Drive-By Truckers Leave Them Wanting More at Webster Hall on Friday
Drive-By Truckers – Webster Hall – February 21, 2020
For those paying attention, Drive-By Truckers have been shining a light on the deep wounds of America for more than 20 years. Led by master storytellers—and simpatico songwriting and musical partners—Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley, the band has an unimpeachable catalog of rough-edged heartland rock that owes just as much to Crazy Horse and the Replacements as it does to Lynryd Skynyrd. While the Truckers have made a stir with their casual Southern fans by calling out the hypocrisies of the Republican party and their inaction with the rising rate of senseless school shootings and race bating on their last album, 2016’s American Band, the five-piece doubled down on their art-depicts-our-shit-show-of-American-life muse with their newest album, The Unraveling. With such politically charged tracks as “Thoughts and Prayers” and “21st Century USA,” Hood and Cooley aren’t releasing any steam from the pressure valve, and they brought their tour in support of the new LP to a packed Webster Hall on Friday night.
When I interviewed Hood last year while the band was working on the album, he leveled with me regarding how his frustrations with the political direction of our country have started to dig inward resulting in a more personal set of songs than American Band. “It’s probably just coming to terms with this world that we’re in right now,” Hood told me. “It’s maybe not as blatantly political as the last album, but it’s definitely part of it. But a more, kind of personal slant of it, I guess. How do you explain this shit to your kids?” It was bound to hit Hood this way. After all, this is the guy who wrote the songs “Puttin’ People on the Moon” and “The Righteous Path.”
The Truckers dove right into the proceedings with Cooley’s “Made Up English Oceans” before moving on to some of the new album’s darker material with “Rosemary with a Bible and a Gun,” “Slow Ride Argument” and “Heroin Again”—each track direct with its subject matter, and like the best Drive-By Truckers songs, acts as uncomfortable but necessary ice breakers and hard pills to swallow. But while we’re mentioning the band’s need to shake up things lyrically, we should also discuss how hard they rock. No matter your political affiliation, you cannot deny the power of this band’s three-guitar assault of Hood, Cooley and multi-instrumentalist Jay Gonzalez, the surplus of riffs surrounding the messages being conveyed.
While Friday’s performance showcased much of The Unraveling, Drive-By Truckers dug deep with some of their most beloved songs, one of the three best Cooley-penned tunes, “Women Without Whiskey,” an early set highlight, before the one-two punch of Southern Rock Opera’s first two numbers, “Days of Graduation” into a particularly raucous rendition of “Ronnie and Neil.” There were only a few moments of preaching from Hood during the marathon-length show, the songs doing the actual sermonizing, but ahead of “Babies in Cages,” he mentioned that Jeremy Christian, who had stabbed multiple people (one of whom Hood loosely knew) on a train in Portland, Ore., was sentenced earlier in the day, and that although he was happy this horrible person was getting the time he deserved, Hood hoped Christian lived long enough to understand the error of his ways.
After hitting the 20-song mark, the Truckers treated the rapt crowd to a rousing cover of the Ramones’ “The KKK Took My Baby Away,” bassist Matt Patton handling lead vocals. From there on out it was all classics, including the bleak desperation of Hood’s “Lookout Mountain” and Cooley’s other two greatest songs, the love-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-tracks duo of “Marry Me” and “Zip City.” Ditching the idea of an encore, Drive-By Truckers rocketed through the finish line at the end of their two-and-a-half-hour set with the Hood sing-along “Hell No, I Ain’t Happy.” The fire behind the pummeling riffs and Hood’s convictions were palpable, and at one point, Cooley and Gonzalez lifted their guitars in the air to slide their fret boards against each other’s to create a striking mix of distortion and feedback. As the lights came up, there was nothing left unsaid but, as always with the Truckers, plenty left not played. But that’s the trick: Leave ’em wanting more. —Pat King | @MrPatKing
