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SOUTHERN MAN
DRIVE-BY TRUCKER PATTERSON HOOD ON TOURING, MICHAEL STIPE’S ACCENT & THE DIRTY SOUTH
Drive By TruckersSouthern rock had pretty much resigned itself to perpetual farewell tours until the Drive-By Truckers emerged from Athens at the turn of the century. With lyrical, erudite stories of rural Southern lifestyle backed by fiery guitars and one foot in the Allman's boogie shoes, the band's charismatic shows earned an immediate following. With hundreds of live dates every year for the past six, the Truckers have worked diligently to spread the word. Needless to say, we were excited to sit down with founder/frontman Patterson Hood and talk about one of 2004's best albums, The Dirty South.
Your songwriting is so deeply steeped in the Southern experience.
Yeah, but it's such a love/hate thing. So much of it is. It's like I'm destined to stay here and grumble about it. I had to get the hell out of Alabama. Really, Athens and Atlanta are the reasons I was able to stay in the South. I've found my little liberal conclave where I can hang out; I've got enough friction in my life without it being in my face all the time. I really, really hate hot weather. I don't make a good Southerner, I guess; it's really sort of ironic, isn't it? There's not much of my temperment or anything that makes it seem like I should be here. I make a lot of it, and I'm proud to be from here, but politically I'm kind of a blue state guy.
You guys tour so heavily, but it's starting to pay off.
It has, but we really didn't have a choice, the way I look at it. We could either make this a hobby and then scrounge up money from our careers and day jobs to make a record every couple of years, and play every few months in Atlanta. But if you want any chance of making a living at it, from where we were sitting looking at it in '98 or '99, I didn't see any other way of looking at it. I've gotten a lot from it; those six years on the road have been the best education. I got more out of that than I did college, learning more about life and myself. I proved once and for all that I'm not lazy, even though I was told that growing up. Those teachers were wrong! (Laughs) I'd really like not being on the road as much in the future, but I don't have a solution to do what we're trying to do without it. I'd like to tour 100 days a year instead of 250.
A few years ago, you were signed to the Lost Highway label and it seemed like that would be a perfect fit for your band. But all of a sudden you were let go.
We signed at kind of a weird moment in time. I wasn't ever seeing myself ever signed to a major label, mainly because I never imagined a major label signing us to the terms that we'd want. But they did. And of course, they were really flush with that success from O Brother, Where Art Thou, and Southern Rock Opera was getting a lot of good reviews. Everyone had told them they were crazy with Brother, and suddenly it was the best selling album of the year. So they were feeling kind of cocky and got kind of turned on to what we were doing and the great press and the number of records we were selling without distribution. I really like that guy at Lost Highway; he's one of the few people at that level in the music industry who is a good guy. And before I signed, I insisted on a face-to-face meeting, where I look him in the eye. We were blessed with a great attorney in that, but it was kind of a man-to-man thing where I looked him dead in the eye and said, “Before I sign this, you have to swear to me that you'll never fuck my band. You have to swear before you'll do that, you'll let us out of this deal.” And HE DID. He held up his word, and he'll forever be a good guy to me because of that. We followed up Southern Rock Opera with Decoration Day, which was a really dark record with a slow middle section. They were wanting a little more uplift and big rock, but it just wasn't there. Rather than put out that record half-assed, they offered us an out. They asked us to make a couple of changes and we said no. So we opted to leave, and our new label has been a better fit.
How important is it to release music at a steady clip? The more you release, the more you have to tour it.
You're right. That really is the big quandary. Pretty much six months after we put out Decoration Day, we turned in The Dirty South to our label. They let us get away with it, but being on a label that's not your own means that you have to slow your pace. Making records is really the part that I love. I love playing the shows but I'm tired of traveling. It's a little bit foreign to me to have to intentionally stall putting out records.
It's often said that you can hear R.E.M. in every Athens band. Yet you guys always get thrown in with the Southern rock or Allman comparisons.
R.E.M. was a far bigger influence on us than the Allman Brothers or Lynyrd Sykyrd. And no one sees that, just like no one sees how Todd Rundgren is the one songwriter that is most influential to me. No one sees this because what we do doesn't sound like that, but the spirit in the way we do it certainly does. I learned a lot about how to be in a band and not let the music industry destroy it from watching R.E.M. all those years. I was a huge fan, and saw them a dozen times back in the day. I had to drive long distances to do it because no one from my home town had even heard of them except for the record store geeks like me who all had Chronic Town before Murmur came out.
Or maybe it's because Michael Stipe doesn't have a big Southern accent like you guys do.
He sure used to! I liked it when he did! (Laughs) They quit making Southern records, and after going to Europe a few times I really understand it now. Every time I've been to Europe I hear them all over the place– in restaurants, on the street, everywhere. They found a way to be a global band and appeal to cultures, and that's an amazing thing. It's made me complain a lot less about what they sing about anymore. It's amazing, watching a bunch of Dutch people completely loving some song that I might not particularly care for, or a universally appealing song like, “Everybody Hurts.” That's really cool. --John Davidson
