Interview: Patterson Hood (Drive-By Truckers)

We get to see a lot of bands grow up in Asheville — playing small places, then bigger places, then even bigger places. Then maybe they outgrow our city altogether and move on. On the flipside, maybe Asheville only gets on a band’s radar once they get wind of our recent-by-comparison lucrative audience draw and are already selling out the large spaces by the time they get here. 

Neither of these scenarios apply to Drive-By Truckers. If you’ve been in Asheville since at least the mid-1990s, the Truckers have been a live show staple the whole time, and they ain’t leaving. This band hits town and people get ready for it. Maybe the pre-game isn’t as whisky-soaked as it used to be — for the fans or for the band — but a DBT show is a wild and good thing. 

There isn’t much like it, as much as other bands of the Southern gothic/alt-country rock whatever-else-you-call-it ilk have tried. I’m not even sure how to describe it, except it feels less like going to a show to see a band and more like going to be part of this big, loud, messy, grand expulsion of energy. And everyone, the crowd and band alike, are about to cut it loose. For some, whether or not to go see the Truckers when they come around isn’t really a question — it’s a given. That look you see on people’s faces at the show? That wide-eyed smile, maybe glistening with a sheen of sweat and beer? I can translate that look for you. It means, “Fuck yeah.”

Last time they rolled through Asheville in their first post-lockdown show, the DBT played in the open air of Rabbit Rabbit — and that was a really good night. But this time, they’re back inside The Orange Peel for a two-night stand, Friday, May 12 - Saturday, May 13, and, really, that’s the place for this band. They were among the Peel’s early-years pioneers, and those shows often come up in conversation about the best performances at the venue. If all you’ve seen of the Truckers’ early aughts shows is footage from the recent Jason Isbell documentary, Running With Our Eyes Closed, do yourself a favor and go online and dig some more. And then don’t bother hemming and hawing about the “old line-up versus new.” Just go get loud.

The band released its 14th studio album, Welcome 2 Club 13, last year, named after a dire Alabama venue that founders Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley played in their pre-DBT days under the name Adam’s House Cat. Then in April, it announced the reissue of 2004’s The Dirty South, with tracks and cover art not included in the original release. Side by side, the albums speak loudly to how much this band has kept the fire under its ass lit over the past 18 years.

Asheville Stages caught up with Hood before the band’s show in Columbia SC, and spoke with him about our town, looking back without nostalgia, family farms, and how DBT have always been the old guys blasting the youngsters off the stage.

Brian Postelle: Drive-By Truckers have a two-night stand at The Orange Peel, and you're also doing them in D.C., New York City, and outside Durham. Is this a new thing for you, that you're trying to stay in the venues that you like to play and just do two nights back-to-back?

Patterson Hood: Yeah, I like it when we do that. That's always my favorite, actually. I mean, we've done two-night stands at The Orange Peel for decades, but yeah, some tours we get to do more of them than others. It's nice to set up camp in a town and be there a couple of days and have time to stretch out. There are more food options and things like that — and of course Asheville has a lot of that. So, we always love coming to Asheville. It's been a favorite town for a long time.

BP: You guys definitely started coming to Asheville well before it was on a lot of a lot of radars, live music-wise.

PH: Oh yeah. The first couple times we played Asheville was this tiny little place. I don't remember the name of it, but I seem to remember they had a record store in there, too. They had to move records and shelving out of the way to make room for us to play. [*editor’s note: this sounds a whole lot like Almost Blue, later known as The Basement.] It was really tiny, and that was in the mid ’90s when we were first starting out, so we've always played [in Asheville]. But we’ve been playing The Orange Peel since [shortly after it opened in 2002], so it's a favorite for sure.

BP: The first time I saw you at The Orange Peel was on The Dirty South tour [around 2004,] and I was really pleased to see that you guys are doing a reissue of that album. With that reissue and then also the Plan 9 records live album [Live at Plan 9 Records, July 13th 2006, released in 2021,] are you doing a lot looking back lately at the early years of the band? Are you kind of feeling nostalgic about that stuff?

PH: Well, yes and no. We've never been big on nostalgia and looking back, but the Plan 9 thing came up a few years ago when they found those tapes, and it was so good! When we heard it, we were really excited because I didn’t even know it existed. And it’s like, “Wow! This is kind of like a missing link.” 

