by Sheldon Birnie
The Drive-By Truckers are a band from the Muscle Shoals, Alabama / Athens, Georgia areas. They play southern inspired rock and roll, with literate as hell lyrics and a touch of country and a dash of R&B. They’ve put about a dozen records, give or take a couple, since 1998, most of which I own on LP, CD, or both, and the rest of which I have on MP3. They’ve played thousands upon thousands of shows up and down and all over the Hillbilly Highway, and are hitting Minneapolis right aways.
I’m a fan of the Drive-By Truckers. Big time. This is something that most folks who know me are painfully aware of, and something that other DBT fans who may not know me have been able to pick up on within the first five minutes of meeting me. I first came across them in a one-page write up in the Vancouver Province back in late 2002. They sounded interesting, so I went home and looked them up on Limewire. I downloaded a couple tracks, but the first that I listened to was a little number by the name of “The Night G.G. Allin Came to Town.” By the end of the track, I was fucking hooked.
I was living in Kelowna at the time, playing punk rock and getting wasted, busking on the streets for cash. I looked up the Truckers at the local indie record shop (long since out of business) and the A&B Sound down the street from our punk house. Nothing. So I downloaded everything I could, which included tracks off their first three records, Gangstabilly, Pizza Deliverance, and the double-disc concept record Southern Rock Opera. Everything was solid gold.
Finally, I managed to track down gainful employment at a pizza joint, where I met a pal who was into southern and classic rock. I told him about the Truckers. A few months later, he told me DBT was playing a gig in Vancouver. I bought tickets online immediately, and when the day came, drove my ratty ass van to Van for the show at Richard’s on Richards.
The show was awesome, over three solid hours of rock, whisky slamming and cigarette smoking. Jason Isbell was in the band at the time, though he’s since gone on to a successful solo career, and the place held maybe 200 people. I sat near the back with my ex, who was under 19 at the time but got in with a friend’s fake ID. It was a life-changing gig, for sure, as it inspired me to start writing gritty country songs to represent my own backwoods reality and upbringing.
Since then, the line-up of the group has changed a little, and the band has pumped out a bunch of great albums and collaborations, including playing back-up sessions for albums and gigs by Betty LaVette and Booker T. This past year, they released their ninth studio album Go-Go Boots, and they’re still touring the shit out of it.
In the meantime, the Truckers tunes have been with me in high times and low. I’ve hauled their CDs and LPs with me on almost a dozen moves, and kept hold of them the two times I was “between homes” and living out of my van. I’ve seen them once since that first show in Vancouver, the one time they ever played Winnipeg, a couple years back on Canada Day at the Garrick. Anybody into roots rock tunes who is anybody in Winnipeg was there, and again they played for over three hours.
I bought a t-shirt at that gig, with a Wes Freed illustration and the title to one of their tunes, “Daddy Needs a Drink.” I lost that t-shirt a couple years back when my buddy Woodtick put his truck deep in a ditch out south of the perimeter. Not sure how it got lost, but I’m not sure of a lot of things about that night and long, drawn out morning. But it seemed a fitting end to the shirt. As Patterson Hood said, once, “It gets so hard to keep between the ditches when the roads wind the way they do.” Truer words have hardly ever been spoken.
Check in next week to the Hillbilly Highway see what’s shaking…