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It feels both right and wrong to describe 2003’s Decoration Day as the moment it all came together for the Drive-By Truckers. The Alabama-rooted, Athens, Georgia-based band had dropped Southern Rock Opera—a narratively audacious account of the life and death of Lynyrd Skynyrd and a reckoning with the toxic groundwater of Southern pride, the kind of double LP invariably described as “sprawling,” and a magnum opus by any yardstick—just two years earlier. That one was their third studio album, but it demanded attention and breached regional containment the way 1998’s Gangstabilly and 1999’s Pizza Deliverance hadn’t quite, landing in the top-25 range of the Village Voice’s 2002 Pazz & Jop critics’ poll just above Sigur Ros, 2ManyDJs, Andrew WK and Steve Earle, just short of the top of the semi-pops.
By the time that list hit the stands the Truckers were touring with a hellbent 22-year-old college dropout from Greenville named Jason Isbell on third guitar; within three days of joining the band, it’s said, he’d written what became the title track on Decoration Day, the first of three albums he’d make with the Truckers before his officially-described-as-amicable departure was announced in 2007. Isbell came out of the gate absurdly strong for a then-nobody, but Decoration arguably contained the best songs any of the Truckers had written to that point: Isbell’s instantly-immortal “Outfit,” Hood’s “Heathens,” “(Something’s Got To) Give Pretty Soon,” and “My Sweet Annette,” and guitarist Mike Cooley’s “Marry Me” and “Pin Hits the Shell.” These things aren’t empirical; the best Drive-By Truckers album is whichever one you’re listening to the loudest at any given moment. But—with all due respect to the many ghosts of Lynyrd Skynyrd and the majesty of the Opera’s “Let There Be Rock”—I know which of the two albums I’ve reached for most often this decade, and which one sounds the most like a skeleton key that unlocked doors the likes of Wednesday. and Jake Lenderman are still walking through today.
On December 2, when the Truckers perform on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, they'll be joined onstage for the first time in nearly twenty years by Isbell, whose post-DBT redemption arc—from self-destruct mode to sobriety, solo stardom, and Scorsese—you may have read a thing or two about. Tomorrow New West Records will release The Definitive Decoration Day, a four-LP (or 3-CD) box set that includes the original album remixed and remastered, a 40-page book featuring unpublished photos and a new essay by Stephen Deusner (author of the authoritative band biography Where the Devil Don’t Stay: Traveling the South with the Drive-By Truckers), plus the never-before-heard Heathens Live at Flicker Bar, Athens, GA—June 20, 2002, an unearthed recording of the audibly-hammered Truckers playing fourteen of Decoration Day’s fifteen songs during a rollicking late-night acoustic set at a 75-cap Athens club almost one year before the album dropped.
Today, we’re privileged to bring you two tastes of what’s in store—an exclusive excerpt from Stephen Deusner’s liner-note essay, and a chance to listen to Heathens Live a little early, which you can do right here. Chances are you’ve never heard anybody have this good a time playing a suite of bleak songs about men and women watching their options shrink down to nothing; as Mike Cooley tells Deusner in the text below, “I remember that crowd being wild, but the wildest people were up on that stage.” —ALEX PAPPADEMAS
“You’re all just a bunch of goddamned heathens!” Patterson Hood yells, mid-song, at the friends and fans crammed into Flicker Theatre & Bar, a venue squarely embedded in the townie part of Athens, Georgia, on a hot Thursday night in June 2002. That word, heathens, is not yet associated with this band of self-proclaimed rednecks, nor does it yet describe the Drive-By Truckers’ most rabid fans. Their annual hometown shows at the 40 Watt are not yet known as HeAthens Homecoming. Hell, even the song “Heathens,” half of which was written on a trampoline at Hood's ex-wife’s hairdresser’s house and all of which remains one of his best tunes, hasn’t even been released. This is the first time they’ve played it in public, but the crowd understands that he means it as the highest compliment. When the song ends, they respond in kind, roaring their approval loudly. It may not be the first time Patterson has called his audience “a bunch of goddamned heathens,” but tonight it sounds like the start of a tradition.
