One night a couple weeks ago I got home from work and found a package from an online music retailer waiting for me. Inside were two new releases—the Drive-By Truckers' Brighter Than Creation's Dark and In the Future, the sophomore effort from Vancouver bong-prog outfit Black Mountain. I have loved the Truckers for nearly a decade now, ever since I obtained a CD-R of their first record, the stupidly titled Gangstabilly, but recently it's been hard to escape the sinking feeling that they've lost their compass. Until people started paying attention to them, they were the funniest band in the United States, but they were no joke act. They were fierce and proud and pissed-off and despondent in all the right places, but they didn't ask for, didn't need your approval or pity or anything else. They had not one but two distinctive songwriting voices. Both the logorrheic Patterson Hood and the much less prolific Mike Cooley were meticulous; you could actually call them "craftsmen" without feeling obligated to footnote it with a wink. They could give you narrative; they could spin out an impressionistic character sketch; they could devote an entire lyric to a silly extended metaphor.
Like I said, this was before people started paying attention to them. On Gangstabilly, which no one (including me) actually bought, even "Wife Beater," Hood's overtly jokeless another-man-against-violence-against-women album opener, came equipped with Cooley's goofy basso backing vocals droning the disarmingly direct chorus, "Don't go back to him, he's a wife beater." The song works because it's not an exercise in either macho or sensitivo self-aggrandizement; this guy is no fake knight pretending he can slay the dragon of misogyny. I mean, the next lyric is "You're better off with this potato eater." You could call some of Hood's characters losers if you wanted to, but they don't identify with that description. You got the sense this was just their lives.
No doubt a big part of this was the fact that the Gangstabilly-era Hood had very little to lose. He was past 30 and didn't have a pot to piss in. He'd been playing in bands since he sprouted pubes and probably didn't have any idea what else he could do. He wrote "18 Wheels of Love," which sports more goofy basso Cooley backing vocals ("Peterbilt, Peterbilt!"), as a gift on the occasion of his mother's remarriage (to a truck driver named Lester) because he couldn't afford to purchase a physical object. I'm sure his mom preferred the song to a blender or place setting; it ended with the couplet "They got married in Dollywood/By a Porter Wagoner look-alike." Another song was called "Buttholeville" and was about exactly what you'd think; on "Steve McQueen," Hood went on for four verses, including a half-time spoken-word bit, fleshing out his man-crush on the late action hero, from totaling his go-kart after watching Bullitt to squiring his first date to The Hunter, the swansong McQueen made while rotting away with mesothelioma. Hood was not then, and never has been, an especially subtle lyricist:
I really loved The Getaway back when I was eight;
That pussy Alec Baldwin SUCKED in the remake.
And speakin' of pussy, I guess Steve got it all—
He fucked Faye Dunaway,
And he fucked Ali McGraw.
You could point out that this is kind of coarse—but why would you try to be subtle or sensitive when you're writing an ode to bygone, bruised-knuckle Hollywood machismo? Only an asshole would try to finesse that. Even as it is, the lyric reveals the protagonist in simple, thrilling ways. At the beginning, his eight-year-old self sees McQueen as the "coolest doggone motherscratcher on the silver screen." But by the time the singer's grown and is out driving on the wrong side of the road with his lights off, Steve has ascended to his rightful place as the "coolest goddamn motherfucker" in the business. The profanity works as a payoff, as an incarnation of McQueen's own vibe, as the narrator's coming of age, as his entrapment in perpetual adolescence.
The next year the Truckers returned with Pizza Deliverance. (Deciding whether that's a better or worse title than Gangstabilly is like choosing between a sucking chest wound and a case of the bends.) Maybe it's not as strong a record, but it's even more mordantly funny. I won't spoil the punchline of "Nine Bullets" by linking to the lyrics, but it still cracks me up every time I hear it, eight years down the line. That one and the desolate/ecstatic "The Company I Keep" are still two of my favorite Truckers songs. "Margo and Harold" describes a guy who's desperately trying to duck a dinner invitation from the weird swinger couple down the street. He's terrified of the basement of Harold's pawn shop and really doesn't want to take a ride in the guy's Corvette, either. He doesn't want to see Margo, in her glittery silver bikini, slouching from the tanning bed to the medicine cabinet to gobble Dilaudid. If you see DBT live these days, they won't play these songs. You can see why, but I think they sell themselves short. On one level, "The President's Penis Is Missing" is a goofus Lewinsky-era number they clearly wrote in five minutes in their Econoline van on tour somewhere between Biloxi and Starkville. There are only so many words you can rhyme with "penis," after all. But its pocket history of our nation's long tradition of extramarital presidential fucking also provides the best possible response to people who thought Bill Clinton's ten blowjobs somehow endangered our democracy. The record closes with a song about the time Hood and Cooley saw deceased shock-rock asshole GG Allin in Memphis. They found Allin as ridiculously, embarrassingly funny as any sane person would have, and the ensuing community outrage just as hilarious.
