The soulful croons of that illusive Muscle Shoals sound started early on at the Concorde2 the night of Drive-by Truckers last U.K date. Wilson Pickett, Etta James, Otis Redding and a wonderfully solemn James McMurty number all blasted from the stereo prior to the bands onstage arrival. The real legacy and potency of that mysteriously salient catalyst of genius shines though at moments like this, with a sold out crowd beginning to hop-scotch with the excitable contorts of children on Christmas eve, and it became infectious.
As bottles of Jack began to appear onstage, the hair-raising coos of some black-and-white 50s country-goth ditty commences and its distinctive haunting gloom of utter Southernisms mean only one thing, enter Mike Cooley and co. stage right.
Searing volume instantly launched its uncontainable waves into the atmosphere, ragingly brash and howling like the screech of a 747 Booing jet engine as Cooley growled into ‘Where The Devil Don’t Stay’ from their southern-rock masterpiece, ‘The Dirty South’. It stomps with the ferocity of Lucifer himself, hollering with vigour and doused in the slurring whiskey that soaks their numerous albums, and then, out of the shadows comes Patterson Hood’s ‘Tornadoes’, straining a tense elongated yearn as he bawls, ‘I can still remember the sound of their applause in the rain, as it echoed through them storm clouds, I swear, It sounded like a train’.
Drive-by Truckers eighth album, ‘the Big To-Do’, was released earlier this year. Continuing the theme of creepy cartoon cover art, this was a record that sustained to coagulate the Atlanta-formed gang of musical outlaws as an unprecedented and unintentionally surreptitiously vital driving force in American rock and roll. Hood’s astute sense of being has always captured me. On the Southern Rock Opera he cast his acumen out on a line, particularly on ‘The Three Great Alabama Icons’. Hood, whose Dad was a Muscle Shoals bass-wielding legend in his own right, muttered about the misunderstood mythical element of Lynyrd Skynyrd, undervalued in all its gritty fabled glory, and I would argue that the same avowal applies to DBT - to a certain extent. But after two hours of DBT tonight, it’s clear that the genius of southern wit and brainpower, pooled with the assault of face-melting guitar riffs that will propel the roof off any venue, is near unstoppable.
Introducing the following belter as a redneck anthem for his redneck friends, Hood spills into honkey-tonk rock-punch ‘The Company I Keep’, followed closely by the whimsical stirring of ‘Self Destruction Zones’ with Cooley at the helm. Its insightful pennings and grubby group delivery, lyrically rich in cunning social observations, pin-pointing problematic generational issues that illuminate unfortunate concern: ‘Till the pawn shops were packed like a backstage party, hanging full of pointy ugly cheap guitars, And the young'uns all turned to karaoke, hanging all their wishes upon disregarded stars’.
The vital wordings of these songs are so affluent in the diversity of story telling - they cascade from poignant declarations of societal issues to the boozy joys of the duality of the southern thing. And it’s this beautiful multiplicity that makes DBT an extremely accomplished song writing outfit, but when Cooley lets rip like a rampant bar-room rocker who’s playing for his very existence on ‘Hell No I Aint Happy’, they reveal they are so much more than simply a rock and roll band - they’re the pulsating mainline artery of American rock and roll and everything debauched, doped-up and outrageously raucous that embodies the divine nature of this illicit necessity.
As the night goes on and the Jack Daniels slowly sinks until the bottle becomes transparent, bassist Shonna Tucker holds her own with a couple of bottles of red, delicately plonked on her bass amp, and after a few well-earned swigs she’s introduced by Hood and the band burst into the edgy ‘(It’s Gonna Be) I Told You So’ followed swiftly by a dazzling amped-up instrumental-riot of ‘World Of Hurt’. This perspicacious country-rock anthem ebs and flows with the tender of Little Feat’s ’Willin’’ and all the acumen of Ronnie Van Zant’s ‘Am I Loosin’, as it ponders love, loss and pain - the three incessant topical mediums. It’s a creation clearly constructed by someone who, in their own right, are a priceless factor in this rock and roll dream and when Cooley gets his mits on it, the subdued country ballad revamps into a riotous eruption of rock and roll bliss, and its all summed up by Hood in a brief lyrical ache…
“"To love is to feel pain" there ain't no way around it
The very nature of love is to grieve when it is over
The secret to a happy ending is knowing when to role the credits
Better role them now before something else goes wrong”
Now tell me that aint the words of a genius…
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