While Buck Owens surely did, he ended up selling himself out on Hee-Haw – the 70’s tv show that ridiculed country people.
Drive-By Truckers won’t end up playing themselves. “Proud of the glory, stare down the shame” – they’re not about to roll over for anyone. But they’ve also learned that pride is never enough. And they’re not about to end up walking tall down dead end streets. Their Southern Rock Opera is a testimony to their continuing education. These lifetime learners have realized the democratic promise – everyday people teaching themselves – that once made millions believe rock and roll was the only culture that mattered. The Truckers worked on their Opera for six years – “brainstorming, writing, learning, playing and recording.” (They even recruited a folklorist and expert on recent Southern History into their creative community – a fellow musician who, as they put it in their liner notes – “was actually in the Civil Rights Struggle as a reporter for the Birmingham Post Herald.”)
Drive-By Truckers want their listeners to know white Southerners weren’t/aren’t the only racists in the country, but they’re also aware that no-one has hurt the South harder than men like Alabama’s governor George Wallace who pandered to the region’s segregationists in the 60’s and 70’s. (The Truckers treat Wallace’s life story in the course of their Opera and their final judgment of the man who stood in the schoolhouse door to prevent black kids from going to integrated schools is worthy of Richard Pryor – “When he met St. Peter at the Pearly Gate/I’d like to think there was a black man standing in the way.”)
I wouldn’t blame you if the notion of a Rock Opera in 2002 seems dead-dog-dead to you. It wasn’t exactly a “Start Me Up” to me when I first heard about it (from a black rock critic named Kandia Crazy-Horse who likes a lot of Southern Rock bands that I think are for the birds). But the wonder of this record is precisely that it comes rolling in from nowhere (just as Democratic art should). Drive-By Truckers churn up a mean old highway of the mind that runs from Bakersfield to “Zip City” where
Your Daddy is a deacon down at the Salem
Church of Christ
And he makes good money as long as the Reynolds
Wrap keeps everything in this town wrapped up tight
Your mama’s as good a wife and Mama as she
can be
And your Sister’s putting that sweet stuff on
everybody in town but me
Your Brother was the first-born, got ten fingers
and ten toes
And it’s damn good thing cause he needs all
twenty to keep the closet door closed
Drive-By Truckers are ex-punk, hard-rock pussy-boys who knock down doors, throw open the windows and let the funk out. While they’re not above lost cause myth-mongering and rockism, their chords cut right through their own hot air. There’s always a musical bridge out of their bombast. Their own entrance on Opera defines a certain kind of quintessentially American daring. Talk about young lions. These guitar cats let their Gibsons ROAR. And there’s nothing hoary about that sound. It takes the Truckers about 10 seconds to rock out the difference between sleepy classic rock verities and their own everything-old-is-new-Southern Thing.
Opera is dedicated to the rock group Lynyrd Skynyrd (who lost their leader – Ronnie Van Zant – and other key members of the band in a plane crash in the late 70’s). But it isn’t overly solemn. It begins with a Southern Gothic horrorcore joke about one of Skynyrd’s most famous songs. Patterson Hood – the Truckers’ lead vocalist and idea man – raps about how his classmates invented a soundtrack for a car crash that killed two students the night before their high school graduation. “Everyone,” he recalls, said that you could hear Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” playing on the crashed car’s stereo, orchestrating the screams and the sirens. And then Hood draws out the punchline…”You know, it’s a very loooooong song.”
Hood allows in his liner notes that he didn’t much like Skynyrd when he was growing up in North Alabama. It wasn’t until he left the South for a few years that he began to dig the band. His Truckers keep coming back to – and blasting off from – the changes in Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama.” As they turn that band’s story into their own Opera they go deep into Southern History and their own pop lives.