Everything changed in 2001, when the Truckers finally made the record that caused people to sit up and take notice: Southern Rock Opera, a double-disc opus about growing up in the South after the Voting Rights Act. They tried to pass it off as a narrative, even including a half-assed libretto in the liner notes. The first disc was supposedly about a guy who grew up young and wild but renounced Lynyrd Skynyrd and arena rock and finally just got old, but the intermittent storyline was only there to prop up Hood's trilogy about contemporary Southern manhood. Athletes always talk about "leaving it all on the field" when they play big games, but it really did sound like Hood was trying to vomit out everything he'd been thinking about his whole life—the "feud" between Ronnie Van Zant and Neil Young, Hood's own teenage resentments toward Bear Bryant and Alabama football culture, George Wallace's compromised political career and eventual descent into hell.
The second disc was supposed to be an alternate reality, in which the narrator, instead of veering off into adulthood, followed his muse to hotshot rock stardom. But halfway through, the narrator disappeared into the mythology; his band became Lynyrd Skynyrd, he became Ronnie Van Zant, and then everybody died in a plane crash. Of course, even while writing about Skynyrd to the point of becoming Skynyrd, Patterson Hood was talkin' about himself—his commitment to the work, his belief that bad things almost certainly will happen to good people, his fear of dying, his desire to be remembered. These are things that had been on his mind a long time. The second disc of Southern Rock Opera begins with his mission statement:
Dropped acid, Blue Oyster Cult concert, fourteen years old,
And I thought them lasers were a spider chasin' me.
On my way home got pulled over in Rogersville, Alabama
With a half-ounce of weed and a case of Sterling Big Mouth.
My buddy Gene was driving,
He'd just barely turned sixteen.
And I'd like to say I'm sorry,
But we lived to tell about it,
And we lived to do a whole bunch more crazy stupid shit.
And I never saw Lynyrd Skynyrd,
But I sure saw Molly Hatchet
With .38 Special and the Johnny Van Zant Band.
After the last chorus, the band gallops down the home stretch riding the double-guitar melody from John Cougar's "I Need a Lover." You could hardly imagine a less hip reference. Maybe it makes me a redneck that I relate to this sort of thing, I don't know. Immediately afterward, we flash forward. Years later, the kid is successful, boasting about the fact that his band has reinforced metal road cases for their guitars and amps, the band's name stenciled on the outside, so indestructible you could throw them out the window of an airplane and they'd just bounce. Bear in mind that at this point the band was still broke and unsigned—Southern Rock Opera was financed by loans from friends and self-released. I have to guess the record was so all-encompassing because the band saw it as their last chance.
But for all Hood's ambition, for me, what put Southern Rock Opera over the top was Mike Cooley's arrival at the party in full costume. Cooley had contributed just one song to the first record and three to the second, but he sang five out of 20 here, revealing himself as a really accomplished miniaturist, a songwriter given to painstaking detail. You got the sense Hood wrote more songs because he was not just willing to live with, but actually enjoyed, rough edges. Whereas Cooley wrote a fraction as many songs because he wanted to hone every last syllable and guitar harmony until they were diamond-sharp. The last four songs on the record are all awesome, and three of them are Hood's. First, the Wikipedia-ready Skynyrd bio "Life in the Factory," with its unstoppable riff. Second, "Greenville to Baton Rouge," about the doomed band's last flight in a crappy prop plane they bought from Aerosmith. Finally, "Angels and Fuselage," narrating the final, frozen half-seconds, "strapped to this projectile" and drifting in midair, before the plane blew apart in the bayou. It's a terrifying song, and probably Hood's finest vocal performance. But the best song of the four is Cooley's, the utterly shitkicking rocker "Shut Up and Get on the Plane," which works equally well as narrative within the album's concept, character study, and overarching philosophy. When I'm facing long odds and need to fire myself up, "Shut Up" is the song I play.
The record isn't perfect; third guitarist Rob Malone contributes two songs that are, frankly, terrible. But it has so much heart and so much deep understanding of complex phenomena, so much affection for home and so little patience for simple answers. I'll love it until the day I die. Other people agreed; self-released in '01, Southern Rock Opera got a wide re-release the next year on Lost Highway, and popped up on numerous 2002 year-end top tens.
