Where the Devil Don't Stay: Traveling the South With the Drive-By Truckers by Stephen Deusner

Author:Stephen Deusner [Deusner, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: music, Individual Composer & Musician
ISBN: 9781477318041
Google: lYsyzgEACAAJ
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2021-09-07T23:51:44.464759+00:00

Back to the Shoals

It was not the homecoming they were hoping for.

By fall 2001 the Drive-By Truckers had hand-sold enough copies of Southern Rock Opera that they were finally getting serious label consideration, including interest from Lost Highway Records, a subsidiary of Universal Music Group and home to Lucinda Williams, Lyle Lovett, and the best-selling O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack. Journalists and critics were starting to pay attention, and Spin magazine wanted to do a feature on the band, which looked to be their first bit of mainstream press. The magazine was sending down to the Shoals a photographer named Mark Heithoff and a writer named Eric Weisbard (a prominent rock critic and later founder of the annual Pop Conference in Seattle), but its staff wanted to center the article on a concert. Could the band book a show someplace in their old stomping grounds?

Well, no. Many of the same old blue laws were in place, still prohibiting local alcohol sales. Florence had gone wet, but Lauderdale County and most of the Shoals were still dry and still a no-man’s-land for bars and clubs. That meant pickin’s were as slim as ever for the Truckers, who were determined to play here, determined to be portrayed as a Shoals band, determined to showcase North Alabama in this first bit of major press. Maybe it was only because the place figured so prominently on their new album, or maybe Patterson Hood still wanted to put his hometown on the map. They had played a local karaoke club once or twice, but the owner refused to book them again, despite the free press and the crowds they were beginning to attract. So the band scheduled another local club, but it closed down for good just a few days before the show. With too little time to rebook anywhere else—and, really, with no other places to rebook—they turned to their friend Dick Cooper, who had served as a resource for Southern Rock Opera: a jack of all trades, “a sort of technical adviser, historian, guru, sounding board, mediator, mood elevator, assistant engineer, and coproducer,” as Patterson puts it. Could they hold the gig out at his house on the lake?

Cooper lived in a big A-frame house out by Wilson Lake, which was a hangout for local musicians and those just passing through. He had two housemates. One was Scott Boyer, who in the early ’70s had fronted a band called Cowboy and scored a modest hit with the song “Please Be with Me” (which Eric Clapton famously covered on his 1974 album 461 Ocean Boulevard). The other was a young bass player named Shonna Tucker, barely drinking age, from Killen, a small town east of Florence. She had a close friend named Jason Isbell who was over there more often than not; everybody thought they were dating, but they were then only close friends. That would come later. “Jason was always over there,” says Tucker. “We would all sit around, drink whiskey, and swap songs.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.