THE BALLAD OF WES FREED
Remembering the artist who gave the band their distinctive visual signature
ON their recent tour the Driveby Truckers added a new song to their setlist, a quiet, sad, squirrelly number called “The Ballad Of Cecil Mccobb”. It’s a eulogy for their old friend Wes Freed, the Richmond-based artist and musician who had worked with the band for more than 20 years before his death in September 2022. He devised the band’s unofficial mascot, called the Cooleybird, a black squawking flamingo that haunts their album covers, tour posters,
T-shirts, stage backdrops, and countless fan tattoos. Freed was also one of the Truckers’ earliest boosters, hosting them at shows in Virginia and giving them a platform to tour other regions of the country. Without him it’s likely the band wouldn’t have lasted into the 2000s.
His death was both expected and sudden. He had been battling cancer for many months, but seemed to be winning. “We’d been worried sick about him for a year, but he had come out the other side,” says Patterson Hood. “He was doing really good. He was in the hospital for surgery and was literally getting dressed to come home when he died. It’s still so hard for me to wrap my head around.”
Hood wrote “The Ballad Of Cecil Mccobb” as a remembrance and a celebration, using Freed’s nickname in the title. “It’s full of his characters — the Moon Girls and even Hextar the Blood Possum. It sounds very true to Wes, I think, but it also sounds like the Truckers.” They cut the song right before heading out on tour and plan to release it as a single, featuring their cover of one of Freed’s own songs along with a booklet of his paintings.
“We can do this single because we have a definite vision about how to do it. It’s all about him. But when it comes time to make another record, I have no idea what will happen. I’m excited about there being a next record sometime, but I can’t imagine how it will go without him.”
people, I’d still have a pretty good time. But of course we’re going to the shows!”
It culminates on Saturday afternoon with a silent auction to benefit a local nonprofit called Nuçi’s Space, which provides inexpensive practice areas and free mental health services to local musicians. The Truckers have been involved since the beginning, but it’s the fans who donate art and memorabilia every year. In a makeshift gallery, the very first Truckers bumper sticker sits next to original paintings and handwritten setlists, signed books and test pressings. This year the fans raised more than $66,000 for the nonprofit – a new record. “Many years ago the band adopted us as their cause, and so did their fans,” says Dave Chamberlin, a special events coordinator at Nuçi’s Space. “The Truckers lead by example, and they’ve created a truly altruistic community. For one weekend you don’t have to question people’s motives. You know they’re acting out of kindness and generosity.”
Homecoming becomes a means of measuring the band’s impact every year, but this year in particular it feels like they’ve reached another crossroads, a point where they’re figuring out how to keep being the Truckers even as they hit their late fifties, even as they lose friends and collaborators. On the other hand, there’s a new wave of younger artists who look to the band as examples of how to age gracefully in rock’n’roll, how to make your mark over the long haul.
“They’re incomparable storytellers that rival the greatest, like Townes Van Zandt, Tom T Hall, and Vic Chesnutt,” says Karly Hartzman, frontwoman for the North Carolina band Wednesday, who’ve toured extensively with the Truckers and opened their Saturdaynight Homecoming show. “The most exciting bit of it is they’re still alive and I can talk to them and eat wings backstage with them after a show in Buffalo. A lot of our songwriting heroes are dead, assholes, or just terrible examples of how to behave in this industry. The Drive-by Truckers are none of those things. They just fucking do their thing and love music. They’re doing what I wanna do when I’m older.”
BACK at the 40 Watt in the early hours of Sunday morning, Homecoming is winding down. The Truckers have played nearly 30 songs in more than three hours, including covers of Alice Cooper’s
“I’m Eighteen” and Bruce Springsteen’s “State Trooper”. They’ve toasted two long-time Heathens who couldn’t make it this year. They’ve passed a bottle of tequila back and forth. They’ve no doubt flashed fans along the rail multiple times. Patterson has led the crowd in chanting “Fuck fear!” over and over before launching into “Angels & Fuselage” from Southern Rock Opera.
They don’t even leave the stage for an encore, but instead invite nearly everyone in Athens up there with them, including producer David Barbe, their tour manager, their entire road crew, each member of Wednesday and assorted locals. Hood shouts out “People Who Died”, a Jim Carroll Band cover that’s been on their setlist almost as long as they’ve been a band. Tonight it’s a celebration of everyone they’ve lost along the way, including Freed, and the song rapidly descends into a rip-roaring bacchanal. Everyone screams and flails at their guitars, Hood exhorting the crowd like a Baptist preacher and Jay Gonzalez running around the stage like a gremlin, stomping on pedals and detuning guitars as they’re being played.
Afterwards, the crowd is slow to disperse. They say their goodbyes, pose for final photos, promise to keep in touch and marvel at the show they’ve just witnessed. “What separates the Drive-by Truckers from almost any rock band is their commitment to wringing every possibility out of the moment in each of their songs,” observes Raucher. “It’s like watching a painter or sculptor approach their raw materials, but their raw material is just the space of the club.”
For the band – and especially for Hood and Cooley – Homecoming is a yearly reminder that they’ve got more things to say and more shows to play; more specifically, they’ve got an autumn tour to plan and another boxset to assemble, this time for 2003’s Decoration Day.
“I don’t know what would happen if I couldn’t do this thing I do,” says Hood. “For a while I was afraid I might never get to do it again. To have your whole identity wrapped up in this thing can be scary. It’s maybe not healthy, but you get a lot of people in the audience yelling along with you and it feels new.”
He admits they probably won’t be releasing new material any time soon, but the Truckers aren’t going anywhere for a while. “It feels like a big chapter is wrapping up for sure, but I don’t feel like we’re anywhere near done yet.”
The Complete Dirty South is released on June 16, 2023 via New West Records. Where The Devil Don’ t Stay, Stephen Deusner’s biography of the band, is published by University Of Texas Press