Southern Rock Opera raised the stakes, establishing the Truckers as a name brand with a real, national following. In 2003, dissed by Lost Highway, the band reemerged with a multi-album deal on New West and a brand-new third guitarist, Jason Isbell, who looked like he was about 16 but wrote like he was 45. Decoration Day, their next record, had a bunch of great songs, including Cooley's best crop yet and the undisputed champeen of Hood's whole oeuvre, "My Sweet Annette." That was the true story of Hood's grandfather's or great-uncle's or somebody's 1933 rehearsal dinner, where his bride's maid-of-honor got unexpectedly sick. Hood's grandfather walked her home, intending nothing, but one thing led to another. The next day he and the maid-of-honor were married, leaving his fiancee at the altar. It's built on a gentle, sparkling guitar lick and the hook is gorgeous and mournful. But as great as "My Sweet Annette" was, it confirmed the fundamental change in philosophy begun with Southern Rock Opera's Skynyrd tributes. Hood had stopped telling his own story (or stories clearly driven by his own identifiable perspective) and started narrating the histories of other folks. As it turned out, that wasn't always so good. Whereas Hood was always comfortable having fun at his own expense, he seemed a little too determined to show respect when speaking for others.
That pattern continued on The Dirty South, which came out just 14 months after Decoration Day and felt a little rushed. The band finally had a steady thing going, but I guess the many lean years of indie rocking had left them with a Depression-era mentality of striking as often as they could while the iron was hot. Anyway, The Dirty South was another concept record about the homeland, a catalog of local archetypes, a kind of Profiles in Dixie. Hood delved some more into his family history, declared a state of emergency after a tornado ravaged his hometown, gave the middle finger to Sheriff Buford Pusser, preferring instead to feel the pain of Alabama bootleggers. Cooley stuck up for Sam Phillips and Sun Records in the saccharine MOR rocker "Carl Perkins' Cadillac" and channeled a second-generation Nascar driver on "Daddy's Cup." Isbell got in the act too with the unnecessary "The Day John Henry Died," but a couple of his songs at least sounded like they were grounded in personal experience rather than The Biography Channel. His "Never Gonna Change," a giant fuck-you on behalf of all working-class Southern people to those who condescend to them, is his best Truckers song and the best thing on the album.
Brighter Than Creation's Dark is every bit as sprawling as anything the Truckers have done to date—19 songs, 80 minutes. A handful of its songs are excellent. Cooley indulges his Stones fetish yet again on "3 Dimes Down," which must have evolved (minimally) out of a particularly fun practice session. It's just a riff, but a great one, and Cooley abandons his usual painstaking lyrical approach for some abstract blind-drunk tone poetry about a teenage night of driving around in a sweet car with two girls but then not getting any. Four songs later, on "Daddy Needs a Drink," Hood accurately describes the lives of millions of this country's working adults with his usual remorselessness. Whether it's wry or despairing depends on your perspective, but either way it sounds like a future standard. For Hood's sake, I hope some Nashville asshole covers it and sells a billion records. Cooley's "A Ghost to Most" and Hood's Iraq PTSD nightmare "That Man I Shot" both throw down righteously. And being an album guy, Hood knows to start and end strong: the opener, "Two Daughters and Beautiful Wife," is an achingly sincere mash note to his family, and the closer, the appropriately cinematic John Ford tribute "The Monument Valley," sweeps as broad as its title implies.
But there are some obvious problems too. First, Jason Isbell left the band after divorcing bassist Shonna Tucker, and now Tucker's been promoted to fill the third-vocalist slot. I was never a big Isbell fan; most of his songs were too mannered for me, dragging the crutch of unearned world-weariness. But at least he was never generic. I take no pleasure in dumping on Tucker, who's a really good bass player and an indispensible harmony singer, but if we're gonna call a spade a spade her three songs are pretty faceless. The extended baseball metaphor of "Home Field Advantage" would've been cheesy even in mid-60s Nashville, back when people actually cared about and related to baseball. Second, "3 Dimes Down" and "A Ghost to Most" to one side, Cooley's songs are a surprisingly weak bunch. He contributed seven this time, and maybe he overextended himself. "Self Destructive Zones" starts off as an amusing complaint from a survivor of a late-80s hair-metal band whose audience vanished after Nevermind, but then degenerates into vague pocket philosophy about "hippies" and "kids." The big, dumb melody doesn't help. Cooley's always sung with a bit of a leer, and that can be smarmy sometimes. "Lisa's Birthday" is really smarmy. Even semi-charming tunes like "Perfect Timing" have a little bit too much middle-aged self-satisfaction in them.
