IN PURSUIT OF LOFTY THINGS Drive-By Truckers
Feb 17, 2011
An extended interview with Patterson Hood, on the new album and more. Check the live video, below.
BY ANDY TENNILLE
20 years ago, Patterson Hood packed his shit and left Muscle Shoals, Alabama, distraught following the break-up of his band of six years - Adam's House Cat - and disillusioned with the small town in northern Alabama that his father - David Hood - and his colleagues at FAME Studios and Muscle Shoals Sound helped put on the map in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s recording classic hits with Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett and the Rolling Stones.
Like any good teenager who grew up in the late ‘70s listening to The Sex Pistols, The Clash and Elvis Costello, Hood rebelled, choosing to leave behind his hometown, his family's business and his father's music for life on the road chasing the rock ‘n roll dream.
"I didn't really intend to rebel against Muscle Shoals as much as I feel like Muscle Shoals rebelled against me," Hood says. "When I started trying to play music, I was viewed as this snotty-nosed loser, fuck-you kid that it made me rebel further. I mean, I wrote ‘Buttholeville' as a response; I didn't come out punching. I felt like I was punched and so I punched back. There are still some people in that town who are mad about that song, and that was in 1988. I tried for a long time to stay there and finally just left after Adam's House Cat broke up with a lot of frustration and anger, feeling like I had to leave."
Searching for a more welcoming music scene, Hood relocated to Athens, Georgia, founded the Drive-By Truckers with former Adam's House Cat bandmate Mike Cooley and the rest is history. Over the next 15 years, the band would go on to make eleven albums, record with Booker T. Jones and Bettye LaVette and tour the world, earning a reputation as one of rock's road warriors. All the while, Hood formed a musical family in Athens that interestingly mirrored what his father's generation developed in Muscle Shoals. David Barbe came on board for Southern Rock Opera and quickly became the band's close confidant and de-facto producing partner. Wes Freed was tapped to illustrate the band's album artwork. Scott Baxendale met the Truckers when the Decoration Day tour hit Denver and has built custom guitars for them ever since. Last year, Hood and company moved their band office and warehouse to Chase Park, the same complex that houses Barbe's studio and Baxendale's new guitar shop. Every January, the Truckers host three nights at the fabulous 40 Watt that benefit local non-profit Nuci's Space and serve as a reunion for their friends, extended family and the entire Athens music community.
"Everyone who has an extended relationship with them are just really quality people, from the folks at Red Light to Traci Thomas at Thirty Tigers to Matt, Damon and the road crew," Barbe says. "It is like a big family, and now that they've moved their headquarters over here next to my studio and Scott's guitar shop is here as well, we're all here next door to one another. We all work together, and there's a lot of love and a lot of loyalty, and that starts with the band."
With Go-Go Boots, their new album out this week on ATO Records, the Truckers have once again turned to their hometown for inspiration, tipping their hat to the country soul made famous by Muscle Shoals while covering two songs by the late Eddie Hinton, one of the town's greatest talents. It's perhaps their most well-rounded effort since The Dirty South and further solidifies their place among America's best rock bands.
*****
BLURT: Well, congrats on another fine album. Lots of people are saying Go-Go Boots is the Truckers finally embracing the more soulful, Muscle Shoals side of the band. In looking back over the last three albums, Brighter Than Creation's Dark was almost an extension of the Dirt Underneath tour, a more intimate, acoustic side of the Truckers. The Big To-Do - a big rock record - seemed like a reaction to that, like the pendulum swinging back in the other direction. What is Go-Go Boots?
PATTERSON HOOD: I think it's probably a little of all of the above. We certainly didn't go in the studio and say, "Well now we're gonna make the Truckers soul record." Any talk of that was more after the fact, when we realized this was the most Muscle Shoals-sounding record that we've ever made. At the same time, it doesn't sound like any particular record ever made at Muscle Shoals. It sounds like a Drive-By Truckers record to me. It's a little heavier on the storytelling aspects than anything we've done since The Dirty South, and in some ways, it's kind of a follow up to that, except musically it moves in different directions.
You recorded Go-Go Boots and your previous album, The Big To-Do, during the same sessions. Why is this band suited for that approach?
