Drive-By Truckers

Sometimes it can take what seems like infinity working at something before you ever see a return. Patterson Hood and longtime collaborator Mike Cooley make a good case in point. Meeting in college, the two formed a band called Adam's House Cat, playing for six years before breaking up. The duo had nothing to show for their time in AHC and knew no other way of life. So they went back to doing what they knew best, starting the Drive-By Truckers. With Cooley, Hood and Jason Isbell taking guitar and vocal duties, Earl Hicks on bass and Brad Morgan on drums, the Truckers possess a style often compared to that of Southern rockers Lynard Sknyrd, who they gave tribute to in their 2001 indie-released opus Southern Rock Opera. The record brought quite a bit of attention to the Truckers, leading to a record deal and a re-issuing of Rock Opera with major label Lost Highway Records. However, things turned sour between the band and Lost Highway upon completion of their latest album, Decoration Day, and the two decided to part ways. Fortunately for the Truckers they were able to buy the masters of Decoration Day at production cost, and signed shortly after to indie label New West Records. Since its release, Decoration Day has received nothing but radiant reviews by virtually every major music and entertainment publication out there - a musical fairy tale very similar to the story of Wilco and what they experienced with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. One other point of interest is that when Hood and Cooley were in Adam's House Cat they once opened for alt-country legends Uncle Tupelo, which featured Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy. What a coincidence, eh? Anyway, Recoil chewed the cud with Hood at his home in Athens, Ga., spending a good portion of the time talking about hip-hop. I kid you not.

Recoil: You guys keep a very grueling tour schedule. Yet one thing that I consistently hear about is your awesome, energizing live performances. How are you guys able to keep up the high-quality level of your shows with being on the road so much?
Patterson Hood: I don't know. If we're going to go to the trouble to be out there, then there's no need to suck at it. As far as keeping up the quality of the shows, that's the fun part. Being on the road gets really old, but the two or three hours that we're playing, that's the easy part. The hard part is the rest of it.

R: You guys have already been in the studio recording your next album. What kind of sound can we expect to hear on the next record and when do you expect for it to be released?
PH: Probably next summer. It's a big main record. It probably has a few more story-telling type songs on it than Decoration Day. [It's] more like Southern Rock Opera in that respect I guess. We've got a lot already recorded. We've got a lot of songs and a lot of really good verses of songs, but it's still kind of finding its shape.

R: Do you think that the band is different now mentally than you were when you made Southern Rock Opera?
PH: Absolutely. Radically. Jason joining the band made a big change not to mention everything we went through during the period of time that we made that record. [We] made a lot of changes in each of our individual personalities and as a whole having gone through all of that. Fourteen months of touring for the Southern Rock Opera and making Decoration Day has kind of morphed us into… I don't really ever want to repeat ourselves. No two of our records sound much alike. In a lot of cases, from one record to another almost sounds like a different band. I guess we are in some ways because we've had a lot of personnel changes after the first two records. I always want to be exploring something new every record, or else why bother?

R: You and Mike Cooley have been playing music together for over fifteen years. What have been some of the things that have enabled you guys to keep that long-going musical relationship?
PH: I don't know. It's been over eighteen years now, and I really don't know except that maybe both of us at some point down the line had enough sense to realize that there's something really good about the two of us playing together. We've had chemistry [since] before we could play. In the beginning, when we started playing together, neither one of us were worth a shit at anything. But even when we were both really bad, there was some kind of chemistry that we were somehow better bad together than apart. And we go off and do our separate things. We definitely live very separate lives, we live nearly five hours apart, but it's still a good mix when we're together. I guess we're such opposites that it just kind of works. Somewhere through all of those years we ended up becoming friends, too, and that's real cool. Because we didn't necessarily always get along. We still can fight like brothers, but we're both probably better friends than either of us tend to admit most of the time.

R: After your experience with Lost Highway, would the band ever consider signing with a major label again? Do you regret the whole experience with Lost Highway?
PH: I don't regret doing it. I think it all worked out for the better, but I don't have any desire to ever go through it again. I've been there and done it. It was a cool experience. I mean what's the odds of someone my age signing with a major label for the first time? It's pretty astronomical. People who get those deals tend to be Jason's age, not my age. I was in some ways disappointed with how many of the clichés turned out to be kind of true. But I certainly don't regret it. I made some new friends, a couple of whom I hopefully still will have some contact with. In the end, they let us go without a fight. It all kind of worked out. Whether we weren't what they thought we would be or whatever, instead of beating the dead horse, putting out that record, then dropping us, and having that record get lost forever, we got to buy it back for a fair price, for what they had in it rather than some escalated price, and move on, take it somewhere where they did want it. New West has been incredible. They've been great to work with. They're really nice people, down to earth. They spent way more money promoting than was ever spent by the major. They spent probably three times the money on us on the new record than Lost Highway ever spent on Rock Opera. We came in around fifty percent under budget making Decoration Day, so that really helped us in being able to afford to buy it back.

