Keep On Truckin’

Lately I've been in search of things American. A few months ago, I found a torn piece of newspaper on the floor at a dark little club. It read, "Becoming an American is a long, hard road." This line conveys a sense of progress and change, as well as difficulty and perseverance. America, I have discovered, has an intimate relationship with duality: we are for national security, but against war without questions; patriotic, but skeptical. We buy into the American dream but understand it never really has and never really will come true.

At their Bowery Ballroom show last Wednesday night, the Drive-By Truckers not only sang about duality, they embodied it. In their roles as creations and critics of the South, they get at the complexity of a marred past in cultural and more personal terms. Most of the songs they played came from their album Southern Rock Opera, released last summer by Lost Highway Records. A set of songs strung together along a plot about a southern boy coming of age, idolizing Lynyrd Skynyrd, sniffing paint, and driving down the highway, the Opera bears a different relationship to "Sweet Home Alabama" than does the new Reese Witherspoon movie. The Truckers are not talking about Southern belles, they're talking about hard-living, hard-dying, trailer-park-inhabiting, drunken highway-driving redneck folks. During the performance of "Dead, Drunk, and Naked," a song about whiskey, drugs, and poor mental health, a stencil of the American flag was projected onto the back wall in red and blue light. Here the central paradox is exposed: even as the song describes the desperation of a boy and his struggle to exist in his society, the Truckers glorify not only that society but that experience as well.

A give-and-take between celebration and denunciation characterizes the Drive-By Truckers' songs, written for the most part by frontman Patterson Hood and guitarist Mike Cooley. They strike a balance between the political tensions of the South--racism, segregation, and controversial public figures like George Wallace--and the drudgery of an everyday life filled with work, drink, and love. The fact that these men have lived this drudgery makes their music honest. Though he now seems to be more into deliverance, Cooley spent many years delivering pizza for Godfather's in Florence, Ala. Drinking Jack Daniels in his Upper West Side hotel room, Cooley said, "Dude, if you've never worked in pizza, then you don't know how to rock."

The Drive-By Truckers both abide by a great tradition of Southern rock music and set a new standard for the politicized lyric. While it may be tempting to group the Truckers with other bands that signify the resurgence of Southern rock, I don't suggest it. This is not Ryan Adams or the Black Crowes; this music is made with entirely different intentions and has an entirely different effect. Whereas Adams croons and Chris Robinson wails, Hood has got the rebel yell and Cooley's got the prayer. The Truckers stand up for a bit of American culture that needs both preservation and criticism, and they are willing to supply it with both. This music is inspired because it allows a cultural and social history to interact with a personal one, and it is honest with its past. These men understand the "duality of the Southern thing," and they tell it like it is.

In true rock ën' roll form, the Drive-By Truckers know about salvation. They convey it with powerful and loud three-guitar parts that resolve into beautiful harmonies, even in the midst of dismal and defeated lyrics. "Angels and Fuselage," the last song on Southern Rock Opera, closed the set Wednesday night. Written from the perspective of Ronnie Van Zant as his airplane went quiet, the song exemplifies the crossover between personal and political that seems to seep out of the Truckers' songs. "I'm scared shitless of what's / Coming next / I'm scared shitless, these angels I see / In the trees are waiting for me," Hood sings. The song hovers between life and afterlife, earth and above, and now and next. In this sense the Drive-By Truckers get at what I want "American" to mean. They are America the lost soul, America the question, America the paradox, and America the becoming.