Drive-By Truckers’ Patterson Hood On Touring Their Magnum Opus, ‘Southern Rock Opera’

Elbowing their way into the Athens, Georgia, music scene with 1998’s Gangstabilly, Drive-By Truckers slowly built a hardcore fanbase through live performances marked by shredded vocal chords, broken guitar strings and the occasional fistfight. With their third album, 1999’s raucous live set Alabama Ass Whuppin’, critics and fans alike thought they had a handle on what Drive-By Truckers were all about: ironic, socially observant rock songs delivered with punk attitude and etched into the canon via epic shows that steadily grew the faithful as the band hammered the country in a van.

All of that would change with Southern Rock Opera, their ambitious magnum opus, released on Sept. 11, 2001. Drawing loosely from the mythic history of pre-plane crash Lynyrd Skynyrd against a backdrop of the era in which Skynyrd emerged, SRO depicts a transitional South still struggling to find its identity amid culture shifts, racial strife and unrestrained fatalism mixed with a heavy party ethos, and, as songwriter Patterson Hood so aptly states on the record, “the duality of the Southern thing.” Suddenly, with the release of SRO on the band’s own Soul Dump Records, these reckless rebels with a Pabst Blue Ribbon were a “SERIOUS BAND.”

The two years of hard touring that followed, including the addition of a young Jason Isbell joining Hood and co-founder Mike Cooley to create a trio of Alabaman triple threats, launched a period of remarkable creativity and solidified the band’s status as one of rock’s most beloved live bands. Along the way, a string of critically acclaimed albums followed amid lineup shifts (including the exit of Isbell to embark on a successful solo career), while the band continually challenged itself creatively and toured incessantly, interrupted only by the pandemic shutdown.

In typical, irreverent style, DBT are set to recognize SRO’s “23rd anniversary” with an expansive summer tour promoted primarily by Live Nation that will reassert SRO’s relevancy amid today’s turbulent times. With more than 40 shows beginning June 7 at the Egyptian Room in Indianapolis and wrapping Nov. 24 at Nashville’s famed Ryman Auditorium, Drive-By Truckers are poised to do what they do best: kick ass and take names. In an hour-long interview via Zoom from his home in Portland, Oregon, DBT’s Hood spoke with Pollstar’s Ray Waddell about SRO’s impact on the band, and why this record remains a relevant, sharply observed commentary.

DBT is managed by Kevin Morris, Christine Stauder and Andrew Borstein at Red Light Management, and booked by Matt Hickey at High Road Touring.

POLLSTAR: I haven’t talked to you since the pandemic. There was no touring to talk about then.
PATTERSON HOOD: No, no. There wasn’t much good to talk about at all during that time, for me. I didn’t do well with the pandemic.

So, I jumped on the DBT bandwagon right about Alabama Ass Whuppin’ time. I thought I knew what y’all were, but when Southern Rock Opera came along, it was like, holy shit, these guys get it, they’re looking at the world through the same lens as I am. Growing up in the ‘70s in Tennessee, Skynyrd was the band. We got let out of school early when their plane crashed (on Oct. 20, 1977). This album really tapped into that, not only the facts of it and what was special about them, but also the mythology of it, and the times. Why do this record at the time? It wasn’t like y’all were The Who when they did Tommy. You were a relatively unknown band and weren’t in a position to take on such an ambitious project.
I think the ridiculousness of that appealed to us. We still have kind of a soft spot for ridiculous. And it served us well, that time at least, maybe sometimes it hasn’t. It was just such a ridiculously crazy idea to do a record about that, especially at that time, because it was about the most untimely thing we could do. It sprang out of boredom. We were touring all the time in a van, and we were being super prolific. We put out Gangstabilly in ‘98, and then Pizza Deliverance in ‘99, and Alabama Ass Whuppin’ in 2000.

We were playing constantly in 2000, doing 250 shows a year, mostly to about 50 people a night, if we were lucky. A lot of dive bars and punk rock bars, a lot of black walls. And a lot of driving all day to get to the next place. You can only listen to that box of cassettes so many times. It would give us something to talk about besides how broke we were, how hungover we were, or whatever. We’d talk about this crazy idea and brainstorm it, trying to see who could get more outlandish. Some of the ideas that didn’t make the record were just really bizarre, but that was part of the fun. It kept us entertained.

We were sleeping on people’s floors most of the time back then. So, we’d make an announcement from the stage, “Hey, anybody want to take the band home? We’ll wash your dishes before we leave tomorrow.” We literally would do that. Because most places it’d be dudes’ apartments usually and they were usually gross. So we would get up, before we’d leave town, we’d wash the dishes. It was like, “Oh, Drive-By Truckers stayed at our place and they washed our dishes. That was cool.”

