Southern rock opera

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I’m addicted to Ticketmaster. It’s a rather horrible addiction. My bartenders don’t charge me a five dollar service fee just so I can have a beer. Heck, I get special privileges just because they know that I am the bar’s profit margin. Ticketmaster rakes me over the coals every time and thanks me by offering me a chance at getting backstage passes to Kenny Chesney, which would be good only if they came with the opportunity to knee Kenny Chesney in the groin.

Basically I go to a lot of concerts. Some, like Wilco, are for bands that I have been following for a decade and have every note they’ve ever recorded. Last night was a little different. Last night I went to see Drive By Truckers, a band that I had heard incredible things about but had never actually seen. Or possibly even listened to. I think I may have heard a song of theirs once. In my mind, that’s enough to drive out to Lawrence.

(In a driving rainstorm no less. It’s always fun to be driving on a road you can’t technically see. I did pass one semi that was lying on its side on the side of the road. Police and ambulance were already there, as was a local news crew featuring a reporter who looked like she would rather not be out in the rain.)

Drive By Truckers are known as a southern rock band. That is how critics will describe you after you release a two disc rock opera based on Lynyrd Skynyrd. The band isn’t just a quasi tribute to the Van Zandts, their music is a lot deeper than that. I was really impressed by the lyrics, which were out of this world at times. For a loud show (and I was next to the sound board where the guy had a dB meter with him) featuring a band with interesting facial hair, you would not expect lyrics that could really be described as poetic in the tragic southern Faulknerian sense of the term.

Two things that will stay with me from the show. First off, the band took the stage with a bottle of Jack Daniels. I don’t think that’s a first for me. The fact that before they started the set they handed the bottle amongst themselves and all downed swigs from it was impressive. Continuing to pass it around during the set was even more so. By the end of the set the band was lit but seemed to improve as they went along.

The second part was that they had a three guitar attack that just blew me away. Now as much as I’m a music critic (at least in my own mind) I am not big on the technical aspects of music. I’ve always explained it as I’m a writer so I can understand how challenging it is to write meaningful lyrics. I can’t play guitar so the difference between bad guitar playing and good and amazing really isn’t that big in my mind. But this was out of this world good. I would actually watch their hands to try to figure out who was playing which part. It wasn’t “two guys strum, one guy solos.” You basically had three solos going on simultaneously and it worked. I really wish I could have seen them when they still had Jason Isbell in the band. That must have been insane.

Great show, really glad I went. Not the typical Wednesday night and I missed trivia but sometimes you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do. Have a great weekend everyone.