Drive-By Truckers Shonna Tucker, Mike Cooley, Brad Morgan, Patterson Hood, John Neff.
Singer/songwriter/guitarists Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley had already been struggling to make music together for more than a decade when they formed the Drive-By Truckers in 1996. As the 1999 live album Alabama Ass Whuppin’ documents, this early incarnation of their band — which also featured drummer Brad Morgan, the only other founding member who has remained amid several lineup changes — was an explosive unit that specialized in bitterly funny slice-of-life alt-country-rock, mostly about working-class or sub-working-class characters (many of them non-fictional), all from the South.
The 2001 double-album Southern Rock Opera was the watershed release that earned the band widespread critical praise and a national fan base. A loose biography of Lynyrd Skynrd that uses that iconic Southern rock band as a kind of metaphor for the region and its myriad racial, political, and economic struggles, the album brought all the Truckers’ strengths together, marrying Springsteen-like characterization and narrative detail to crunchy guitar riffs as hard as anything in the AC/DC catalogue.
The seven years since have been a blur of activity for the band: four more remarkably strong albums, the entrance and departure of third singer/songwriter Jason Isbell, and a punishing touring schedule. The group had planned to spend 2007 taking it easy. Instead, they made a Grammy-nominated record with soul singer Bettye LaVette, then played an acoustic tour, revisiting neglected old songs and road-testing new ones. Most of those new songs turned up on Brighter Than Creation’s Dark, the 19-song, 75-minute album that came out in January. Less geographically specific than their earlier records, but no less ambitious, the album has been widely hailed as their best since Southern Rock Opera — the kind of accolade that will probably haunt them for the rest of their career. They celebrated, naturally, by hitting the road. They play the 9:30 Club tonight and Saturday night.
Patterson Hood, like most of the band, grew up in Northern Alabama. His father, David Hood, is a session player whose bass and trombone can be heard on many mid-to-late-1960s hits by the likes of Aretha Franklin, Etta James, and Percy Sledge. Patterson writes and sings the majority of Drive By Truckers songs, having penned a dozen of the new album’s nineteen. DCist caught up with him last night in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on his break between soundcheck and the show. (Proof, as if any more were required, that he’s an incurable workaholic.)