It gave us a good enough reputation to where we’d get asked to stay. We made friends that we’re still friends with, and a couple in particular we’re close friends with.

At night, everybody wants to talk to the band and by that time we’re just worn out. So we would just start talking about Southern Rock Opera to them and watch their eyes glass over and then they’d be heading to bed. It’s such a ridiculous idea people were just like, “Wow, they’re really crazy.”

I guess some people thought it was crazy, depending on what part of the country they’re in, but to me it’s not all that ridiculous that they’re totally worthy of that kind of examination, first of all. And not just them. You’re not just looking at this band. You’re more looking at that era in the South.
That was part of it, too. It’s like we use [Skynyrd] as a portal to enter this conversation about that time frame. It’s really more about growing up in the post-civil rights South in the era of [late Alabama Gov.] George Wallace, who of course, where we grew up, was still a really big deal, so it was kind of an examination of that. And then just the music of our youth and how the partying and drinkin’ and crazy shenanigans of our youth helped us deal with all the other shit surrounding us, and helped us grow up. So it actually was a more compelling story than it probably sounded like at 4 in the morning at someone’s apartment.

After a bong hit.
(Laughs) Yeah, after a bong hit. But the ridiculousness of it was such a part of it, too. We recorded it in the fall of 2000, so we had literally worked on it for years before we recorded it, just brainstorming and writing songs. While in the meantime, recording, putting out, and touring behind three other records we were all along working on this thing.
Originally, we were going to do it under a fake name. It was going to be Betamax Guillotine. And that was just going to be it. But by the early 2000s, we had enough of a following where it made sense to tie it all together. And so that’s just what we did.

But we knew by the time we made it that, as silly as it sounded talking about it, there was more to it than that [ridiculousness]. We knew that the element of surprise when people actually heard it would probably work in its favor. Because it gets pretty heavy. It starts off with a fatal car accident and ends with a plane crash, and in between there’s all that other stuff. And it’s funny and fun at times, but it’s also pretty dark and heavy at times.

Of course, none of us had any way of knowing it [would drop] on 9/11, and that became its own weird thing, because the mood of the country shifted. All that corresponded with us going out and playing this thing. That was part of how it was received really, because it was so of this other time that worked in its favor in a weird way.
It became about “the good old days.” I remember the original review I wrote in Billboard about Alabama Ass Whuppin’ was like, “if these guys could guys play, they’d be dangerous.”

I remember that! I was with my dad (legendary Muscle Shoals bassist David Hood) when that review came out, and that was the first time my dad ever really thought we might have a chance at something. He was so excited that we got reviewed in Billboard because of course he’s a session guy, so he grew up subscribing to Billboard. And that gave us a legitimacy that we had never quite gotten before in his eyes. And it was cool. I’d forgotten that you were the one who wrote that piece.

Well, first of all, I apologize …
No, no, it’s awesome. It was true. We actually probably could play better than it seemed like, but we didn’t necessarily come off that way, playing it perfect wasn’t the point at that time.

But then imagine my surprise when this record is next and, all of a sudden, it floored me. Quite clearly you CAN play, and the quality of the subject matter, whatever ridiculousness, you took it very seriously from the jump.

We always took our ridiculousness seriously, and, thankfully, probably still do. We’re all older now in a lot of ways, but we still have that. I just played with everybody the other night. We hadn’t seen each other in a couple of months … until Saturday night. We all played in upstate Washington, just a one-off, and we only got to play an hour. It was like a festival set and everybody flew in for it. We had the best time just getting to play. So I’m excited about actually going out and touring all over the country again, because it’s been several years since we’ve done that kind of touring. I’m ready to do it.

As a rock opera, is Southern Rock Opera more Tommy or Quadrophenia?
(Laughs) I don’t know. Tommy’s got more humor about it, but I would probably say I like Quadrophenia better of the two works. But it’s its own thing. [SRO] is both that and making fun of that at the same time; it’s definitely a little tongue-in-cheek. And if you try to follow the narrative of it, it’s a little broken.

Well, that’s closer to Quadrophenia. But to me, it’s more Jesus Christ Superstar.
With Ronnie as Jesus. Ronnie Van Zant Superstar, which that in itself is kind of funny.