What really stands out to me, though, is how somber Patterson Hood has become. For a guy who nearly always sports a huge, shit-eating grin onstage, he is not having any discernible fun here. "That Man I Shot" is a great, harrowing rocker, but it doesn't stand out the way it should, because the record doesn't offer any balance. Equally bleak is "The Home Front," about a young mother hoping her husband comes back from the war, knowing he's likely to bring God knows what manner of nightmares with him if he does. In both songs, Hood is clearly working hard to speak honestly, without polemicizing or condescending, in the voices of Americans more often used as props than seen as people. It's a heavy burden, and the songs are a little airless.
Even in the songs not overtly about the War on Terror, it's clear things ain't going too great in Hood's America. "The Opening Act" tells the story of a heroin-addicted journeyman musician; it's such a downer that even Hood's description of a barroom mechanical-bull victim as an "urban bovine Knievel" doesn't lighten the mood. The dead-on-his-feet narrator of "Goode's Field Road" is about to head off to a meet-up that's going to turn out about as well as the one in "Powderfinger." Then there's "You and Your Crystal Meth," which Hood begins as a rant at an addicted friend but then turns into a Serious Statement; fortunately it's just two minutes long. Even the wistful "Two Daughters" is kind of a bummer, since its narrator has just died and is only realizing in retrospect that heaven was lolling around in bed on Saturday morning with his kids. There's not much on the other side of the ledger.
Some of this is just the ravages of time. Hood is not the same person or songwriter who gave us "Steve McQueen" and "Nine Bullets." These days it's not just him and Cooley sleeping in the van in the rest area. He's past 40 now, with a wife and kids and probably a mortgage; he's done fucking around. And maybe the label pressure, fan attention, and critical respect he's gotten has tightened him up, but no doubt it's also inspired him to stretch out a little. And why not? You can't play the fool forever, right? Why not try out some family historiography and Faulkneresque weirdness?
But it's not just that Hood is in a different place in his personal life. Some of the change also has to be due to the fact that our country has changed profoundly, and not for the better, since the days of Gangstabilly and Pizza Deliverance. Back then, our biggest worry was confirmed adulterer Henry Hyde and his fellow hacks blowing millions of taxpayer dollars trying to remove Bill Clinton from office. Now, we're a nation that unapologetically tortures innocent people. The most influential, outspoken, willfully depraved Justice on our conscienceless, result-oriented Supreme Court, apparently under the impression that the TV show 24 accurately describes reality, recently spoke out in favor of torture. Our craven Attorney General recently testified before Congress that it is not possible for the President to violate the law—because, just like Richard Nixon said, if the President does something, it's not illegal. Our government asserts it has the power to designate anyone, including American citizens, "enemy combatants" and imprison them indefinitely, without the right to trial, or to see the evidence or confront the witnesses against them. Habeas corpus—the most fundamental individual right there is, the right not to be imprisoned by the government in violation of the Constitution, a right that dates from 1215 and the Magna Carta—no longer exists in any meaningful form in this nation. (As my friend Martin said the other day, "Either we have habeas corpus and I'm an American, or we don't have habeas corpus and I just live here.") Our august United States Senate just voted to legalize warrantless wiretapping and retroactively immunize telephone companies who helped the Justice Department eavesdrop on Americans in violation of federal law. Our media are lemmings who fail to grasp the simplest issues and work overtime to justify the excesses of and curry favor with authority. The whole situation is, not to put too fine a point on it, fucking disgusting. So I understand why Patterson Hood is not in a kidding mood.
I want to be clear that I'm not arguing for escapism. I'm not demanding Tom T. Hall-style comedy tracks about trucks and beer. This band has been around long enough and contributed enough to my life that they've more than earned the right to be difficult, to get crabby and stay crabby. All I'm saying is that a little balance goes a long way, and there are lots of different ways to let some light into the room. Gallows humor works, but so does a little righteous anger. So does a straight first-person opinion about this world. After sitting through so many sober and bereaved stories told in other people's vices, I really wanted to hear Hood jump to his feet, grab me by the shirt, and tell me what he thought about this mess we're in. And the more Hood disappeared into his characters, the more I began to resent the studied narrative distance. It couldn't be more clear that the current state of affairs in our country deeply aggrieves him personally. I'm sure he didn't want to be accused of preaching, or alienate a chunk of his audience. But I wish he would've taken the risk.
Anyway, this is a roundabout way of telling the story of how, halfway through Brighter Than Creation's Dark, I couldn't take any more, and I took the record off. ("Lisa's Birthday" was the last straw; after Hood's grim-faced hopelessness, I just couldn't take Cooley's smirking-lothario persona.) I put on Black Mountain instead.
