The Great Concept Album Horror Success Story #1: Drive-By Truckers - Southern Rock Opera

So, we’ve spent a lot of time talking about concept album losers.  The fact is, there are some fantastic winners out there also.  I want to wrap up this series by talking about a few of them that deserve mention.  The first two won’t be ones you’ve likely heard of before, but you owe it to yourself to give them a listen.

This week, I want to talk about Drive-By Truckers’ masterful album Southern Rock Opera.

There may not be an album released in the last twenty years that was more important to me personally than this one.  Drive-By Truckers is a band that my wife and I used to see regularly when we lived in Athens, GA.  We rarely missed a show and saw them play probably twenty times or more while we lived there.  

Years later, after we moved to Southern California, we made more than one trip back to Athens to visit family and organized the visits around shows they were playing.  I have an autographed poster from one of those shows where the entire band thanked us for making the trip.  It's even signed by the artist, Wes Freed, who was playing in the opening band The Shiners.  It was given to us after a show at Tasty World in Athens.  

It was completely unexpected and meant more to us than they could possibly know.  The day I part with it will be the day it's pried from my cold, dead fingers.  

Drive-By Truckers will always be one of my favorite bands and a very big reason for that is Southern Rock Opera.  Whether you like their style of music or not, there is no denying the incredible achievement this band made when crafting this album.  It uses the story of legendary band Lynyrd Skynyrd as a framework to address the American South in general.  Songs explore topics as broad and deep as racism, religious conservatism and the conflicting feelings of the modern southern man.  That last part is what resonated with me.  It has to do with recognizing the mistakes of the past while embracing your roots unapologetically.  In other words, being proud of the deep sense of family, community and strong moral ethic, while acknowledging all of the racist and cultural shortcomings that personally make me sick to even think about. 

Southern Rock Opera tackles all of that and more by playing to the Truckers' strengths.  What this band does best is tell stories.  Their songs are character studies that do more with three verses and a chorus than many authors do with three hundred pages to work with.

For instance, take the song "Zip City".  It never once preaches to you.  The entire song is sung from the perspective of a seventeen-year-old boy who has a fast car, too much time on his hands and "no good intentions".  He's traveling to see a girl in Zip City because it's something to do.  He's been dating her despite the fact that she won't sleep with him, he doesn't love her and there's absolutely no future in what he's doing.  The song paints a picture (which the best songs always do), but this song isn't about how great it is to be in love or how awesome the party is.  This song is showing you a moment in time as this kid reflects on where he is, why he's there and what (if anything) he's going to do about it.

Almost every song on the record takes a similar approach; never preaching at you but instead just presenting the picture as it is and letting you make up your own mind about what it's trying to say.

Southern Rock Opera is a beast of an album.  It’s not apologetic, but faces the issues and flaws of its subject matter head on.  It contains a song (“The Southern Thing”) that truly encapsulates feelings I've had my entire life which had never, EVER, been properly articulated by another artist.

In short, it’s one of my all-time favorite albums and if you listen to it from beginning to end, you'll feel like you've been on an epic journey by the time Hood and guest vocalist Kelly Hogan sing "Angels and Fuselage" (a song about the plane crash that took Skynyrd down). 

One of the coolest things about Southern Rock Opera is the story of how the band brought it to market.  The Truckers had released two albums on their own label.  They knew just how ambitious releasing a double album was going to be, especially a concept album like they had in mind.  Instead of seeking a record label to foot the bill, Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley put together a business plan.  They presented it to potential investors and pitched to them exactly how they would pay that investment back with touring over time.  Remember, this was happening at a time when the internet was still fairly young.  In fact, there was no model out there like Kickstarter for them to raise the funds.  They did it through presentations, e-mails and getting in front of people. 

The idea was ingenious and so well thought out that years later, Hood was invited to speak about it to a class of business students at the University of Georgia.  While that alone is impressive, you have to think about the motivation behind what they were doing.  By raising their own funds, they were able to craft their vision exactly as they saw it, with zero interference from a record label.  

In past installments, I’ve discussed how creating in a vacuum completely killed concept albums, however in this case there's one key difference.  This album was a band effort, not the vision of one songwriter with an ego to stroke.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, the band put Southern Rock Opera out on their own label at first.  They toured behind it and sold copies out of the van as they went.  In less than a year, the buzz about the album was so big that Lost Highway records came calling and agreed to distribute it nationally.  The Truckers' investors were paid back with interest and it cemented the band as an American success story.  

Critically, it is hailed as a great album.  It was given 4 out of 5 stars in Rolling Stone, 5 out of 5 stars on Allmusic.com and has been featured in dozens of books and articles as one of the best rock albums of all time.

Eight studio albums later, they are still putting out amazing music.  I literally can't point to one album and say it's not worth listening to.  If you’ve never heard it though, Southern Rock Opera is a great introduction to the band and you can find the entire album on YouTube.  Below, is a link to an animated video of “Zip City”, the song I mention above.  

Should you want to hear a different album though, I would point you toward American Band, their latest record which, while released prior to his election, became a rallying cry to those frustrated by Donald Trump’s rise and the racial tensions that bubbled up to the surface.  

Even if you don't agree with the politics, you have to admire the way they frame the issues of gun violence and police brutality in modern day America.  Below is a link to "Ever South" from that album, a song where Patterson Hood sings about how no matter where you are, if you're from the American South, you bring that with you.

Next week we'll take a look at another concept album that's "off the radar" for most folks.  Until then, enjoy the link above and check out my Amazon author's page to download my novel The Wash and other stories.

See you next week!