‘Don’t look back’ policy aside, Drive-By Truckers revisit catalog classic

ajc staff

ajc staff

As Hood puts it in the liner notes of the expanded three-CD deluxe edition released in August, “It’s been 23 years since the release of the album that drastically changed our lives and 22 years since we performed it (more or less) straight through in near entirety. We’ll be hitting the road, three guitars blazing, and telling y’all a story. It’s an album we spent years writing and learning to play and then recording (in the upstairs of a uniform shop in downtown Birmingham, Alabama). We feel that the record, while somewhat timeless, also has a current timeliness to it considering the social and political issues of today. Instead of performing it as if it’s still 2000AD, we want to make it our own, reflecting who we all are now in 2024.”

Hood and Cooley will take the stage at the Tabernacle in Atlanta on Nov. 9 with the band’s longtime lineup that features drummer Brad Morgan, guitarist-keyboardist Jay Gonzalez and bassist Matt Patton.

Photo by Andy Tenille

Photo by Andy Tenille

During a recent interview, Hood said the timing was right for a number of reasons.

“For starters, we’ve done the reissue,” he noted of the deluxe edition. “As Cooley says, we’re in the reissue business now. I’m proud of it and really happy with how it turned out.

“When we put out ‘Southern Rock Opera’ the first time on 9/11/2001 (on their own label, Soul Dump Records), we were an underground band. We were playing for 50 people a night, but we were also living out on the road, playing and playing and playing for whoever we could pull in.”

The double-CD debuted with a trifold cover and a 24-page booklet. “It was an ambitious package,” Hood said, “for a band that had no money whatsoever to put together and self-release.”

Now available on CD, vinyl and Apple iTunes, the expanded edition was remixed by longtime Drive-By Truckers producer and engineer David Barbe in his Athens studio and mastered by Greg Calbi at Sterling Sound in New York.

“On the live side, people have been asking us to do it for years and we’ve never been interested,” Hood said. “We always had a ‘don’t look back’ policy in our band. But after (the political upheaval connected to the election of) 2020 and everything that’s happened, we’re all in an unusual place as a band right now. We’re not making a brand-new record at the moment (their most recent was 2022′s “Welcome 2 Club XIII”) and we want to tour.”

The push to get back on the road came in part because of how well the Drive-By Truckers get along — musically and personally. Hood said he considers the current group to be the Truckers’ lineup until the end of time.

“We finished a five-week tour back in July, and everyone was sad to say bye. It’s very much a family, which is what I always wanted it to be,” he said. “The notion that you have to have all this drama to create art? I’ve had enough drama in my life to where I’ve got no shortage of it. There’s plenty of stuff in the well to dip into if I want to.”

Of course, touring behind “Southern Rock Opera” has Hood thinking again how he feels about being a Southerner — not that those thoughts are ever far away from the Muscle Shoals native. Hood said his feelings about the South have evolved in many ways since the album’s original release, both good and bad.

Robb Cohen for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Robb Cohen for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Looking at a song like ‘Wallace’ in the era of MAGA and Trump, it’s unfortunately way more timely to the public discussion then it was when we put the record out the first time. So I wanted to address that. I wanted to use (the recent reissue and current tour) as a way of talking about now, and what it means now. I didn’t really know how that was going to work, but we figured out what we were going to try to do and hope for the best,” he said, with a little Southern self-deprecation coming through. “The first leg of the tour, we were really happy with how it turned out. Happy with the show and the crowd response. They got what we were doing with it.”

Photo by Brantley Gutierrez

Photo by Brantley Gutierrez

After so many years, the difficulty and the duality of “Southern Rock Opera” has given Hood plenty to ponder.

“I wanted to address the things that I feel differently about from when we wrote it, without it being preachy or taking away from the fun of it or denouncing something that we did,” he said. “It’s not quite that. It was the places where I think I got it wrong the first time.

“When I wrote ‘The Southern Thing,’ which was the very last thing I wrote for the record, (the matter of Southern identity) was all through the record, but what was it? If you ask a hundred Southerners, you’re going to get a hundred different answers.”

Looking back, Hood noted that the band had only played “Southern Rock Opera” a handful of times until this year.

“It’s like I failed as a writer because everyone’s taking this thing the wrong way (interpreting the album as some sort of flag-waving statement of redneck pride), and I don’t want to be any part of it,” he said. “So I wanted to address that as part of the show.

“There’s several songs that we’ve done in the years since then that really connect well with that record, particularly on the ‘American Band’ record. Having Cooley do ‘Surrender Under Protest’ (from 2016′s ‘American Band’) right after we do ‘Southern Thing’ (from ‘Southern Rock Opera’) is great. That should have been like that all along. We probably played (’Southern Rock Opera’) more times this year than we ever played it before. That’s been interesting and that’s been fun.”

CONCERT PREVIEW

Drive-By Truckers: “Southern Rock Opera Revisited 2024″

8 p.m. Nov. 9 at the Tabernacle. Tickets, $55-$250. 152 Luckie St., Atlanta. 404-659-9022, tabernacleatl.com