Our band is not economical. We're not aerodynamic. We're a big, gas-guzzling dinosaur of a road hog. We're made of big heavy steel, we're hard to parallel park, but if you get us out on the open road and gun it a little bit, we're good on a nice long trip. That's just who we are. There have been times when we've gone through periods where we've tried to be a little more agile and it's just not what we do best, unfortunately. So there's an inherent bigness that comes with what we do, and recording two albums at once was a way of embracing that without putting out another two hour-long record like Brighter than Creation's Dark. I personally have a real strong soft spot for that record, but I didn't want to do another one like it, not any time soon.
I don't know if we'll ever choose to or get to do a project the same way again, but I'm really glad that we got to do it this time and that it turned out the way it did. In a lot of ways, doing two records at once really, really worked for us; the way we operate and the way we record. I wish I could do it that way from now on, but the reality is that to do it that way, you've got to put both of those records out in a relatively timely fashion, which means having two records out in eleven months. As cool as that sounded on paper, that's a lot of work.
I need to follow up on something you said a little bit earlier. You said this could be considered the follow up to The Dirty South. I find that interesting because to me that record represented the peak of that particular lineup. Now you've had a couple of records with this band. Is this record a good representation of the potential of this band?
I have no idea where this band will go next or could go next. The lineup is so stellar right now, and I feel like in some ways we're running at the peak of our potential, but in another way I feel like we're almost just now scratching the surface and getting to the good stuff underneath. It's a really fertile band in a lot of ways, and there's plenty of the good kind of dynamics that can make something interesting without any of the troublesome dynamics. I've never had a band that's played just like the sound in my head, only way better. The band in my head is the same as this band, and that's really a good feeling.
Let's talk about Go-Go Boots. How did you differentiate the songs for it versus the ones for The Big To-Do?
I knew that there was a record somewhere in my head that I really wanted to hear, and that became Go-Go Boots. When we went in the studio, there was a very clear-cut idea of what The Big To-Do was, and then there were these other songs that I felt just as passionate about, maybe even more so in some cases. I knew it was gonna take a little more time than we've ever really had the luxury of having to find that record, so we went about it at our own pace while taking care of the business at hand, which was making The Big To Do. As we wrapped that record up, we knew that we weren't gonna be shut out of the studio for the next two years like it used to be between records. We knew that we had this ongoing thing that we could work on at our leisure. So we'd do a leg of the tour, and I'd be listening to what we had so far on the Go-Go Boots stuff and thinking about what's next. We'd book a little studio time when we got home, go in there and apply what we worked on or talked about on that tour and then go back out on the road some more. It was really enjoyable to have this ongoing thing. I tend to write more if I've got a project I'm writing for. That was the thing about the two-year gaps between working on records in the past - I would tend to just not write during that time. It's an easy thing to put off when there's nothing looming. With this record on the horizon, I pushed myself to keep writing because I knew that we had this record that had the potential to be as good as anything we've ever made, but it still hadn't found its identity yet. We had these really great songs, I thought, but there wasn't that thing that makes a collection of songs a great album, that unifying thing that ties it all together.
In the midst of all this, we were asked to record a song for an Eddie Hinton tribute. That turned out to be kind of the missing piece. That opened a creative door that was like, "Wow, this really ties in with these Go-Go Boots songs we're working on." Once we decided to include those songs on the record, this other running theme emerged in the record that inspired me to dig out "Mercy Buckets" and turn it into something that we could use. I'd had an earlier version of that song for many, many years that actually predates the Truckers. If someone asked me to play at their wedding, I'd play it, but it wasn't a song I really heard on one of our records. Hearing the Eddie Hinton songs on there changed my mind, so I went back and rewrote the song and made it a much better song. We knew as soon as we recorded it that it was the way the album should end.
The last thing I wrote was "I Do Believe," which I wrote right as we were finishing the record. Originally, we were gonna begin the record with "Go-Go Boots", but then once I wrote that song, it became pretty clear that it's gotta be the first song. Having that as the first song, "Mercy Buckets" as the last song and the Eddie Hinton songs in the middle gave the record this arc that counterpoints all of the darker killing songs in the middle.
You've chosen family as the source of inspiration or song subject matter many times throughout your career, "I Do Believe" being the latest. Tell me who that song is about?
