Drive-by Truckers
(Billboard Books)
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I’ve sat through a great many boozy debates over whether the redneck national anthem is really “Sweet Home Alabama” or “Free Bird”–but still, no one seriously disputes that it’s a Skynyrd song. There’s a lot more to being southern than mere defensiveness, and Skynyrd’s discography captured a good deal of it, with a level of wit few others have approached. Unfortunately, the band literally went down in flames–on October 20, 1977, their plane crashed into a Mississippi swamp, killing Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines, his sister and backup singer Cassie Gaines, and tour manager and longtime friend Dean Kilpatrick. Since then, almost no one has attempted to portray southern identity through rock ‘n’ roll (as opposed to country) in anything but the broadest of strokes–flying the stars ‘n’ bars or the Jack Daniel’s logo or both–even though at our best, southerners both white and black have traditions of regional and cultural humor and self-knowledge that maybe only New York Jews can rival. Though the white south has had fits and starts of rock prominence since, until very recently most of the artists–and particularly those of the indie stripe–have sidestepped the issues, aiming for that mythically homogeneous rock audience, doing the equivalent of training like a newscaster to develop the perfect accentless accent. Even R.E.M., whose early perceived incomprehensibility stemmed from a distinct Georgia drawl and a sense of kudzu-draped rural mystery, eventually managed to breed out their southernness.
The Truckers have made good records before, but their latest, the double album Southern Rock Opera, is an unexpected masterpiece. “The Southern Thing” articulates the modern white southerner’s plaint far more eloquently and with less dodge than Goad: “Ain’t about excuses or alibis / Ain’t about cotton or cotton-picking lies / Ain’t about the races, the crying shame / To the fucking rich man all poor people look the same.” Hood spends the entire work trying to explain what he calls the “duality of the southern thing,” and it’s so complicated that nothing seems particularly extraneous. In his unblinking gaze, for example, George Wallace winds up in hell–not for having been a white supremacist, but for pretending to still be one to cadge votes even after he knew better. “Proud of the glory, stare down the shame,” Hood sings, and I know what he means: shame in feeling or being made to feel backward, pride in a long memory and a talent for preserving one’s heritage; shame in being stereotyped as a bunch of ignorant fundamentalists, pride in keeping faith alive in a world often perceived as abandoning it; shame in having treated great black artists shabbily, pride in having grown up with so many of them; shame in being poor, pride in refusing to sell out.
That’s the kind of stagnation fast-talking, fast-moving urban types fear above all: the sensation of having outlived one’s own life. And if you happen to believe that the climax of life always happens in youth, the only way to avoid that situation is to die young. (Most hipsters waffle on this, of course–just as their postadolescent glow is fading, they conveniently announce that their priorities have changed.) It was from a point of view of passionate youth that Ronnie Van Zant asked the eternal rhetorical question “If I leave here tomorrow, would you still remember me?”