We have three live albums from different eras.We have Alabama Ass Whuppin’ — that is a really good document of that era of the band, before Southern Rock Opera, when we were a four-piece. We had those first couple of albums out that we went out and played pretty punk rock, so I've always liked Alabama Ass Whuppin’ a lot. Then we did that box set [It’s Great to Be Alive] at the Fillmore [in San Francisco] in 2014, which is the current lineup, kind taking a look at our catalog for songs old and new and all that. And I've always really liked that. It's a really good collection. But having something that was a really great live collection of the lineup with [Jason] Isbell was a cool thing to find and put out, so we were excited about that.

Then the The Dirty South thing, it’s something that's been talked about for a really long time because it’s a lot of fans’ favorite record of ours, and a lot of people really love it and there were some things about it that always bugged me and bugged us, because it wasn't quite the way we had set out to make it. So, it gave us a chance to really go back and do a couple things right that had been kind of half-assed done, you know?

Wes [Freed, artist and long-time DBT cover illustrator] did some of his great, really incredible art for that record, but when [New West Records, who is also releasing the reissue] put it out on vinyl, they did a pretty half-assed job — they just kind of threw the packaging together. And the stuff he had done was beautiful, so it gave us a chance to really properly package what Wes had done art-wise. And while we were working on this, Wes passed away last fall and that makes it even more emotional.

When we first turned in that record way back when, the people that were at the label at the time were unhappy with how long it was. They were against it being a double [album] and all, so we took three songs out of the sequence that were important to the whole — because it is kind of a concept record, and it kind of tells a bit of a story. [So] it made that part of it really fit together and make sense [like] we had planned. Getting to restore the original sequence was great, and then we got it all remastered by Greg Calbi. He actually mastered the original Dirty South. It was the first record he did for us and he's done almost everything since then, and he did a really amazing job bringing this into life, so we're real proud of it

Photo by Brantley Guitierrez

BP: That was the record that introduced me to the Truckers, so I'm really looking forward to it. On your latest, Welcome 2 Club 13, I feel like you guys kind of have a conceptual thing going on there, too, but at the same time you have some songs in there where it feels like you're kind of looking back at where you've been and how it compares to where you are now. Is that where you were going with this record?

PH: We had just come out of the [COVID-19] lockdown and some of it was written during the lockdown period. And, you know, that was a strange period. That was a dark period for us because of not being able to play and not being able to work, and we were under a lot of stress about financial stuff because of the [indoor venue] ban. You know, we were all out of work for a year and a half, and at the same time [there are] house payments and the kids need new shoes. Life goes on.

But it was a particularly tough time. And we'd done what ended up being three albums in a row in a short time, two of which [The Unraveling and The New OK], came out in 2020 [and] were extremely political and kind of based around the news events of the day and our reactions to them — trying to raise kids in the era of Trump and the era of lockdown drills and all the horrific shit that kids are having to grow up through right now. So, it was kind of good to make a record that was more steeped in personal stuff.

I guess in some ways in Club 13, there was some looking back at where we grew up and the [Muscle Shoals, Ala.] area, which has changed a lot, and in a lot of ways for the better since I was growing up there. I don't know — it just kind of happened that way. But I'm really proud of that record and we're really just now getting the tour behind it properly in the States. 

When it came out, we were touring Europe. We had a really fantastic European tour last spring, and by the time we got back to America, we had basically already played so many of the places that you play with a brand-new record [and] it was too soon to go play again. All of a sudden, we had a new record, and we couldn't really do a lot with it, so we did kind of a weird summer tour and then were off most of the fall, so we're really just now getting to properly tour behind that album. It’s a fun record to play live, so it makes for a good show.

BP: You guys have put out a lot of records. When do you guys realize that it's time to make a new one?

PH: It varies. I mean, it more has to do with the songs. I don't see us really making a new one anytime too soon because I still feel like Club 13’s a pretty new record for us. Like I said, we're really just now getting to tour behind it. And I've been so busy, I haven't really been writing a whole lot lately. I'm working on a solo record that I'm going to put out next, but even with that, I'm not really in a big hurry. Like I said, we have so much stuff — we've kind of made an effort to slow down a little bit and kind of catch up. We've done, counting solo records and side projects, getting up close to 25 albums.

BP: I saw you play an acoustic set years ago at Asheville Brewing Co. You were playing at a screening of this short film, “The Accountant,” [the 2001 short film directed by Ray McKinnon] and you talked about [the song] “Sinkhole” [from the 2003 album Decoration Day] and its relationship to that movie. Do you think the themes around that film and the themes around “Sinkhole” are still holding up?

