Drive-By Truckers – Alabama Ass Whuppin’

Not that they were ever a shy and retiring bunch, but when the Drive-By Truckers first started visiting my neck of the North Carolina woods four years ago, their shows did have the random pedal steel-calmed moment. These days you’ll find frontguy Patterson Hood, under a truckstop cap and behind an “ain’t this a blast” grin, testifying how arena rock saved his life as a teenager. Then the Truckers will point three electric guitars at you, Skynyrd style, and blaze away to prove that Hood took those stoned-at-the-stadium lessons to heart.

This live album, recorded in various clubs in Atlanta and Athens, Georgia, in the summer and fall of 1999, finds the band barreling toward the end of that transition. Leading the way are an especially boisterous take on longtime staple “Steve McQueen”, fortified by a snippet of “Gimme Three Steps” for the occasion, and a runaway-semi version of Jim Carroll’s “People Who Died”.

It’s telling that the band’s two best-known, and most rootsy, songs, “Bulldozers And Dirt” and “Nine Bullets” (the co-headliners of their debut single), are AWOL. Their absence leaves room for “Lookout Mountain” and “Buttholeville”, a pair of self-described “redneck cock-rock” anthems dating back to the days of Adam’s House Cat, a long-gone Replacements-like outfit led by Hood and fellow DBT guitarist/vocalist/songwriter Mike Cooley.

But don’t assume that loud and rowdy means dumb. Look no further than “The Living Bubba”, a moving tribute to the late Atlanta musician Gregory Dean Smalley that shows the biggest emotional wallop sometimes comes from a life story told matter-of-factly.