In the annals of concept albums, they don’t get much more ambitious than “Southern Rock Opera,” the 2001 double-album from the Drive-By Truckers.
The idea by vocalist/guitarist Patterson Hood and high school friend Earl Hicks pre-dated DBT, and is about a fictional Southern rock band named Betamax Guillotine that was loosely inspired by the real-life Lynyrd Skynyrd. And while DBT was founded in 1997 by Hood and guitarist Mike Cooley, the band would cut two studio efforts and a live album before finally tackling what they’d been loosely referring to as “The Rock Opera.”
Fast forward 23 years later, and “Southern Rock Opera” has been reissued, and today’s DBTs are heading out on the road to play it in its entirety on a string of dates around the country. For Hood, revisiting this fan favorite was a chance to give the album its due with its re-arrival on a major label imprint after it was originally released on DBT’s self-funded Soul Dump Records.
“I’ve been wanting to remaster it forever,” Hood revealed in a recent interview “It’s always bugged me that the vinyl version of “Southern Rock Opera” was kind of half-assed. When we released the thing ourselves initially, which was still the CD era, we couldn’t afford to put it out on vinyl. We did the self-released version in 2001 and we still did as much packaging as we could afford and put together for that as far as the booklet and the trifold cover and all that stuff. When we sold the record the next year to Lost Highway (Records) and they did the reissue and re-released it on a larger level, they did a vinyl version, but they kind of did it half-assed. They didn’t really master it very well and obviously didn’t put a lot of TLC into it.”
Longtime friend and producer David Barbe (Sugar, Mercyland), who helped produce the original album, asked on for the reissue and as Hood put it, “…wanted to take another stab at mixing it. We wanted to see if we could get a little more out of what’s there without changing or fixing anything, so that’s what he did.”
The result is a deluxe version featuring two sides of additional studio material, live recordings (featuring Jason Isbell shortly after he joined the band), a 28-page booklet packed with never-before-seen photos and expanded liner notes by Hood revealing that the journey to “Southern Rock Opera” was as epic as the final result.
“We couldn’t afford a studio to record it in, so we recorded it in this warehouse place upstairs from a uniform shop in downtown Birmingham, AL,” Hood recalled. “It was early September 2000, and Birmingham had an early fall heatwave, and we had no air conditioning. It was 90 degrees, and we couldn’t even run a fan because you could hear it on the tape. We would open the window, turn the fan on and air the place out once every two hours or so, and cool it down to a nice, balmy 90 degrees or something. Then we’d close the windows, turn off the fan, and record until we couldn’t take it anymore. It got to where we were wearing our boxers and a t-shirt up there, sweating profusely, and drinking lots and lots of beer and booze. At the same, everybody was kind of going through break-ups at the time with their girlfriends and wives. I myself was in the middle of a divorce.”
Hood added with a laugh, “There’s nothing like stubborn rednecks when they set their mind to something, especially when they set their mind to something that’s probably an ill-gotten idea in the first place.”
As enterprising as “Southern Rock Opera” was in its original incarnation, Hood is just as jazzed about taking it out on the road, particularly given how often fans have asked when the DBTs were going to revisit this sprawling effort.
“We’re going to play the damn thing, mostly start to finish,” Hood said. “I think after ‘Angels and Fuselage,’ we’re going to come back out. We quit doing encores back in 2016, but I think we’re going to bring back the encore set since we’ll finish the “Rock Opera.” We’ll catch our breath, and depending on how long we have before the curfew, we’ll go out and play a little bit longer. We’re not going to have an opening act for most of these shows. We’re just going to do it as ‘An Evening With…’ That will give us a chance to play some other things and have it be different every night. Normally the band doesn’t use a set list. Normally, we figure out what the first song is before we walk out on stage and then it’s anything goes. This will give us a chance to come out and be a little bit looser with whatever we feel like playing. We’re looking for it to be pretty different from night to night.”
Central to the “Southern Rock Opera” concept is what Hood called, “The Duality of the Southern Thing,” a line he wrote for the epic “The Three Great Alabama Icons.” And for the young Hood, it meant, “…the mixture of shame and pride so many Southerners feel about their heritage.” While it then represented the North-South divide dating back to the Civil War, nowadays the Alabama native sees the nation’s current divisiveness being more of a rural-urban disconnect that he’s experienced in the Pacific Northwest, a region of the country he and his family have called home for the past nine years.
“I live in Portland, which is considered one of the most liberal cities in America,” he said. “But if you drive five miles in any direction, it’s not that different from Alabama, where I grew up. In fact, it’s more like it other than how it looks, because it’s really beautiful out here. And likewise, my sister lives in Birmingham and Cooley lives in Birmingham, which is a very blue city in what is arguably one of the three reddest states in the country. But you know, Birmingham is a pretty progressive city. It’s got its problems—all cities and towns have problems. Everywhere has problems. The murder rate in my small Alabama hometown is way higher per capita than the murder rate in Portland. So many of the clichés about crime-ridden cities are really BS.”
Social issues aside, the 60-year-old singer-songwriter sees 2025 being filled with music. In addition to Drive-By Truckers dates, he’ll be doing a full-band solo tour to promote his new solo album, “Exploding Trees and Airplane Screams,” which is set for a Feb. 21 release.
“I’ve actually made a solo record…It’ll be 12 years this fall since I put one out,” Hood said. “I made it with Chris Funk, who plays guitar with The Decemberists and is the producer.
Usually, with my solo things, I just go out myself with an acoustic guitar. But to do this thing justice, it’s going to take a little bit of help because Chris is playing guitar and also a bunch of old vintage synthesizers are on it. We’ve got some strings and can have woodwinds and all kinds of things. I’m real proud of it. That’ll be a big part of whatever I do (in 2025), in addition to hopefully doing some recording with my band because we’re definitely due.”
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