Photo by Andy Tenille

PH: Sure! I mean, you know people are still losing their farms. It hasn’t really gotten any easier out there. In fact, a lot more people have lost their farms since then. It's a very real thing. Life is hard for a lot of people. We're lucky we get to do this thing we love, and most of the time get to make a pretty decent living at it. But then something like 2020 happens and you're thrown out of work for a year and a half, and it makes you really appreciate what you’ve got, that's for sure.

And “Sinkhole's” funny because I saw “The Accountant” and was so instantly — I mean, I fell in love with it. I thought it was the most amazing film, but there was so much about it that I related to from parts of my life, because I did grow up on a family farm — a homestead, land that had been in my family a long time. And I knew that it wasn't really going to be in the family much longer. The generation that had it was getting old and kind of dying off and there was a very limited amount of time. The family that lived out there did other things for a living, so it wasn't really so much a working farm as it was just the land that had been a working farm. 

But [the movie] really hit a bunch of buttons for me. So when I wrote the song, there was a lot of the movie and there was a lot of my life in it, too. And I wrote it real fast. I wrote it while stuck in traffic literally outside of Mobile, Alabama, on my way to Texas. And I didn't have a guitar, so I just wrote it and kind of heard in my head what I thought the guitar would do. And then when I stopped for the night in Lafayette, Louisiana, I pulled my guitar out and actually learned how to play it. I'd already kind of had that riff — that dialed down dow dow dow dow. I had that riff, and it kind of made sense and it fit between those verses. It just kind of all came together very naturally and very quickly.

BP: Speaking to that riff, too, that sound — that lower tuning with the kind of walk up on that riff, it's so central to Trucker’s sound and that time period. Just having that really sort of heavy, low tuning kind of sound.

PH: With our tuning down and all, it makes those kind of melodic riffs really have a heaviness to them, so I guess that is a big part of our sound for sure. And on the new record, “The Driver”’s got that kind of a thing about it, too.

BP: On Welcome 2 Club 13, the title track on that, I read where you were talking about it being a nod back to the early days and a tribute to the club that you were playing then. You even mentioned Adam's House Cat in the song. What was that scene like?

PH: Oh, it sucked! I mean it was awful. It was the only game in town. It wasn't a good gig, but it was the only gig, and they didn't really like us but they’d throw us up on Wednesday every now and then, opening for somebody else or if they had a cancellation. The song’s not necessarily so much a fond look back as sort of just a sarcastic look back, I guess.

It’s sort of the “anti-glory days” song. A lot of people look at their glory days as that time of their life when we were that age. But when we were that age, it sucked! We were older by the time we started the Truckers — I was well into my 30s. We really started touring heavy and were playing 150 to 250 shows a year, playing for 50 people then going to the next town playing for the next 50 people in kind of punk rock bars. Most of the bands on that circuit were all 10 years younger than us. They were all the age Cooley and I had been when we were doing Adam's House Cat, so we kind of took that as a point of pride that we were the old guys that would come in there and lay waste to the place. 

And we did, you know? You didn't really want to play after us unless you really had it together, because we came in barrels blazing. And that's how we built this thing. We've always been a very formidable live band, and I like to think we still are. We just played three nights in Florida and they were as good as any shows ever that we do. This is a good tour.

BP: I think there's something in the way that people say they're going to a Drive-By Truckers show that's different than the way that they say they're going to other shows. It’s almost… not ritualistic. Well, maybe ritualistic! It’s a real big deal for some people when you guys come around.

PH: We’ve got a great fan base. They're really fantastic and we're really lucky. Our job is to make sure we're worthy of that because they're so great. And I gotta mention before we part ways — I'd be remiss, since you’re in Asheville, to not mention that my favorite band right now is an Asheville band. In fact, my two favorite things right now are from your town.

The band Wednesday, who is kind of blowing up right now — they toured with us last summer and we fucking love them, man. They're great. They're a fantastic band. They're great live and their new record [Rat Saw God] is so far my favorite record this year. It's a really kick-ass record. And then their guitar player, MJ Lenderman, also has so much stuff in his solo record last year. Boat Songs was my favorite record of last year, and he's great live, too, and very different from Wednesday. It's his own thing, but both are so fantastic.

BP: Thanks for giving them a shout out! And we’ll look forward to seeing you in Asheville.

PH: Absolutely, man. I'm glad we got to talk and I'll see you at The Orange Peel.

IF YOU GO

Who: Drive-By Truckers with Lydia Loveless
When: Friday, May 12, and Saturday, May 13, 8 p.m.
Where: The Orange Peel, 101 Biltmore Ave., theorangepeel.net
Tickets: $30 advance/$33 day of show

(Photo by Brantley Guitierrez)