Home Is Where The Heart Is
Patterson Hood Talks About The Drive-By Truckers' Life On The Road, Community Involvement And Why The Band May Need Some Time Off
originally published November 1, 2006
Danny Clinch
Drive-By Truckers
Patterson Hood, leader of the Drive-By Truckers, tidies the remains of his toddler's rejected lunch and brews yet another pot of coffee. He pours a cup of joe before settling down at the curvy red Formica table for a visit. This caffeinated domesticity disguises his tour-weary burnout as he prepares to leave on the last stint of what he describes as "one very long year."
For the uninitiated, a shortcut comparison of the Truckers' music to contemporaries like Wilco and Son Volt does disservice to their stubborn individuality. Their kind of rocking alludes to Sticky Fingers-era Rolling Stones with a dose of soupy-good Richard Thompson licks thrown in behind Hood's gut-felt rasp or Mike Cooley's baritone growl. Their latest album A Blessing And A Curse, an end-product of the combined talents of Hood, Cooley, guitarist-vocalist Jason Isbell, bassist Shonna Tucker and drummer Brad Morgan, beckons like a cigarette-smoking siren that captured a little wisdom after she got her heart broke instead.
It's gratifying to see how far our boy Patterson has come since his earliest days performing at now-defunct downtown venues like the High Hat Club and Atomic Ballroom. He always could bite the head off a song like a carny chicken geek. Over the last decade, he has refined that stage-presence, shedding much of the novelty he once hid behind. Maturity has honed his articulateness into powerful, heartfelt songwriting mated with balls-on rockin' that transcends the somewhat limiting Southern rock label and has earned the Drive-By Truckers critical raves. Relentless touring has won the band legions of fans, but the business of conjuring up a sincere, soulful performance night after night takes its toll on a person.
"I get so burned out from being on the road all the time and missing my family. People can run into me sometimes and think that I am an ungrateful, spoiled asshole, because all I do is bitch ‘cause I'm homesick," Hood says, but this defies the good nature and generous spirit that has characterized him during the last 10 years he's called Athens home.
Exercising that generous spirit, the Drive-By Truckers will undoubtedly pack the 40 Watt on their annual two-night engagement to benefit musicians' resource center Nuçi's Space on Friday, Nov. 3 and Saturday, Nov. 4. Having graduated to playing 1,000–2,000 capacity rooms, these 40 Watt dates will be especially intimate shows. For a band with so much rising cachet, giving back to the community remains a high priority as success comes a-calling.
"I can't think of a better place to use my good fortune. I'm lucky enough to do what I love and - for the time being at least - make a living at it, " says Hood. "I can't say enough about what Nuçi's Space has done for the community. It seems like it ought to be used and supported even more than it is. I think a lot of people just don't know what they do; they think it's just this funny little, blue building down the hill."
In that funny, little blue building at the corner of Oconee and Williams streets, not only can local musicians book inexpensive rehearsal time, find a music instructor, nose through the center's library and get an axe repaired, they can also schedule physical examinations by an M.D. and get referrals for low-cost mental health services. Ironically, all this goodness was borne out of the suicide of the founder's son, Nuçi Phillips.
"Linda Phillips is amazing, " says Hood. "She took the worst possible, personal tragedy and turned her grief into something that has helped a lot of people. It's a beautiful thing. To me, that's the best of what we as a people can do, so, I'll do anything I can do to honor and support that.”
With their rising fame, the Drive-By Truckers are giving back to the community, one that was so generous during the band's lean times. Hood was verifiably homeless when the career-transforming, concept album Southern Rock Opera came out. He credits the 40 Watt's support for aiding the Truckers' success. Despite this year's heavy tour schedule, he looks forward to returning to its stage.
"I like that now we can sell out that room pretty much any time we come to town. It's a nice feeling," he laughs. "It's like, 'aren't you glad you supported us then?'"
Hood and the Truckers' charitable endeavors follow a trend established by other successful musicians in Athens to give back to a community that supported them in their formative years. Their support also extends to their fellow musicians, with Hood citing favorites ranging from Don Chambers and Mother Jackson to Kimberly Morgan ("I've never seen anybody that fearless on stage!" he says of the local country singer.) Also, he teamed up with David Barbe to produce The Dexateens' newest release Hardware Healing. He raves, "I'm so proud of them! They are a great band."
