Drive-By Truckers' Southern Rock Opera gets even better with time

Southern Rock Opera, the 2001 breakthrough album from Drive-By Truckers, hangs suspended in time. Steeped in modern Southern folklore, the double album, which is getting an expanded deluxe reissue that releases on August 2, draws deeply of the past without succumbing to the trappings of nostalgia—a trick the Athens, Georgia-based band pulled off with vigor, empathy, and muscle. The Truckers didn’t play as if they were excavating the past, nor did they surf the wave of neo-garage rock emanating from the Midwest and East Coast early in the 2000s: they were too old, literary, and, well, Southern to be classified among the White Stripes and the Strokes, to name two American rock bands who released pivotal albums in 2001.

Drive-By Truckers may have released Southern Rock Opera in 2001 but the self-released double-album wasn’t among the marquee titles when it arrived in September. The Truckers were firmly an independent band at that moment, albeit one with some significant critical support. In 2000, Eric Weisbard called the group “the best underground rock and roll band in America” in his Spin review of the live Alabama Ass Whuppin’. In 2001, Southern Rock Opera impressed Robert Christgau enough to place it in the top 24 of his Dean’s List for Village Voice‘s annual Pazz & Jop critics poll, but it’d take another year for the record to show up on the overall list, a placement aided by a year of buzz and a re-release on Lost Highway Records in the summer of 2002.

To a certain extent, business mechanics were the driving factor in the slow build for Southern Rock Opera. Drive-By Truckers were flying well underneath the radar in Athens toward the end of the 1990s, playing an earthy rock & roll rooted in the underground tended and tilled by R.E.M. that nevertheless felt as if it owed more to the rebellious roar of Southern rock than the creeping mysticism of jangle-pop. Some of this certainly is due to Paterson Hood—who has co-led the Truckers with Mike Cooley since the early 1980s, when they were called Adam’s House Cat—being raised in a musical household. His father, David Hood, played sessions at the fabled FAME Studios and co-founded its offshoot Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, yet the roots Patterson displays through Southern Rock Opera owe more to what he absorbed growing up in the South. Particularly, he exhibits a deep fascination with Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Floridian rockers whose leader Ronnie Van Zant died in a plane crash on October 20, 1977, alongside guitarist Steve Gaines, singer Cassie Gaines, assistant road manager Dean Kilpatrick, and two pilots.

Lynyrd Skynyrd’s story provides the grist for Betamax Guillotine, the fictional band at the heart of Southern Rock Opera. The Truckers pair their mythologized spin on Skynyrd with stories of growing up in the South, a place where it’s often impossible to outrun the past and truth intermingles freely with fables. The band follows that same aesthetic throughout the album, blurring the line between memory and myth, creating a world where death feels as vibrant and present as life. “Days Of Graduation” provides an ideal keynote, recasting a Southern urban legend of a teenage couple suffering a fatal car crash the day before high school graduation; when the paramedics find them, “Free Bird” can still be heard wailing on the stereo.

The real Skynyrd pops up all the time throughout Southern Rock Opera, nearly as often as the invented Betamax Guillotine. “Ronnie and Neil” chronicles the relationship between Van Zant and Neil Young, a mutual admiration crossed with a feud that culminated in a swipe at the folk-rocker in Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama.” Van Zant shows up again as a subject in “The Three Great Alabama Icons,” along with the segregationist politician George Wallace, who is also the subject of his own song not much later. The looming legacies of Southern rock and racism fuel a large portion of Southern Rock Opera, a history that’s given gravity by the ambling thunder of the Truckers. A key to the record’s success is that it’s as visceral as it is cerebral; there’d be no reason to explore its mysteries if it didn’t provide that sonic rush.

Those rich, contradictory Southern enigmas as articulated by Hood, Cooley, and, occasionally, Rob Malone—a guitarist who penned a pair of songs on Southern Rock Opera; he left during the album’s supporting tour, replaced by a young Jason Isbell—are what gave the album its mystique in the early 2000s. If anything, the reckoning with how the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and the New South of the 1970s curdled into reactionary politics in the 1980s sounds even more poignant today in its new expanded iteration. 

The new edition of Southern Rock Opera isn’t quite the same as the version released in the early 2000s. It rejiggers the sequencing somewhat—originally part of the first CD, “Birmingham” and “Moved” are shuffled off to a third LP also featuring the unreleased “Mystery Song;” the flip side contains three live tracks from November 2001, along with the unreleased jape “Don’t Cockblock The Rock.” The very title of the latter emphasizes a sense of humor that can get lost amidst the talk of Southern myths and legends, yet the slightly resequenced record winds up emphasizing how Southern Rock Opera is all about the bigger picture. Individual moments provided catharsis and transcendence—the majestic closer “Angels and Fuselage” ties those two emotions together—but this album is indeed operatic, a grandly romantic adventure where the shared journey is what resonates. 

Listening to the new reissue, it’s hard not to think about the changes of the last twenty years, particularly the rise of reactionary politics. Whether it’s the memories of the mid-twentieth century or the actuality of living in the Y2K era, the South documented on Southern Rock Opera no longer exists. The passage of time hasn’t robbed the album of its potency yet it’s added a poignancy that can sometimes seem extraordinarily moving.