Southern Discomfort
The Muscle Shoals rockers’ magnum opus, now bigger and even better. By John Mulvey.
Drive-By Truckers ★★★★ The Complete Dirty South
A TOWN where all the car dealerships burn to the ground over a few months. A redneck sheriff who takes on Southern crime syndicates, only for his wife to be murdered, his house to be blown up and, ultimately, his own life to be ended in a mysterious car crash. Men who can pick 400 pounds of cotton in a day. Moonshiners galore. A cast, in general, “Mean and strong like liquor/ Mean and strong like fear.”
If the Drive-By Truckers planned to challenge stereotypes when they released the original Dirty South in 2004, initial impressions suggest they weren’t entirely successful. In the songs of Patterson Hood, Mike Cooley and a precocious Jason Isbell, their territory of Alabama and beyond is marked by lawlessness, by toxic masculinity. The first line on the album finds Cooley remembering, “My Daddy played poker on a stump in the woods back in his younger days.” From there, it only goes South.
The Drive-By Tr uckers, though, have always been a lot smarter and more nuanced than they first appear: “The hardest thing for a redneck to do is embrace his inner Springsteen,” Cooley wryly told me in 2005, sat on the Truckers’ tour bus with an exceptionally large bottle of Jack Daniel’s, a living embodiment of their mission to take Southern clichés, interrogate the context and detail behind them, and eventually even subvert them.
A tricky job, and it’s one that requires a lot of words to elucidate. When The Dirty South was originally released, a spat between band and record company meant this fifth Truckers album came out in truncated form; an injustice that hasn’t prevented many of the band’s fans – and this writer – seeing it as their finest. Now, though, The Complete Dirty South presents the Truckers’ vision in its entirety: reordered, with three more excellent songs, copious sleevenotes, and some remixing and updated vocals that never detract from the authenticity of the project.
It remains, too, a great roots rock LP that showcases the band’s short-lived but ferocious triple threat of Cooley, Hood and Isbell on singing, songwriting and guitar duties. Cooley’s opening Where The Devil Don’t Stay is still thrilling, one of the best examples of the Truckers as Liberal Skynyrd. But it’s the empathy that lingers strongest, especially when Isbell, rapidly learning his craft, takes the reins. TVA is one of the new additions, a soulful Isbell song that articulates the changes dambuilding made to his family and his Alabaman community.
In this way, The Dirty South works as lived scholarship, where personal experience illuminates wild yarns and historical indictments. On album highlight Danko/ Manuel, Isbell underpins his paean to The Band with a growing awareness of the damage wrought on him by a touring life. “A little rest might do me good,” he notes, but it would take Isbell three more turbulent years to leave the Drive-By Truckers, and another five to sober up. As many Truckers protagonists would testify, reckless lives are not always the easiest things to escape.