"I Do Believe" is about my grandmother, Sissy, on my mom's side. She's the person on earth that I was the closest to, as far as a child and as an adult. As long as she was alive, she was the person I was the closest to. I really haven't written about her much. Some aspects of her have popped up in "Old Timers' Disease," which I definitely count as one of my family's songs even though it's a fictional story. My granddaddy used to talk about walking down the street with her when they were young, and cars would just about start colliding because whoever was driving would be so busy staring at her butt that they'd run into telephone poles. She was a really stunning woman, so I used that imagery in "Old Timers' Disease." She's in "Little Bonnie," too, but I'd never written specifically about her or our relationship.
I've been writing since '73, since I was eight years old, and I've written a shitload of songs, but it's still as much a mystery to me now as at any point in time as far as how it all happens. I can tell you where specific things in a song came from, but I can't tell you what made me think of it at that moment. We were riding down the road in our van and we'd been to Europe, and then Colorado, and we were on our way home, and everyone's exhausted. We were driving home from the Atlanta airport, and I was sitting in the back of the van and that song just hit me. I wrote it down right there on a little notepad I had in my bag. I was no more thinking about Sissy or any of the stuff that's in that song...it was as far as anything could have been from my mind, and yet, in about a ten-minute period of time, I wrote that song. It was a very vivid snapshot of a moment in time when I was about my daughter's age, five years old or so. It wasn't until after I finished writing it that I realized I'd just written about Sissy. I can't remember the last time I'd thought about that day, but it's all there in that song.
Does that happen a lot for you, where a song just comes out of the sky like a lightning bolt?
Almost all the good ones. In a lot of cases, it's an idea I've had for years, but the actual writing of it happens like a lightning bolt. For years, I've wanted to write a song about the cop that "Used to Be A Cop" is about. I had the basic idea for that song when we were writing The Dirty South, but the song never got written. I have no idea what caused me to write that song out of the blue one night a couple of Novembers ago when I was just sitting in my office. I wasn't thinking about it then, I wasn't thinking about any of that. It just came out. I had my acoustic guitar, and I pretty much played what I play on the record, just that four chord little circle that plays throughout the song. I demoed it as soon as I finished writing it, and it already had the jagged staccato, psycho thing at the end, which was definitely borrowing kind of a Bernard Herrmann feel, ‘cause I love Bernard Herrmann.
As far as the disco beat and all of that, that all happened when the band got a hold of it. The song's set in the late 70's, early 80's, so that's the music that would have been playing at the bar when the former cop's watching his ex-wife dancing with some dude and thinking about following her home. It's so weird. It's 7 minutes long, and it's already gotten more radio play than any song we've ever put out. We've always said if we ever have a breakthrough hit, it's gonna be from the outer edges of what we do. It's not gonna be the hit version of the thing we do, it would be from a different direction. I've always thought that. It has gotten more radio attention than any song we've ever put out, and it's seven fucking minutes long. It's funny. The studio version's even longer than the version live. It's a minute longer on the record than the live version. When does that happen? (Laughs)
So what's the story behind "Go-Go Boots?" When you see these things on the TV, hear them on the radio or read them in the paper or online, what's the first reaction?
When I was a little boy there were two things I wanted to do; I wanted to either be a rock star or a film director. I always wanted to make movies and always wrote stories and outlines for a number of things. Southern Rock Opera started off as an outline for a screenplay me and Earl (Hicks, former producer and bass player) were gonna write, and then it made more sense to just make a record. That was when it first dawned on me to merge those two worlds, so that's been a big part of what I've done over the years.
The murder that inspired "Fireplace Poker" and "Go-Go Boots" was a real event that happened in my hometown in the late 80's. It went down over a week or 10-day period of time and was pretty much the front-page story every day. It was all unraveling before your eyes, and just watching it all happen, I thought, "I wanna make a movie about this." I thought it would make an incredible Southern gothic, Night of the Hunter-style movie.