But why hassle himself with helping? "A lot of good bands don't really break through, and we've been really lucky in that regard," Hood explains. "Lucky and hard workers. Musicians in general, the real people who do it because they feel like they have a calling. I think those people tend to be pretty idealistic, try to make what difference they can."
That calling to rock and roll is what filmmaker Barr Weissman has been exploring in his upcoming documentary about the Drive-By Truckers.
"Barr's not a music guy. That's what attracted us to him when he first made the pitch to us," says Hood. "He had never done anything that had to do with music before, and we really liked that. We didn't want to do a music video or a business kinda thing, a band versus their record company story. His pitch to us was that he considered himself one of those people who uses that phrase, 'rock and roll saved my life as a teenager.' He wanted to [make] a love letter to those aspects of rock 'n' roll that starred us.
"That's one of the things all the members of our band all have in common is we all fall into that group of people that never really found anything that we fit into other than rock 'n' roll music."
Now in post-production, the film is slated for a tour of film festivals next year.
For himself, Hood recently wrapped tracking his forthcoming solo record at Barbe's Chase Park Transduction with Will Johnson and Scott Danbom, both of Centro-matic. Although he says that 2007 will be a year off for the Truckers, he plans on playing some dates behind that album, "but not like how Drive-By Truckers tour. Different, smaller places. Not as many of them," he hastens to add.
No matter how busy Hood gets, a smattering of dream projects tweak his imagination. "I'd love to work with William Bell. I'd love to do something with Bobby Womack…" His eyes light up. "I love Bobby Womack." A smile erupts. "Bettye LaVette is a dream project! I'd love to work with her on some kind of level. Tom T. Hall… if he ever wants to come out of retirement, I would love to produce a record for him."
Until then, during the 22 hours a day he and the Truckers aren't onstage, Patterson Hood marinates in the back lounge of the bus cozied up with a maxed-out iPod, looking forward to trick or treating with his daughter and playing the benefit for Nuçi's Space.
"I can't change the world, and I can't even change the country, but maybe I can do a little bit of good right here," he says.
WHO: Drive-By Truckers, Be Your Own Pet
WHERE: 40 Watt Club
WHEN: Friday, November 3
HOW MUCH: $20
WHO: Drive-By Truckers, The Great Horned Owls
WHERE: 40 Watt Club
WHEN: Saturday, November 4
HOW MUCH: $20
At Play In The Fields
Richard Buckner's Lyrical New Album Meadow Experiments With Storytelling Styles
originally published November 1, 2006
On Richard Buckner’s latest album, titled Meadow, a sparse world takes shape in imagistic clusters: “Coming up the stairs / lying in the smoke / waiting in the weeds / dropping on a dare / sometimes, you just know / the light through the leaves as you’re coming on,” he sings in “The Tether and the Tie.” For all their plain language and familiar word-pictures, the San Francisco singer’s newest songs describe a realm that is anything but realistic, and their inhabitants exhibit behavior that resists being read against that of real people: “Everyone’s talking as they’re falling / always thinking of rides to come,” for instance.
“The words just come, and then editing is where I love to spend my time,” Buckner explains. This process leads him to paying close attention to language and “letting phrases become characters or isolated moments, remembered for one reason or another that may lead to another phrase that turns a corner or provokes something else into happening.” Songs spring to life as words are divorced from context and savored as individual units. “Content is an after-effect, no matter what you think you’re trying,” Buckner asserts.
With over a century of modernist, postmodernist and consciously abstract art under its belt, western civ should be pretty comfortable with Buckner’s aesthetic precepts; ambitious English majors could glean multiple species of post-Nietzschean critical theory from them. Those who have followed Buckner’s career from Day One, however, might be surprised to hear him embrace abstraction.
When the singer-guitarist made his recording debut with Bloomed in 1994, he spun clear narratives full of characters with whom you could easily relate, garnering comparisons to alt-country progenitors like Bruce Hancock and Townes Van Zandt. And while Buckner attests that there is “no kinship” between his music and any particular genre, many listeners still count him among Americana’s insurgent faction. Reviewers still call him a “troubadour” and make requisite references to whiskey and lonely highways when discussing his work. Later albums like The Hill, a set of 15 poems from Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology set to music that Buckner released in 2000, have lent some credence to this depiction and placement in the folk setting. Even Meadow, whose songs feature bristling rock guitar and a meaty rhythm section, boasts some lyrical piano lines that wouldn’t sound out of place in an Emmylou Harris ballad.
