By Alli Patton
When the Drive-By Truckers released their third studio album, Southern Rock Opera, in 2001, they might not have foreseen the impact it would have on the Muscle Shoals-bred group or the Southern rock style as a whole.
“We put all of our hopes into that, all of our eggs into that basket,” the band’s longtime guitarist-vocalist Mike Cooley said. “Turned out for once we were right.”
Southern Rock Opera would be the record that changed everything for the group, which had, up until then, been playing the dive bar circuit to crowds of a few dozen. It opened the door to larger audiences, bigger venues, major label interest and nationwide distribution, setting them on the hit-riddled path they’ve trekked these last two decades.
“It laid the groundwork,” Cooley said. “For a lot of people, it was the first record they got into. It’s the one everybody comes back to.”
Now, the Drive-By Truckers are revisiting the landmark record themselves, celebrating their breakthrough album with a deluxe re-release and a cross-country tour.
“This was as good a time as any,” Cooley explained of coming back to the album in its 23rd year. “We always wanted to remaster it.”
While going in and improving the sound quality, they discovered additional studio material and live recordings that never made it onto Southern Rock Opera the first time around.
“There are a couple of things that weren’t on the original record that we didn’t even remember doing on the tapes,” he added with a laugh. “I’m pretty sure it was us.”
While it may have been easy to forget a track or two after 20 years, the band is less likely to let slip the experience of actually recording the album as Southern Rock Opera came to life under somewhat unpleasant conditions.
“We didn’t have a record deal,” Cooley said. “We didn’t have access to studio time. We just needed a place to do it.”
That place was the upstairs of a uniform shop on 3rd Avenue North in downtown Birmingham, a business owned by Cooley’s wife’s uncle.
“We would go in after the store closed at 6 p.m. and pretty much record until 6 a.m.,” Cooley said.
It was not only a tiring experience, it was a hot one. Recording took place in late summer in a building with no air conditioning, the band unable to use fans to cool the space.
“It sounded like hitting the runway when you turned the fans on. We’d have to just turn them off and play as long as we can stand it,” Cooley said. “It was fun and hard. I wouldn’t take anything for it, but I don’t want to do it again.”
Even still, during a mid-June tour stop at Birmingham’s Iron City, they weren’t thinking about that treacherous recording process all those years ago. They seemed content to be surrounded by the people and places they call home.
“That was probably one of our favorite Alabama shows we’ve ever played. We had a great crowd that night. It’s one of the best audiences we’ve ever had,” Cooley said.
Getting to tour Southern Rock Opera now marks a special moment for the Drive-By Truckers who didn’t get to perform the album the way they truly wanted to when they released it in 2001.
“We were still touring in a van and playing small clubs, a lot of dive bars,” Cooley said. “We were an opening act a lot of the time. We couldn’t just go and do this two-and-a-half-hour set like we’d always envisioned. By the time we moved into playing theaters and bigger rooms where we could do whatever show we wanted to do, we had already put out two more records and we were moving on. This is, in a way, touring behind the record for the first time the way we kind of always thought of it.”
Reworking the album has been an equally special experience for the band, one that reminded them of their journey to today.
“Going back and listening to all those recordings – I haven’t listened to those versions closely in years – it was fun. We were better than I remember. We were actually kind of good,” Cooley said.
Those songs have held up over the years, becoming staples in the Truckers’ repertoire, but because of more than what they did for the band’s career.
Southern Rock Opera and its songs pushed listeners’ perceptions of what Southern rock could be, all at once severe and tender, over-the-top and still subtle, battered yet beautiful. The album not only revived that decades-old sound for a new millennium, but it also reckoned with a darker side of heritage.
Southern Rock Opera was born from an ambitious concept. It was meant as a tribute to 1970s arena rock and an examination of the South’s past, all while set against a fever-dream narrative of a fictitious band in the post-civil rights era South. With hints of Lynyrd Skynyrd and mentions of George Wallace in the same riff, the band attempted to come to terms with what they’ve coined “The Duality of the Southern Thing,” an inner jumble of pride and shame that often writhes within Southerners.
While the Drive-By Truckers didn’t set out to single-handedly change the South when they released the record, they created music to soundtrack efforts toward a better one. The songs of Southern Rock Opera, their themes and messages, will all withstand the tests of 20 more years. Cooley, however, hopes some of the things they were singing about all those years ago won’t.
“I hope some of the darker elements become more irrelevant as we move forward,” he said. “I’d like to think that the country as a whole, not just the South, can finally move on from some of those darker elements of our past. We thought when we made the record that we were closer to the end of some of those things than we turned out to be, but we’ll keep trying. We’ll keep pushing.”