My Big, Gigantic Drum Kit

oneweekoneband:

Greetings everyone, I hope you’re 10% as excited to spend the week with the Drive By Truckers as I am.  The band has a long, fascinating history, and I should say that I’m not even going to attempt to do it justice here.  I do highly recommend seeking out The Secret To A Happy Ending, Barr Weissman’s fantastic documentary about the band, or at least skimming their Wikipedia Page.  Really briefly, the Drive By Truckers are a band mostly from Alabama that has been around since the late 1990’s, though Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley, the band’s core duo (think Jagger/Richards) have been playing together since the mid 1980’s.  

While I certainly hope to be able to entertain and engage DBT diehards while at the same time piquing the interest of the reader who has never heard a single note of the band’s music, I must confess that it’s the casual, informed, but undevoted fan that I’m most interested in conversing with, if not converting, this week.  

As much as I love the Drive By Truckers, and as much as their music has been more important to me over the last four years than any other band’s, I also understand that this band is not for everyone.  I don’t mean that in a condescending “not everyone can appreciate the learned genius of the Drive By Truckers” kind of way, I actually think quite the opposite; rather, The Drive By Truckers are a very specific band, and their approach and aim may very well not seem to appeal to everyone.  One of the biggest things I’d love to try to show this week is that the band’s specificity is actually what makes them so universally appealing, and that (and this is one of the things no one ever really talks about), the Drive By Truckers make, among other things, brilliant pop music.

That being said, when I think about how perfectly the Drive By Truckers match up with my own passions, interests, and priorities as a music fan and consumer, and I then think about how long it took me to become a serious fan, and how gradual that process was, it’s seems to me a daunting task to try to persuade, in just one week, anyone with just the slightest bit of interest in the group that they indeed are one of America’s very greatest rock and roll bands.  

And so, while it excites me to know I may be somehow responsible for first exposing someone to the Drive By Truckers, what would truly thrill me would be take someone who has heard a few of the band’s songs or records and doesn’t really know what to make of them, or (more likely) finds all the preaching and minor chords and sad-sack Southern stories to be just a little bit tedious, and, after spending a week explaining, complicating, and unraveling some of the myths and central aspects of the band, turn that casual appreciator into somewhat of a believer.

To any of you hardcore fans: the real reason I can’t primarily cater to you this week is because you probably know more than me. Lets briefly admit to my disappointing DBT credentials: The first Drive By Truckers record I ever heard (and fell in love with) was Brighter Than Creation’s Dark, which was released in 2008, six records and nearly a decade into the band’s already well-established career.  I never saw the band with Jason Isbell, though, in a weird twist, I’ve actually seen Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit more times than the Drive By Truckers.  Mike Cooley and Patterson Hood have been playing together longer than I’ve been alive, and I’ve never been to the 40 Watt.

To everyone else, I was having a hard time figuring out how to structure my week of posts about the Truckers, to do so chronologically didn’t seem right, until I came across this quote from Patterson Hood, it was like he was talking right to me: “When in doubt, strip it down to the very very foundation, which is the songs.” The Drive By Truckers draw from a number of genres and subgenres, but one of the great many things DBT takes from country music is the simple reliance on the song, the deeply held belief that you can take away all the amps and distortion and ear-ringing riffs, and what’s important at the end of the day is whether or not there’s still a song you can sing around a campfire: the melody and the words.  

And so, this week I’ll be focusing on just that—the songs— and I’ll be jumping all around, across albums, across the different eras of the band, and across the band’s many songwriters, hopefully not to a jarring effect.  Over the next week, I hope everyone following along gets surprised, scared, annoyed, and thrilled by some aspect of this enormous band.

And now, on to the actual music…

As a pretty big DBT fan (since Decoration Day, and I did see them with Isbell a few times), I’m okay with not being catered to.  Just glad to see them on OW/OB and happy to see another contributor wading into non-chronological waters.