I revisited [SRO] start to finish recently. You do a great job of blending the truth of it, like the Hell House, and the relationships in the band, and the people, with the mythology, like Betamax Guillotine and how Ronnie died. And there’s various aspects of it that were clearly not true but was Southern mythology. It reminds me of that line from “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance“ — “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
One of my favorite movies.

But you’re close to the truth, and maybe the REAL truth, in a lot of ways. But you also give plenty of space for the legend and myth of it, too. It’s one of those records I’ll always go back to.
Well, thank you. We’re doing a reissue, which is something that I’ve been wanting to get done for a long time. We put it out ourselves on vinyl in 2001. And then we signed with Lost Highway the following year, and they re-released it the summer of 2002. And at that time, vinyl hadn’t taken off again. It was still a bit of a no man’s land.

But that was one of the things, when we were negotiating it, they promised us they’d do a vinyl release. But when they actually put it out, they kind of did it pretty half-assed. They didn’t really reproduce all the artwork. All the work that we put into it, they kind of did a Reader’s Digest version of the packaging.

And the mastering and stuff like that was never very good. It honestly wasn’t that good in the first place, because we didn’t have any money. And then they pressed the CDs on the vinyl, and the sides were too long on Act I. And nothing really sounded great about it. Greg Calbi started mastering our records around The Dirty South and has done almost all of them since then at Sterling Sound, and his stuff sounds so good. I always wanted him to remaster [SRO] and get it sounding like it’s supposed to. It’s still recorded in a warehouse on very low-end recording equipment, there’s no fixing that, but I wanted to at least get the most out of it.

Getting to do this reissue finally enabled us to do that, and David Barbe ended up remixing it, and the new mixes are nothing radically changed, it’s very true to the original. It just sounds a little better. The bass sits a little better and the vocals sit better. Nothing was fixed or fixed up, but everything that’s there just sounds better. Then Calbi remastered it and that sounds great. I just got my test pressings last week, it sounds like a million bucks, man. It sounds super cool. And yet it also sounds a little bit punk rock and janky too, which is part of it. We didn’t clean it up too much. We just made what was there sound better.
And all the packaging for the reissue is beautiful. We’ve really gotten to run with Wes [Freed’s] artwork and all the other artwork on the record, too, and have it all look as good as we can. And a really good-looking book, with new liner notes, so it’s going to be a nice package.

The disc of bonus stuff turned out cool because there wasn’t a lot of extra stuff recorded. But there’s a couple of things that are. There’s one thing that we didn’t even remember doing that we found on the tapes when Barbe was remixing it. He found a song that wasn’t even labeled. It didn’t even have a title, it had nothing. It was just a blank file for about four and a half minutes and it’s kind of killer. And I never even wrote the words down. It was something we did late, late one night. We were drunk and no one has really any memory of doing it. So we just call it “The Mystery Song.” But it’s cool enough that we’re probably going to work it up and actually play it a few times.

And then there’s a live side on the bonus disc of four songs from a show we did at the EARL in Atlanta, about three weeks after Isbell joined the band. Rob Malone is the third guitar player on the record, but he quit the band a month after the record came out and that’s when Isbell joined and did two years of touring behind it. I’m really happy that we got to put out something that has a little taste of what that sounded like at that time.

Ronnie supposedly never wrote anything down either. So maybe it’s fitting that you never wrote any lyrics to that mystery song down.
Maybe it is. Craig Finn supposedly doesn’t write his down. And I can’t even fathom that because his stuff’s really wordy and brilliant. I can’t remember words, I could never work that way, so I’m kind of in awe of that.

It sounds like you get a kick out of listening to shows where you were drunk. I can’t stand to hear myself drunk. If you sound good, I guess you can be happy about it.
Yeah, it’s weird, because we’re not a hard drinking band at all anymore. Our hardest drinkers are sober now. I’ll still drink, but I don’t drink like I used to. I can’t. I’m too old for that shit. And I don’t even want to. I like having a couple of drinks before the show, but I don’t like to get drunk and play anymore.

But in those days, I mean, shit, we stayed drunk. That was just our reality. We were drunk in the studio back in those days. And hell, making Southern Rock Opera, we were in that warehouse and there was a uniform shop in Downtown Birmingham downstairs. So we couldn’t go in until they closed. We’d go in at 6:00 at night, and we had access to it from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. We’d all get an early dinner and go in there and just play and drink. And we’d record at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning; by then we were wasted. But that was just our reality then.

And it’s not a healthy lifestyle, but we weren’t really planning to be around a long time, we were already older than people thought we were. We were an older band when we started the Truckers because Cooley and I had already been playing together 11 years before we even started the Drive-By Truckers. So by that time, we’d already been trying to do it for a long time. We’d already lived longer than we really thought we ever would because I don’t think I ever planned on making it to 30, and I was well into my thirties when we did Southern Rock Opera.

