In creative phrases, Drive-By Truckers’ bold third album Southern Rock Opera is now acknowledged as a magnum opus, but this sprawling masterpiece emerged from a goofy concept which its creators initially took lower than significantly.
Its genesis dates again to a street journey taken by vocal and guitar frontman Patterson Hood and bassist Earl Hicks previous to the Truckers’ formation. In spring 1995, the 2 mates discovered themselves in a U-Haul truck, touring from Alabama to Georgia, the place Hicks was about to take up residence. To move the time through the drive, the 2 mates devised what they initially believed is perhaps a screenplay as a substitute of an album.
“The truck didn’t have a radio, so our rambling talk somehow morphed into this idea for a movie,” Hood recollects in a 2021 interview on the band’s official web site. “It was about the mythology surrounding a fictitious rock and roll band loosely inspired by stories I knew from growing up in Muscle Shoals [in Alabama] and close friends who had worked with Lynyrd Skynyrd in the early days.”
Hood and Hicks fashioned Drive-By Truckers shortly after Hicks moved to Athens, however their Lynyrd Skynyrd idea went onto the again burner whereas the band made its first two albums, 1998’s Gangstabilly and the next 12 months’s Pizza Deliverance. Nonetheless, the Truckers saved coming again to Hood and Hicks’ screenplay concept and so they lastly turned it into an album with 2001’s Southern Rock Opera.
Successfully, the document weaves the historical past of Lynyrd Skynyrd right into a narrative a couple of fictitious rock band referred to as Betamax Guillotine, whose story unfolds inside the context of the South through the Nineteen Seventies. It options 20 tracks and runs for over 90 minutes, but as an entity, Southern Rock Opera has by no means felt flabby. In actual fact, it presents a rip-roaring array of candid, roots-y laborious rock songs starting from the anthemic likes of “Guitar Man” and “Let There Be Rock” via to the adrenalized “Ronnie And Neil” (which examines the really non-existent feud between Neil Younger and Lynyrd Skynyrd) and the mournful, epic “Angels And Fuselage”: an impressionistic lament recalling the tragic 1977 aircraft crash which claimed the lives of Skynyrd vocalist Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines, and backing vocalist Cassie Gaines.
Nonetheless, whereas the completed document excited the band, merely getting it on the market proved to be a problem. And not using a label deal, Drive-By Truckers took the DIY route and – with the assistance of an early Kickstarter-type fan-based marketing campaign – pressed and launched Southern Rock Opera via their very own Soul Dump Data in September 2001. The persistence quickly paid off: Evaluations comparable to David Fricke’s Rolling Stone rave (“Southern Rock Opera deserves a fistful of stars just for the “Free Bird”-via-Loopy Horse squall of guitarists Mike Cooley, Rob Malone, and Patterson Hood”) led to the Drive-By Truckers’ signing a brand new take care of Mercury/Misplaced Freeway Data – and the repressed 2002 version of Southern Rock Opera bringing this singular roots-rock outfit to a a lot wider viewers.
“All of our lives were drastically changed by this ridiculous album,” Patterson Hood recalled in 2021. “Before it came out, most people told us we were crazy. We already knew that, but we did believe in what we were doing and how we were going about it. It somehow made sense to us and as it turned out, seemed to capture some kind of mood of the people who heard it. It somehow seems to still resonate with people two decades later.”
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