January 22, 2003

***The Litter Box***

SHIT-FACED at 3 a.m. is no place to be under almost any circumstance, least of all when you're trying to be objective. But here I sit in a low-grade beer orbit, feeling wistful for the so-called good old days and thinking bed might be the better option. I know what you're thinking: there's nothing worse than listening to some old fart's tales of yesteryear. More often than not, other people's good old days suck. However, tonight I'm drunk enough to club a baby seal and looking to share a good campfire story, and this is the story of the Drive-By Truckers.

It was a relatively long time ago in an area code far, far away. Back then, conventional, right-minded critics concluded that the DBTs were destined to be an interesting obscurity, a weirdo mix of alt-country and a severe tongue-in-cheek vamp on growing up as Southern trash. Thus it was guaranteed not to catch on. I mean, who could take albums with titles like Gangstabilly and Pizza Deliverance as serious pieces of music? And I reckon most people really didn't. By the time the latest disc passed across my desk, their press kit was thin and nobody north of the Mason-Dixon line had much to say about the guys except to mention their killer tune titled "The Living Bubba." A gut-wrenching true tale of a friend who died of an AIDS-related illness, "Bubba" managed to strike a chord with everyone who heard it. It was great because it was an unvarnished hunk of reality and not some maudlin prose with a double meaning. It also revealed the Truckers' main man, Patterson Hood, as a thoughtful writer who obscured himself with the more laughable aspects of growing up in redneck country. A subsequent phone conversation with Hood confirmed he was a man coming to grips with being the product of a Southern upbringing and how the rest of the country related to the South. By the time the DBTs rolled through my town, I felt I had a whole new perspective on the band that nobody else was privy to. So of course they hit the stage and made the ultimate statement by chucking sentiment in the back seat and conducting a clinic on how to be the best Southern rock band in the world. I just tossed up my hands and went home dumber than ever.

Five years later they stand on very different turf. Spin, Rolling Stone, and a host of other mainstream publications are onto them now because of their 2001 classic, Southern Rock Opera. Six years in the making, the double album tells the thinly veiled saga of Lynyrd Skynyrd while also taking on everyone from George Wallace to Bear Bryant. It's quite good in some spots and just as terrible in others, but most of all it captures Hood coming to terms with himself and what he liked to refer to as the "Southern thing."

So tonight I blast a CD that is pretty uneven and try to get into the head of a guy who is trying to work out where he's come from and what it all means. It's something we can all identify with, though most of us will never dare to go there, even with the aid of a six-pack.

E-mail John O'Neill at litterbox@sfbg.com.