But you played so much by then that you could play by muscle memory at some point.
Oh, yeah. For sure. And I don’t think Cooley ever played a show sober until years and years later. He doesn’t drink at all now. Those were different days, different times.

No question that this album changed the game for you, and it started an era of pretty remarkable growth, great songs, and creativity for you guys that jump-started with that live album, Alabama Ass Whuppin’.
Yeah. And I like that record a lot. I’ve got a real fondness for Alabama Ass Whuppin’. It’s a fun record. That’s something I miss about a lot of music. I love all kinds of stuff and I’ve got extremely eclectic taste. But I do like it when records are fun. I think a lot of rock and roll records forget to be fun. They’re either trying to impress you with something or whatever.
I think literally one of the best bands in the world is Southern Culture on the Skids. They’re amazing, their musicianship and everything about them, they’re such an incredible band.
People don’t take them seriously, which is partly how they want it because they think it should be fun. But people don’t notice that actually those cats can play. They throw down, every one of them. And what they’re doing is actually preserving a dying art as far as their approach to playing, and the kind of music, and their influences and all that is stuff that no one’s really doing anymore.

Your shows were always fun and always a party, and the fans eat it up and are hardcore. But there was this moment in time right around Decoration Day, Dirty South and those records, I think that, had you fully leaned into that “We’re the big Southern rock band now,” and gone full redneck and embraced it, you could have stepped into that and assumed that mantle. And it seems to me as an observer that you passed on doing that.
We didn’t really ever want to. I don’t think we ever really viewed ourselves as that. And this sounds pretentious to say it like this maybe, but it’s almost like method acting. I don’t think any of us really saw us as that kind of band, as much as we wanted to make a record about that, and we wanted it to be legit sounding. We didn’t want to sound like some other type of band trying to do this thing. We wanted to sound at least slightly legit about it.

And of course we had Rob Malone, who’s the guitar player on the record. He’s a very legit guitar player. And then Jason Isbell who joined and took his place, he was a kid when he joined our band, but he was already just an over-the-top, undeniable talent out there. And Cooley’s a great guitar player. I think Cooley’s an underrated guitar player because I think he’s got such a personality that people probably think of him more as the personality and sometimes don’t look close enough to realize what a smoking player he is.

I try to pull my weight in whatever ways I can. I don’t think I’m that caliber of a player, but I’m solid. I’m a super-solid rhythm player that’s got a few things I can do lead-wise, but I’m not a hot picker. I never cared to be a hot picker. But I love playing and playing pretty solid. And we have good players in the band.

Brad is our secret weapon on the drums. He’s a killer backside drummer, man. And that’s another dying art, people who play drums that way.

You can set your watch by that guy.
Yeah. He is rock solid with the two always being on that backside of the beat. That, and us tuning down, gives it all that sludgy-ness, that kind of heaviness, that I think works in our favor. But after that record, Decoration Day, we were moving in a pretty different direction. The only other record we did that was stylistically a little bit like Southern Rock Opera would be The Dirty South. And even that was kind of moving into some other directions. Because I think A Blessing and a Curse is more of a power pop record. And Brighter Than Creation’s Dark more of a kind of almost an Americana type record. And we’ve kind of been all over the map, because we’re all into different things.drums that way.

Yeah, but the lyrics, it’s a little more cerebral than what a lot of… I like all music fans and respect anybody who goes out to a show, but they don’t want to think too hard a lot of times. And that’s fine. There’s a place for it. Rock and roll is supposed to be dumb a lot of the time.
Sure. And I love big, dumb rock. I do. But I don’t think that’s quite what we do or even what we do well. I think our attempts at doing that probably aren’t as good as other things we do.

This was also a milestone era for DBT in that you signed with High Road Touring and you had those guys booking your shows up until this most current tour. Surely that made a difference for you.
Oh my God, yeah. And of course, I grew up loving a lot of the original High Road bands before it was called High Road, back when Frank Riley was booking for Monterey Peninsula. I was enough of a geek about the bands I loved where I knew who was booking those Replacements shows or whatever, different bands, so he was on my radar. And I started inviting him to shows. The first time we ever played in San Francisco, I invited Frank Riley to the show and he didn’t come. And I invited him to our second San Francisco show and he didn’t come. And I invited him every time we came to San Francisco. I’d reach out and invite him to the show and he wouldn’t come.