R: How much do you think that the record industry's focus on image rather than music has affected the band's ability to get your music out to the public?
PH: It does make it harder I guess because we don't really have a well-defined image. We're not really an image band. The band's got probably too much personality for its own good. Not to mention that the industry revolves around basically promoting one thing; something that's very recognizable and basic and easy to remember. The fact that we've got three song-writers who all have pretty different and pretty extreme personalities, it's kind of a big mess from an image point of view for someone who is trying to look for a way to streamline it because none of the short sound bytes really work. So for lack of a better term they latch onto 'new southern rock,' which is pretty laughable to me, because I don't think of us as really any kind of that stuff. I think we're just a rock-n-roll band. In a lot of ways, we kind do some things kind of in an old fashioned way. Our approach to a lot of things is probably more like some of the bands that we grew up loving. But we're not retro. We're not the least bit retro. We're not interested in being retro. I'd rather be timeless than bring up some specific time. I know that saying timeless sounds kind of conceited, but I don't mean it as a value judgment like that. I'd really like the music not to signify any specific point in time. Southern Rock Opera was set in the seventies, so I guess that was sort of slightly retro. But we really didn't try to make it sound like a seventies record.

R: You were raised in a musical family. Your dad was a session bassist. Were there ever any ever second thoughts about pursuing a life as a musician? Was there any thought of doing something else?
PH: Yeah, but I couldn't find any other alternatives. I've told people before and actually my dad used to tell people that if you have a second choice, do it. But I never had a second choice. It's kind of like if you can live without it, do, because you are better off. This really isn't any way to make a living. And I've been really, really lucky. In a lot of ways I feel like I am one of the luckiest people in the world. I'm able to survive doing what I love doing all the way to this late stage of the game. But at the same time, it's a dirty heart-breaking business. If you have a second choice go for that, but I just never did. There was never anything else for me to do. When Adam's House Cat broke up in 1991, which was Cooley and my band for six years, I put my entire life, heart, and soul into that thing. I mean everything. I ended up getting divorced over it, and then the band broke up and I was left with nothing. I had nothing to show for six years of my life except for a finished record that still hasn't come out. And I went through a pretty deep, dark, two-year depression after that, [which] probably resulted in some of the earlier songs that became Drive-By Trucker songs, for that matter. But during those two years I spent a lot of my time trying to find something else that I could do and there just wasn't. I'm just not good at anything else. So it was kind of like, 'Fuck it.' I'm used to being broke, so I might as well do what I do. If I have any chance of ever being anything in this life, it's going to be doing what I do best. Otherwise I'll be a line cook at fifty or sixty or delivering pizzas into my retirement years, which I may yet end up having to do [laughs]. Every year that I'm not delivering pizzas is probably a good year [laughs more].

R: So your dad was against you following in his footsteps? He didn't advise you to follow his career path?
PH: No, not at all. He advised me against it at every turn. He's real proud of what we've done and he's real proud of the way things are overall going for us now. I think he really likes the records now. He really thinks the new one is a pretty big accomplishment and a pretty big leap artistically over what we've done [in the past]. He and I are real close, but in a lot of ways what I do is so different that it's almost a different following in his footsteps. They are almost two different worlds. The life of a session player has its own ups and downs but they're very different ones. Really the only thing that we do have in common about our jobs is that they both sort of involve music. And they both involve way too much bullshit that doesn't involve music. It may be different bullshits, but we got that in common [laughs].

R: You've said that the whole dirty South movement in hip-hop is the most vital thing going on in southern music right now.
PH: You listen to the new OutKast record and that will back me up right there. I think everybody in the band agrees with that. I don't tend to say I speak for the band, even though I'm kind of the band spokesman so much of time. On things like personal taste we all have such very very different personalities, but I think that's one of the things we all can pretty much agree on.

R: So you think hip-hop is the most vital thing to come out of the South?
PH: In music, period. There's really no one writing as good of lyrics as the better hip-hop artists are. I can't even call the new OutKast album hip-hop because Andre Three-Thousand's disc sounds like Prince in his heyday. It doesn't sound like he's trying to sound like Prince, but it hits me the same way that the Prince records did back when he was churning out an incredible record every nine to ten months back in the early-mid eighties when he was on such a roll. The Andre disc on this record really hits me the same way.

R: Do you think it's possible that the band's music has been influenced by hip-hop at all as of late?
PH: Oh yeah. For that matter, I guess you could say 'Three Great Alabama Icons' was my attempt at a rap song [laughs]. Obviously I'm not going to rap like somebody that knows how to do that. That would be ridiculous and just stupid. I can't talk that fast. But that was certainly an influence. It proved that if you have something to say and if you put it, in the case of a hip-hop song, over a beat or, in the case of our song, over a musical interlude, that can be a vital way of expressing something musically.

R: DBT has been credited as being one of the bands responsible for bringing back the style of rock music that was very popular in the sixties and seventies. With all the changes that have gone on in the music industry, do you ever see rock-n-roll music returning to the height of popularity it experienced in its glory days?
PH: I don't know about rock-n-roll in the traditional sense. Jason had a really good point on that that he's been bringing out in interviews. Hip-hop is doing in a lot of ways what rock-n-roll did then, and in a lot of ways it's basically the same thing. It's all rock-n-roll, it's just a different way of expressing it. I think there's still very vital and important music being made, and some of it may even be in the more traditional rock-n-roll vein, as in bands like Radiohead or whatever. I think things have gotten a lot better in the last year or so. It almost always seems like the worse things get politically and/or socially in a country or the world it always seems to have a good effect on music, which I guess is the silver lining of the cloud. That seems to be applying right now. And I also think that with the music industry being in such well-publicized trouble, the ones who will probably survive it are the ones who are looking for new progressive things to do that are a little different. They're realizing that the status quo just isn't working any more. And the ones who really realize that and run with that instead of trying to sue music fans over downloading are the ones who will survive and flourish in the coming years. And the rest of them, fuck them. I'll dance on their grave. I'll look forward to seeing them fail so that maybe someone else can do a better job.

November 2003