Drive-By Truckers
First of all, you need to get past the Athens, Georgia, pretensions, which get a band only so far down the road to stardom, especially since R.E.M.—the sometime darlings of Athens—are finally beginning to consign themselves to the dustbin of pop music obscurity. Not that there’s anything wrong with R.E.M. doing a disappearing act, since they were only occasionally interesting after they got famous (a familiar theme in American pop music). To my admittedly-idiosyncratic way of thinking, R.E.M. peaked at Fables of the Reconstruction (1985), although to be fair this year’s Accelerate shows the band returning to top form and energetic live performances.
For my money, though, the real rock and roll coming out of Athens happened a long before R.E.M. That’s right, I’m talking about the B-52′s. Campy as all get out, but they got the party started big-time during the late 1970s when things were looking pretty bleak musically on the American side of the pond, where we were all trying to put pretentious Anglo-American prog-rock bands like Kansas, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Yes, and Steely Dan far behind us. Hearing “Private Idaho” out on the green pastures of 1978 West Philadelphia was a revelation. Ask me how I know, and I’ll tell you how it sounded just after I got off the Greyhound bus from the provinces: with Max Roach and Dizzy Gillespie jazz flyers posted on all the nearest signposts, and with all of my friends giving me the message that we needed to see “Yes” and the “Doobie Brothers” like right now. Talk about your cognitive dissonance! But, campy clothes and hairstyles or not, the B-52′s were a kick-ass rock band in those days, even if the Southerness of their gimmick was sort of lost on some of us yankeees.
Not so for the Alabama-bred, Athens-based Drive-By Truckers, who are clear candidates for “hardest working Southern rock band” of the new millennium. Pizza Deliverance, titled with a sly reference to the Georgia-boy poet, novelist, guitar picker, and hard drinker James Dickey’s great novel (and later film) Deliverance. Set in the “New South” of the 1960s, Dickey’s Deliverance (1970) set out the contrast between Appalachian hillbilly and Atlanta suburban dude better than any other novel or film of the era. The suburbs had re-shaped the Old South, and them folks back in the hollow weren’t liking it one bit. So too with the Drive-By Truckers, who’ve sustained their Southern roots through a handful of great albums, all of which are now being released on high-quality vinyl by New West Records. Pizza Deliverance has the grit and vibe of the best “Southern Rock” of iconic bands like the Allman Brothers, but without the endless jams and flower child pretensions. Sometimes the South will hurt you, and front-man singer and guitarist Patterson Hood and his mates are here to confirm the pain and see past it into a future that comprises songs that explain not only the suburban sprawl of “Bulldozers and Dirt” but also the evangelical complaint of “Too Much Sex (Too Little Jesus).”
If you want to start understanding the South, an enterprise guaranteed to consume a lifetime of pains and pleasures unsuspected by those beyond the pale, you could think of worse places to start your education.