But Buckner’s increasingly obtuse lyrics continuously distance him from the alt-country crowd. He also doesn’t share the genre’s interest in constructing authenticity and consciously eschewing the mainstream, speaking of his late ‘90s major label stint in balanced, realistic terms: “MCA was an education in human nature," he says, "the game of business and survival. I had a good contract that gave me a lot of freedom, but I still had to fight for everything as well. I was unrepresented by A&R and had no manager… There were perks and potholes. I kinda leave the whole experience with other things like divorce or change of lifestyle, where, later on, it seems weird that you went through it, but you’re glad you did.”
Throughout his career, Buckner has never actively sought out or shunned mainstream attention, citing the fact that “no one else was interested” as his grounds for inking a big label deal. Like other acts such as The Innocence Mission, American Music Club and Athens’ own Vigilantes of Love, who gained cultish followings among the adult-alternative set during tenures on majors, Buckner failed to produce a hit single or album. Devotion + Doubt and Since, his two releases for MCA, are still his definitive works, however, mixing aching acoustic tunes with yearning, twangy rock to bring the disparate elements of Buckner’s sound together successfully.
Buckner also developed some fruitful and lasting artistic relationships during the late ‘90s. For Devotion + Doubt, he hooked up with Joey Burns and John Convertino (both of Calexico, Giant Sand and Friends of Dean Martinez), both of whom he would continue to collaborate with in the future. JD Foster engineered both albums; with Meadow, he and Buckner work together once again. This decision was partially logistical - Buckner recently moved to Brooklyn, making him Foster’s neighbor - but more rooted in friendship.
“We spent a lot of the time we were working on the record just sitting around and talking,” Buckner recalls. He also feels that Foster’s skills complement his own: “JD has a technical mind that I don’t have for recording, effects and such.” Like playing with language, working with his friend allows Buckner to take his songs in unexpected directions. “I wanted to work with JD Foster because I wanted to take myself out of the picture as much as I could,” notes the songwriter.
So while Meadow bears only Buckner’s name on its spine, the record is a collaborative effort through and through. “The demos with basic melody ideas and words were done," says Buckner, "but I wanted my parts reinterpreted by other musicians, as well as their own ideas.” These other musicians include GBV alumni Doug Gillard and Kevin March and Mekons drummer Steven Goulding. Unsurprisingly, the record’s a rocker, rippling with muscle even during slower cuts like “Before.”
This taut long-player contrasts nicely with Impasse and Dents and Shells, Buckner’s two previous full-lengths. The Elliott Smith-esque arrangements that populate those albums are deft and compelling, but their general sonic is so similar to that of more generic indie-pop releases that Buckner’s uniqueness can be easily missed. In Meadow, rockers like “Canyon” use mounting tension to draw attention to their slippery structures, teasing us with hooks and strong melodies but denying us the pleasures of recognizable choruses or clear resolutions.
These musical curveballs might be the byproducts of Buckner’s early conception of Meadow. “The beginning idea for Meadow was going to be more [experimental], with intros, outros and in-betweens,” Buckner reveals, adding that he “also wanted JD Foster to have as much time and sound for what he wanted to do. After I got JD on the project, I was really trying to step back more, remembering that ideas can be used anytime, really. I still plan on using some of those sorts of ways, but it’s a slow process: gear, ideas and time.”
While a departure into more esoteric musical territory would likely jolt many of Buckner’s fans, it isn’t unthinkable: avant-garde artists like David Grubbs and Marc Ribot have appeared on previous albums, and Buckner says he enjoys the abrasive minimalism of Tony Conrad and Vibracathedral Orchestra. Perhaps the next batch of fragmented lyrics that this “troubadour” pins will even demand more abstract musical accompaniment. For now, though, he has an extensive catalogue of often misunderstood, universally underappreciated songs waiting to be unpacked. Truth be told, Buckner needn’t be any more challenging or thought-provoking than he already is.
WHO: Richard Buckner, Kimberly Morgan
WHERE: 40 Watt Club
WHEN: Tuesday, November 7
HOW MUCH: $10
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