Drive-By Truckers came into their own in audacious fashion with 2001’s Southern Rock Opera. Originally self-released, their third LP was two-disc, semi-fictional story of an Alabama band coming of age and wrestling with “the duality of the Southern thing” under the welcomed influence of Lynyrd Skynyrd and the unwelcomed governance of George Wallace.
Last year, the album got the deluxe reissue treatment via New West (remastered, resequenced, bonus disc appended), and that prompted the Southern Rock Opera Revisited Tour, which came to the Ardmore Music Hall, in the Philadelphia suburbs. It was a smaller club show than the Truckers’ usual haunts, and it quickly sold out, although it was livestreamed on Nugs.net.
The Truckers, who are rarely off the road, have a long history of avoiding setlists, with leaders Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley usually alternating song choices and trading lead vocals and lead guitars throughout long sets of rousing, rebellious and redemptive rock ’n’ roll. This time, however, they stuck to SRO’s narrative, with a few amendments: deleting the two songs written by former band member Rob Malone, integrating several thematically related Cooley songs from later albums, jumping around a bit in the album sequence.
A bunch of SRO’s songs are live DBT staples, including “Zip City” (Cooley’s tale of adolescent sexual frustratio), “Let There Be Rock” (a celebration of ’70s hard-rock standard-bearers such as Molly Hatchet, Thin Lizzy, AC/DC—now with an added shout-out to the Replacements) and “Ronnie And Neil” (in which Hood responds to Ronnie Van Zandt who used “Sweet Home Alabama” to respond to Neil Young’s “Southern Man”). Those songs were still highlights, but so were deeper cuts such as Cooley’s “Guitar Man Upstairs,” with its exhilarating X-like rockabilly, and Hood’s “Dead, Drunk And Naked,” stripped down to a harder, sharper groove.
In many ways the current Truckers—with Brad Morgan still on drums but with Jay Gonzalez on guitar and keyboards and Matt Patton on bass—are a better band now, and Hood’s grizzled voice is stronger and more nuanced while Cooley’s is deeper and more soulful than when they recorded SRO.
The show avoided the deadening predictability and somber reverence that can dampen many full-album tours. Southern Rock Opera was rooted in nostalgia and history and storytelling from the start (check out the brand-new MAGNET Classics Podcast about it!), and more than two decades later, it retains its ability to celebrate growing up in the musical and political climates of the South in the late ’70s and early ’80s—we’re just 40-odd, rather than 20-odd, years removed now.
Hood took several opportunities to contextualize the narrative: He talked about growing up in Birmingham (“the most underrated city in America”) and experiences with his father, David Hood, the bassist for the Swampers, the Muscle Shoals rhythm section who backed Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett and a myriad of soul singers. To celebrate what would have been the 82nd birthday of guitarist Jimmy Johnson (his dad’s partner in the Swampers and a mentor for Hood the younger), the band detoured to play a song Johnson hated: “Buttholeville,” originally by Adam’s House Cat, Hood and Cooley’s first band. (Its extended guitar jam was another highlight.)
But Hood also talked about the frustrating parallels between George Wallace’s racist policies and our current political leadership as he introduced “The Three Great Alabama Icons” and “Wallace.” SRO doesn’t have the protest songs that have become central to the Truckers’ work in recent decades, but the voluble Hood had plenty to say decrying Elon Musk and fearing for America, which catalyzed him to lead the crowd to chant, “Fuck fear.” Hood, with his outstretched arms and passionate speeches, can have a preacher’s righteous fervor, and a DBT show is a good antidote and catharsis for those of us feeling fraught. Let there be rock, indeed.
Cooley, for his part, said little, retaining his laconic cool, although many of his songs rocked the hardest, especially “Every Single Storied Flameout” from 2022’s Welcome 2 Club XIII, which built to a triple-guitar wall-of-sound.
After ending the main set with Southern Rock Opera’s “Angels And Fuselage,” the band returned for two covers: Wet Willie’s “Keep On Smilin’” (a 1974 hit that the Truckers played recently at Jimmy Carter’s 100th birthday celebration) and Warren Zevon’s bitter-yet-redemptive “Play It All Night Long.”
The night was a treat for longtime fans to hear Drive-By Truckers revisit their past while singing about their even more distant past. But the Truckers are no legacy act: Their last few albums have been among their best, Patterson Hood has an excellent solo album due February 21 (with guest appearances from Wednesday, Waxahatchee, Lydia Loveless, Kevin Morby, Steve Berlin and many more), and the world can use some good new protest songs, if that’s what the Truckers have in store.
—Steve Klinge; photos by Chris Sikich