If you know In the Future, or even if you've heard Black Mountain's self-titled 2005 debut, you're probably about to accuse me of being full of shit. I understand why you would. Don't the Truckers actually work hard telling stories about real life? If I'm not looking for dumb escapism, for what conceivable purpose would I trade Brighter Than Creation's Dark for Black Mountain, who are big, unsubtle, and inarguably retro? Well, you have a point. I concede there are a lot of things about In the Future that aren't particularly great. To name just a few:
- The music, to be kind, breaks no new ground. Its most obvious forefather is Black Sabbath's immortal Sabotage, the proggiest hard-rock record (or the heaviest prog record, if you'd rather) ever made. Sabotage is probably one of my 20 favorite records of all time, but even I must acknowledge the album is 34 years old. Naturally it's comfortable to slip on those old clothes, overload the pre-amp, plug in the Mellotron, etc., but I'm not going to argue much if you find this sort of unapologetic backsliding kind of cowardly. The opening "Stormy High" has a glorious, stomping riff in 7/4 time, but instead of banging my head, I was thinking, "Man, this sounds a lot like 'Hole in the Sky'." Maybe this is my problem. But anyone with a passing familiarity with Classic Rock Radio can play the same spot-the-influence game on every song; it'll drive you crazy if you let it. "Tyrants" starts off channeling Iron Maiden and concludes with something out of the acoustic Jethro Tull songbook. "Stay Free" is a spookily gorgeous acoustic number that's even druggier than the rest of the record, which is saying something; it's got lyrics like "Beautiful ponies/So beautiful they'll kill us all." I love the song, but it's basically just "Something in the Air" re-set to waltz time. "Wild Wind," a brief, sweeping piano ballad, has a chorus straight out of John Lennon's "Mind Games."
- The lyrics, by and large, are really bad.
- Stephen McBean, who does most of the singing, is no Ozzy, no Brucie Dickinson. He's not even a Paul Di'Anno. Don't get me wrong, he can carry a tune and doesn't embarrass himself. But the band's grand, ambitious rock symphonies would be immeasurably improved by the howls of a truly confident, distinctive vocalist.
- The most ambitious offering, the 16-minute "Bright Lights," just stops the record cold. The first four or so minutes are comically ponderous. Eventually the inevitable segue into another stone Sabbath ripoff brings the proceedings back to life a little, but even then you still have 12 minutes to go.
But on the other hand In the Future has much to recommend it. For instance:
- It's fucking awesome.
You know what I mean? Ultimately I don't care so much that it's derivative and the lyrics are clumsy if not outright gibberish and the singer isn't compelling. It's not fatal to me that the band is shamelessly cribbing from the bygone age of primal arena rock, with their beards and long flowing robes and glove compartment full of E-Z Widers. They commit to the effort fully and without shame, and the results are totally credible.
If you want to take the easy way out, you could make fun of them for calling their record In the Future. Like I've been saying, ain't nothing forward-looking about this music. But I don't think that's what they mean. Shortly after the 2004 election, I started seeing a lot of a particular bumper sticker in my liberal Oakland neighborhood—it said, "Frodo failed. Bush has the ring." Yeah, me too—the first time I saw it, I projectile-vomited through the windshield of my car. But it's no accident that the first word McBean sings on "Stormy High" is "witches," and the rest of the record is full of references to black magic, demons, Lucifer, dead bodies, shadows, cancer. "Tyrants" is a vision of an evil warlord turned on and killed by the rank and file he's exploited. No points for guessing who McBean is talking about. The other songs have no narrative structure, but the vibe is unmistakeable. What the band means by In the Future is the world we're heading toward if we don't do something about the current state of affairs, a world with no rules, no trust across borders or cultures, no safe havens.
Basically, Black Mountain travels in the opposite direction, but ends up taking you to the same place as Patterson Hood. I'm not saying In the Future is a better record than Brighter Than Creation's Dark. Sometimes I think it is, sometimes not, and in the end I'm reserving judgment. Despite what I said above, since ejecting it unceremoniously from my CD player the night it arrived, I've listened to the new DBT many times, and I can forgive its flaws, just like I forgive Black Mountain's. After all, I just got through ripping the Truckers for being too indirect about their feelings, and formally Black Mountain is way, way more abstruse. Still, their message comes through just as loud, if not more so, through the force of the arrangements and the playing and the consistency of the message and lyrical imagery and, above all, the band's palpable anger. And there's something silky and effortless about their retroisms, while you can't help but see how much the Truckers are sweating. It just goes to show that there are many different roads to the same destination, and you can make the identical critique in many different ways.
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