He finally came to see us in Austin during SXSW when Southern Rock Opera was out and had just gotten the big four stars in Rolling Stone and all that stuff. And there was this buzz about us. We went to South By and there was actually a super buzz about us and he came to that show and he signed us that night. And he hired [agent] Matt Hickey almost the exact same time he signed us, so he paired us together and we’ve been working together for over 22 years now. I love Matt. Along the way he became a dear friend as well as our booking agent, and somebody that I have just worlds of respect for.

It takes the relationship between the agent and the band, and knowing what they like, and making the tour work the way they want it to work, that’s underestimated a lot of times.
Yeah, it’s hard.

Talk about touring, because the last time we did an interview was during the shutdown, because I thought it was important to talk to a real road dog who was not on the road, and that’d be you. Now, I imagine it’s been full throttle, since you could go out. How’s it been going since you started back?
I may be biased, but to me the band’s as good or better than it’s ever been. The band, we play super good. We all get along great. On the business end, it’s been hard. Lockdown really hurt us and we’ve had a lot of rebuilding we’ve had to do from that. We essentially lost an album, we had just put out The Unraveling and that tour, I think we played three weeks of what was going to be a year and a half of touring before everything shut down.
Things were just off enough when it all started back to where it kind of hit you in the profit margin. That little narrow thing that you actually all live off of was wiped away. We still had good enough crowds to where it looked good out there and it was fun, but it was just off enough to where the money’s been super hard since then. It’s definitely gotten better as we’ve gone along and things have opened up more, but it’s been hard rebuilding from all that. And we’re all older people too. It is like, shit, man, I didn’t really have two years of my life to spare to just sit in my attic with an acoustic guitar playing in front of a computer screen pretending like it’s a rock show. But that was it for a while. And so I think it mentally has been a little bit challenging. I know for me, I think for all of us in our band, it’s been just kind of overcoming that.

I’m real proud of the last record we did. And the touring behind it was kind of weird because when everything opened back up, we had to play all those make-up dates. And right at that time is when we recorded the last record, Welcome 2 Club XIII, by the time it came out, we had basically just burned through all those markets and then we didn’t really have anywhere to go play this new record.

We were in Europe when it came out, and that Europe tour went great. But then we came back to the States and that summer were playing all the places you would play after you’d already played all the dates you play on a record tour, except we had a new record and weren’t playing those places. So it was like another year before we really got to play New York or wherever, the places that you think of when you first put out a record.

So everything’s been a little weird from the business end, kind of getting back in the black from that. This tour is looking good, and it’s going to be fun. We’re all in a good place on a personal level with each other and we still have fun. I love my job. I like going out and playing. I’m a lifer. I’ll be out doing this. And there’s also no denying, we’re not a new band. Everybody loves something shiny and new and we’re not that. We’re an old band that hadn’t quite got the elder statesman level yet. We’re kind of in that weird, in-between place. It’s like we’re old enough to where you’ve seen us before, but not quite old enough to where, “We better go see them this time before they all die.”

To tour on SRO, it’s not any kind of milestone anniversary of the release. That’s kind of what I love about it, to tip your hat to Southern Rock Opera.
It’s our 23rd, man. It’s our 23rd anniversary.

It seems to me like a good time to do it, because it’s a great record and always bears listening to. But I mean, without a new record, let’s examine the shit out of it. Why not?
Well, unfortunately, it’s kind of timely too, and actually in some bad ways because when we wrote that record all those years ago, we thought that George Wallace is this thing from the past that we were still having to reckon with. We were still having to reckon with what growing up amongst all that meant and overcoming that. And we were kind of looking at it like we’re kind of in the dawning of a new South, and things getting better and moving away from all that. But that’s not really what’s happening right now. It’s not a North-South thing anymore. It’s more of an urban-rural thing that’s going on.

Did you ever talk to the guys in Skynyrd about [SRO]?
They didn’t like that record too much. They weren’t all that hot on it. I talked to Gary [Rossington] backstage, I think it was in Florida. He goes, “I’m not sure I get it, but they told me I need to be nice about it.”

That’s Gary all the way, man.
It was funny. The one who liked it in that camp was Artimus [Pyle]. And, of course, part of that I think was he was fighting with Gary.

I’m looking at your upcoming tour route now — June, July, August, into the fall all solid, a lot of dates. What’s that feeling like on the precipice of being gone for a long time?
I love it. I mean, it makes me feel alive, because that’s what I do, so I want to be able to continue to do the shit out of it as long as I’ve got that in me to do it. And we’re all healthy, and feeling good, and ready to rock.