Drive-By Truckers back on the road with new songs about old times
Adam’s House Cat didn’t have a Whisky a Go Go, CBGB or Fillmore to cut its teeth at. Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley’s ’80s indie rock outfit, Adam’s House Cat, had Club XIII – a smalltown Southern bar that mostly booked cover bands.
Nearly four decades after Hood and Cooley’s first band played the bar, their current band, ace rock ’n’ roll journeymen Drive-By Truckers, look back at the bar with a smile and wink on new single “Welcome 2 Club XIII.”
“The song has a sarcastic kind of fondness for the place,” Hood told the Herald ahead of the Truckers’ Thursday show at Royale. He added with a laugh, “They had Roman numerals in their name because they were classy.”
“When we started out as House Cat in ’85 we were literally the only band playing original music in town,” Hood said of his hometown, Muscle Shoals, Ala. “There was really no place for us to play, but the guy that ran Club XIII liked our band so he’d throw us a Wednesday night every now and then or let us open for some hair metal cover band and slide us a couple hundred dollars.”
It wasn’t rock ’n’ roll glory but it was a start. And starts are where Hood gets a lot of his most tender and tragic material.
With politics and hate dominating the news for the last half decade, the Truckers got swept up into the zeitgeist. Hood has never shied away from songs that addressed contemporary ills, but during the Trump presidency he leaned into the moments — sample song titles include “Babies in Cages,” “Thoughts and Prayers” and “The New OK.”
“I was ready to take a break from writing about current events,” he said. “We ended up with an unintended trilogy of political polemic records. We wrote what we felt we had to write.”
For the next album, also called “Welcome 2 Club XIII,” Hood spends more time looking back at his past, not always with fondness. Due in June, the set has a wistful quality, a kind of sentimentality tempered by the burden of adulthood.
It begins with “The Driver,” a stomping fever dream in which Hood describes the intense experience of driving around the rural South as a teen and then transitions to images of seeing the mountains of Montana for the first time from the windows of the tour van on an early Truckers’ trek. The LP closes with “Wilder Days,” a ballad of lost youth somewhere between plaintive and nostalgic.
“‘The Driver’ comes from those experiences of driving around aimlessly late at night probably doing things that shouldn’t be encouraged at this point in time,”
Hood said. “But those drives were often what led to a moment of clarity or epiphany that would lead me to do something like dropping out of college to form Adam’s House Cat.”
“‘Wilder Days’ is an acknowledgment of realizing that you’re not invincible,” he continued. “From the start I knew the song
would close the record like I knew that when I wrote ‘The Driver’ that it would be the opening song.”
In between the tracks, “Welcome 2 Club XIII,” runs through what fans have come to expect from a Truckers record: regret, longing, joy, fury, overdriven guitars, soul mixed with Southern rock, Americana
spiked with echoes of grunge, and lots of starts — origin stories of well-spent and misspent youth.
The current tour will run through all that stuff too by putting new songs next to old ones, favorites and forgotten nuggets.
“We don’t use a set list, we just decide the first song and go so there’s an element of
chaos to our shows,” Hood said. “We’re thinking about the new stuff and what fits with it. We’re still pulling songs from the trilogy. … We had 15 months of touring booked and it all went to (expletive) so the shows will be celebratory. I know that.”