The dirty south: from the sins visited upon our fathers to the sins of our fathers themselves, we'll stay below the Mason-Dixon line, where the ghosts of the past are so intertwined into the culture that one wonders if they ever went to the grave in the first place. They oh so often haunt the region--legally, socially, economically, politically, and (depending on who you ask and who you believe and what you believe) literally--that it's no wonder so many Southern artists (musical, literary, etc...)--conjur up these insular, defeatist, patriotic, rebellious, rustic Gothic works of schizophrenia. Down here, we're not all hicks, we're not all poor, and we're not all backwoods...but none of us are more than two generations removed from it. We're all part of the Collective Southern Social Unconscious.
No band today mines these Jungian waters as well (or as much) as the Drive-By Truckers. Most other Southern musical acts--no matter the genre--write about the culture because it's second nature (or, in some cases, affectation influenced by commerce), and they write about it as a given; they don't question--they just observe. The Truckers, however, have spent album-upon-album analyzing and criticizing and honoring the quick and the dead of those who are and were American by choice, but Southern by the grace of God. This band does so by copping the most obvious (and much parodied) aspect of the most popular Southern rock act of the past ever: Lynyrd Skynyrd's triple-guitar attack.
The Truckers, though--unlike so many other Southern Rock acts of the past thirty years--use the triple-guitar attack as a means to an end, not the end itself. They use that sound--the Skynyrd sound--to deliberately evoke images of Skynyrd, its legacy down here--to at least 10% of the population--as not only the greatest rock band ever, but as one of the two symbols of the grandness and rise and fall of the region. Most every region and culture around the world has (and forever has had) a coming-of-age moment or rite or ritual for its young men, but has any other culture in the history of mankind ever had that rite centered on one* singular sole that wasn't a deity? I don't think so. In fact, I know so. In the Deep South, though, it's different. Every Southern born-and-bred white boy must drink a beer and sing all the words to at least one Skynyrd song before he graduates. Those who don't are socially outcast from the majority. I don't exaggerate, either. Lynyrd Skynyrd is that important.
Patterson Hood--leader of the Truckers--knows this, and he and the Truckers emulate the Skynyrd sound in order to call attention to the complex conflicts and contradictions of the South, and the people the Truckers are calling are--primarily--Southerners. Hood and company use a familiar form--one in which they excel--to entice and invite, and then they hope that their music is strong enough to keep the audience's attention while their messages slowly seep in and through. In this aspect, the Truckers--at their best--easily rival Skynyrd--the world's greatest rock and roll band for the entire span of their existance--in reach and grasp. In fact, with the Truckers' third album Southern Rock Opera, they surpassed Skynyrd, at least in terms of artistry.
Southern Rock Opera--released in 2001--is a sprawling double album, a concept record, a song cycle that opens and examines what they call "the Southern thing." In doing so, in so bracing and honest and painful and intelligent and passionate a fashion, the Alabama natives deconstruct and construct and deconstruct again the great mythology of a region in as expert a fashion as any artist has ever done before. It's as great a rock record--for what it does--as any ever recorded. In its own way, it's the thematic and lyric** equal of Marvin Gaye's What's Going On or Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions....
That album, though, didn't yield a single,*** and there's not one single cut on that album that would even seem like a radio single****. Southern Rock Opera is as singular an LP as has been recorded this past decade. The Truckers' follow-up album Decoration Day, though, offered not one but two impressive single-cut songs. The title track is (obviously, huh) one of them.
Decoration Day (the album) was made after fellow native Alabamian Jason Isbell joined the band. Going from strength to strength, Isbell's addition gave the Truckers another first-rate songwriter (Hood and co-guitarist Mike Cooley). In fact, Isbell might even be the best writer of the group.***** One wouldn't doubt it after hearing the title track. "Decoration Day" takes the essence of Southern Rock Opera and boils it down to 5:48. In the song, Isbell tells the tale of two warring families who've forgotten why they fought in the first place...yet still continue their battle. Sure, on the surface it sounds like the Hatfields and the McCoys, and it is, but that's just the hook.
The song's poison's in its details, in Isbell's examination of a culture of ignorance and violence, of the corruptive and destructive effects of pride. It's a metaphor for "the Southern thing", of course, but it also works as a story itself, as a tale of evil male hubris, of fathers hurting their children and their children's future out of their own hurt and their own lack of understanding and compassion and kindness, learned at the harsh hands of their own fathers, and the effects of all this on the son, and the complex, tortured feelings of the child who must honor his father because that's how he must prove he's worthy and prove he's a good son and a good brother and how important and painful familial love can be, and of the sin of obligation.
Isbell's singing sells the song--which could easily arch into camp under many another singer--as he sounds haunted and determined himself, and then the triple-guitar attack of Isbell, Hood, and Cooly reach into the song not to exorcise the demons, but to inflame them, as the guitars here are as incendiary as any we've heard these past ten years, and music this searing can only call forth the demons and the ghosts and demand that we Southerners confront them, whether to pay them heed on Decoration Day (for every day is Decoration Day down here) or to spit on their grave...or maybe a bit of both. It's the Southern thing to do, ya'll.
NOTES
*Okay, it's not just one musical act; it's two: Skynyrd and Hank Williams, Jr.
**Muscially, though, Southern Rock Opera isn't on a par with those two records. Don't get me wrong, the music's great: it's tough and honest and skilled and full of sound and fury; however, the Drive-By Truckers, musically, didn't break any new ground, not the way Marvin Gaye or Public Enemy did. The Truckers make great use of the Skynyrd sound, and they even add a few new wrinkles here and there, but essentially, it's still the Skynyrd sound.
***Not that an album yielding a single has stopped me from pulling in album cuts before (I mean, just yesterday--with Otis Taylor--I did that), but still....
****Heck, even Radiohead's phenomenal and radio-unfriendly Kid A had one song that would've worked by itself.
*****Apparently Isbell thought so, for he split from the group a couple/three years ago, and he released his first solo album last year. It's a good one, too.
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