Drive By Truckers: Saturday

By Jeremy Erwin

Being sweat-soaked, filthy and tired at the close of a summer’s day is just what sets the tone for taking in the Drive By Truckers. So when the Muscle Shoals six piece climbed the stage just as the sun fell behind the clouds, my dirty hands held onto that front row fence like it was my own slice of heaven.

Grey haired, long haired, in clean shirts or no shirts, everyone on this side of the evening’s most difficult decision (on the stage opposite was Roky Erickson in his first performance in over two decades) knew that they’d be on the receiving end of the best show they’d see all weekend. The band played a warm up at Austin’s La Zona Rosa the previous night that wound down about 2AM. “I saw em’ play last night for more than three hours. This is gonna suck.” slurred someone in the dusty mess who squeezed in next to me. For a band who really gets moving about two hours in and the bottle’s half gone, tonight’s hour set certainly had its downside.

But here they were, leaner and cleaner than I last saw them over two years ago, and this time with a pedal steel player tucked into the shadows. But with the roar of thousands, waves, lights, a boot hell stomp, and they were into it. The band fired track after track from Southern Rock Opera into these sunburned faces, and the thick Texas sky turned every chorus into an anthem: "Ronnie and Neil Ronnie and Neil/Rock stars today ain't half as real/Speaking there minds on how they feel/Let them guitars blast for Ronnie and Neil."

You could almost hear the sobs as Death Cab for Cutie loaded their gear across the field.
And while Patterson Hood may be the band’s centerpiece simply because he stands in the center of the stage, bookends Jason Isbell and Mike Cooley soaked in the loudest praise each time they took a lead vocal, Isbell with breathy poise and Cooley’s southern Keith Richard’s swagger. Cigarettes dangled and poses were struck but, as with everything the Drive By Truckers throw out, irony’s fingerprints were nowhere. Ten songs, twelve songs, an hour long or 40 minutes, I didn’t keep track. And not because the band tossed me the jug of Jack Daniels they passed around between songs and slid quietly behind the bass amp when they were done.

Watching this band is like watching all the great things that rock bands forgot how to do, and it flows out of them like a fountain. Less like a traveling instruction manual, the show plays out like a western made up of film from the cutting room trashbin. "Carl Perkins’ Cadillac." "Sinkhole." "Puttin’ People on the Moon." Each one is a mini opera about how life was better before we were around and what makes it hell to live in the present. All of it was tossed into the southern air on a summer night. I’m glad I caught it.