Hood allows he never saw Skynyrd play but in a track called “Let There Be Rock” he name-checks other Southern bands and arena rock acts that he did hear as a teenager in the 70’s. The song’s tale of drugging and drinking and driving and puking seems to have no particular place to go. Until Hood crashes into a memory of a rock group that actually rocked -“I sure saw AC/CD with Bon Scott singing LET THERE BE ROCK.” A local history of wasted youth culture suddenly maps a majestic community. It’s a lifting, left turn that the Drive-By Truckers are always looking to make. One that puts them on the road with that “race of singers” who have aimed (in Walt s’s words): “to endow the democratic averages of America with the ranges of heroism with which the Greeks and feudal poets endowed their god-like or Lordly-born characters.”
Whitman’s prescription, of course, might be bad medicine for blowhard rockers. But the Truckers – “a little more rock and less cocaine” – have roots that keep them grounded.
They pump up America’s democratic averages by turning up the volume to Tornado and heroicizing the half-remembered Lynyrd Skynyrd. “Life in the Factory” tells how this “bunch of fatherless boys” practiced “seven days a week” in a shed with no windows back in the Florida swamps – 100 degree heat radiating off the tin. That’s why, Hood sings, they never broke a sweat when they went on to play summer festivals as part of a touring schedule that included 300 dates in a year. Skynyrd were always ready to play ferociously because they knew “Rock’s the only thing to save them” from steel mills or Ford plants. The Truckers’ clarity on this score hooks them up with Bruce Springsteen who once recorded his own song called “Factory” on Darkness on the Edge of Town – the album where he came into his own working class consciousness. But the Clash and “Sway” sound of the Truckers’ “Factory” is a truer evocation of suppressed fury all down the line.
Southern Rock Opera is, in a way, the follow-up to Darkness that Springsteen himself never really managed to make. In part, because he couldn’t quite cross over the color line. The Truckers down home truth telling about the burden of Southern History beats Springsteen’s approach in a song like “My Hometown,” where he sings about the racial problems that jumped off when he was growing up in Jersey. “There was a lot of fights between the black and the white – there was nothing you could do.” Which won’t quite do.
Drive-By Truckers don’t throw up the hands – or pull their punches. They begin their Opera in earnest by invoking the Church bombing in Birmingham and immediately link their heroes’ tale with one of the defining moments in American cultural history – that sequence of events in the mid-60’s that led first Wilson Picket and then Aretha Franklin to head down to Muscle Shoals, Alabama where they made the soul music that soundtracked the progress of the Civil Rights Movement. The Truckers remind their audience that white southern musicians were playing behind Wicked Pickett and Aretha when those singers were out front embodying Freedom. Patterson Hood hears Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” as a tribute to Muscle Shoals where the band went to record a few years after Pickett and Aretha. Skynyrd met a lot of good people there, he sings, “not racist pieces of shit.” His readiness to spit out that hard line hints why Drive-By Truckers are a little farther up the road than Bruce Springsteen who seems softer on racism even when he’s singing a protest song about Diallo.
Drive-By Truckers impulse to take racism personally not only makes them model southerners. It makes them exemplary American Artists.
Their Opera‘s last track should speak to all Americans now. “Angels and Fuselage” puts you inside a plane that’s about to crash. Written before 9/11, it’s taken on a new resonance in the aftermath. As the Truckers guitars hum and drone, Hood sings out his mortal fear of being “strapped to this projectile.” Then the chords die down – “the engines have stopped now.” Hood dreams of a last call for alcohol and faces up to the no-future:
I’m scared shitless of what’s coming next
I’m scared shitless, these angels I see
In the trees waiting for me…
There are no voices in the last couple minutes of “Angels and Fuselage.” Just white noise with shards of melody out of “Layla” and Hendrix. And then, in the midst of the static and guitar dischords, strange little sprinkles of piano. The first time I heard them I thought of a child trying tentatively to get a tune out of a keyboard. Now the spray of notes reminds me of a rainbow – the sounds evoke the out of time/tune piano that finishes off the Rolling Stone’s trippy 60’s classic “She’s Like a Rainbow.” “Angels and Fuselage” is a about a bad trip. But the grace notes in that shattered soundscape bring it all back home to me – beauty’s always being born somewhere in America’s grand mess.
Note
1 Stephen Garbedian’s review of Bryan K. Garman’s A Race of Singers: Whitman’s Working Class Hero from Guthrie to Springsteen XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics. #9)