I wrote the song a long time ago, over the course of a number of years. I probably wrote the first draft of it in the late 80's and wrote pretty much the version that we have now in the mid-90s. I had it in mind for the album I referred to as "the Heathens record," which was the album that morphed into Decoration Day, so it was definitely on a list of song titles leading up to making that record. By the time we finally made the record, we had so many songs and it was already going in so many directions that it got shelved and put aside. It just wasn't the time for it, but I was still drawn to that story, so I wrote "Go-Go Boots" a little later as another attempt to tell that story, just in a different form. That ended up being one of the first songs we recorded for this album. It was a magical take, and we knew early on that that was definitely gonna be on the album and that it was like gonna be the title cut for this darker, weirder second record we were working on as we did The Big To-Do.
As we were finishing the record last summer, the same weekend we did "I Do Believe," "The Fireplace Poker" reared its head one more time. We were about to finish the record, we didn't really need another song, and we sure didn't need a nine-minute long narrative about a murder that we already had another song about, but if we didn't do anything right now with, I knew we'd never do anything with it. So we gave it a stab to see what we could get, and we very quickly ended up with a magical take. So once again, I've got two songs about the same thing from different perspectives on a record, and I guess that's just another one of those things we do.
I'd like to talk about "Ray's Automatic Weapon." How often does it happen that you write a song and by the time you start playing it out, or it comes out on a record, it's taken on a whole new meaning? I'm talking about the recent shooting in Arizona and the whole debate right now about gun laws.
I honestly hadn't even thought about that until you said it just now, about "Ray's Automatic Weapon," but it's very true. Southern Rock Opera happened that way, too, in that it came out on 9/11 and ends with a plane crash. Playing that album the first time in New York was on October 11th of that year, and Ground Zero was still smoldering. It was really weird stepping up on stage to play that record knowing the closeness of all of that, even though that record was set in a different time and place and was about something totally different. People did come up to us after the show and they would talk about "Angels and Fuselage" and the relation to what had just happened in their lives. Nothing could have been further from our minds about what we intended when we recorded that song, but none-the-less, those things happened. That's part of the beauty of this art form. Songs do take on new meanings that were never intended, and that's a great thing, particularly if it helps somebody deal with something they're suffering through.
Let's talk about Eddie Hinton. It isn't as if the Muscle Shoals scene lacks folks who had all the talent in the world but never made the spotlight. Why Eddie Hinton? Why not Donnie Fritts, Tony Joe White, or countless others?
With Eddie, it always seems to go one step further. Eddie's story is a tragic narrative. He was such an amazing talent in a town that had so many amazing talents, but Eddie's talent might have transcended one step further even. He was a writer on the same level with Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham. He was a guitar player of the caliber of Duane Allman. Extremely underrated, but a fantastic guitar player, a great studio musician who could pretty much play whatever they put in front of him. He played the harmonica, he could play drums, and he wrote string arrangements. He wrote a string arrangement that he took to the London Symphony Orchestra to play ‘cause he heard strings in his head on the song. He wrote the arrangement on the plane ride over.
When he got there, those classically trained symphony players couldn't believe that this guy from Alabama had written these parts. They were in awe of it. He was this vocalist on the level with Otis Redding, but you can't find his records. They're almost all imports. He lost his mind and spent a lot of time in and out of mental institutions and was known to be a little deranged, maybe a little violent. He slept on a park bench for about a year in Decatur, Alabama. It's just a very tragic, sad, sad story, but if you listen to his records, they're just beautiful. So we were definitely drawn to his story. I wrote "Sandwiches for the Road," which is on Gangstabilly, a couple weeks after he passed away in '95. We've had this ongoing relationship with Eddie's music over the entire history of this band. It's been the music that plays between sets at our shows for at least eight or nine years. So it just made sense.
I had wanted in the past to record one of his songs, but it was vetoed from day one because we were scared we wouldn't be able to do it justice. But then we got asked to do the tribute thing, and it was really then just a matter of talking Cooley into it. He was always a little skeptical of the idea of covering an Eddie Hinton song, for very good reasons. But at the end of the day we were all very happy with what we did on that. And we're glad we did it. I think in doing that, it was a nice boost for our confidence in pursuing some of the loftier things we were trying to do with this record.
[Photo and Video Credit (both from January, at the 40 Watt Club in Athens) by Andy Tennille - who, in case you don't know, is our Associate Editor. See his print feature on the Truckers in BLURT #10, due to hit newsstands in mid-March.]
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