Up onstage with him tonight are the rest of the Truckers, still road-weary but in high cotton nevertheless. Hood and fellow singer-songwriter-guitarists Mike Cooley and “Nearly Famous” Jason Isbell have left their amps back at home and are strumming and picking and punishing acoustics. Drummer Brad Morgan has half his kit but hits just as hard as usual. Only bassist Earl “Bird Dog” Hicks is plugged in and amped up. “The Flicker’s too tiny to do an electric set, especially as loud as we were back then,” Hood says, looking back nearly 25 years later. “It was our triumphant homecoming, so we were good and liquored up and in a very celebratory mood, and we were playing mostly for friends of ours. It was loose but good.”
Even (mostly) unelectrified, even drunk as skunks, they’re still loud and rowdy as they run through most of their just recorded, not-yet-released fourth album, Decoration Day. And the audience hangs on every lyric and riff: they sound like they’re actually listening to these songs, as though they grasp the importance of this moment. They’re quiet during the songs, loud between them, shouting out questions and curses and requests directly to the band. “I remember that crowd being wild,” says Cooley, “but the wildest people were up on that stage.”
The Truckers have reason to celebrate, and they have reason to play a bunch of new material tonight. Earlier this evening they cleaned up at the Flagpole Athens Music Awards, winning Band/Group of the Year, Favorite Album Cover Art, and Album of the Year for their 2001 breakout, Southern Rock Opera. And, just a few days after their Flicker show, they’re booked to play AthFest, their first time taking the main stage. This is a big moment for the band, who have weathered hard times, endless miles, and a recent seismic lineup change to find something like sustaining success. They’ve just signed a contract with a major label, just finished tracking their new album, and are now finally being feted by the local music community.
And they have a new member, 23-year-old Isbell, young enough to be their kid. Before he became a Trucker, he’d never been on tour before, had never had to win over a roomful of strangers with nothing but his guitar and a good song, had never had to figure out what to do with all that down time. He was wide-eyed, wet behind the ears, open to whatever came his way. “I was just excited about everything,” he says of this early era in his long career. “I felt like I’d joined a gang, and I was trying to experience as much of everything as quickly as possible. It’s like that Gillian Welch song, ‘Wrecking Ball,’ where she sings, ‘I took every secret I’ve ever known and headed for the wall.’ That’s exactly how it felt to me at that point in time. I was just running as hard as I could with everything I had at my disposal.” He wasn’t wasting any time, though: Inspired by Hood and Cooley’s tales of Southerners at loose ends, he had already written songs that would be standouts on the new album, “Outfit” and “Decoration Day.”
But for every blessing there’s a curse. The band are worn out from long months on the road touring Southern Rock Opera, where they’ve hand-sold enough of the double CDs to draw the interest of major labels, but they’re already sick of those songs. “We still got that damned rock opera to contend with,” Hood complains to the crowd, but there’s a wink in his voice, as though he knows they’re lucky beyond words. Still, all they really want to play are the new songs. This late-night gig at Flicker allows the Truckers to cleanse their palates, so to speak, at least with something other than whiskey, and they attack these songs the way a starving man attacks a turkey leg. At the end of the night, there’s nothing left but bone. “We used to do a lot of house parties and stuff like that, back before living-room shows became a thing,” says Morgan today. “So we were used to doing this kind of stripped-down, acoustic thing. I remember being really drunk that night and I remember the show being really good, and that’s about all I remember.”
They run through almost all of the album with a cocky and charming bravado, playing some of their most beloved songs—“Sink Hole,” “Hell No, I Ain’t Happy,” “My Sweet Annette,” “Outfit,” “Marry Me,” “The Deeper In,” and of course “Heathens”—for the first time in front of an actual audience. These acoustic performances crackle with a different energy than the familiar studio versions. Hood's new compositions “Do It Yourself” (one of two songs about the suicide of their old friend and former Adam’s House Cat bandmate John Cahoon) and Cooley’s “Marry Me” (one of two songs about the tragic death of their old friend Chris Quillen) are more punk than country or Southern rock, with a pent-up skinny-tie jitteriness. “Decoration Day” almost sounds like Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, thanks to Hicks’ ominously descending bassline, and the coda comes out of nowhere, surprising even the band themselves with its twisted briarpatch of bent notes and errant riffs.
The Truckers might have been most famously aligned with Lynyrd Skynyrd, the subject of Southern Rock Opera, but at Flicker they don’t sound much like that band at all. In fact, they sound mostly like themselves. “That’s the thing about our band,” says Hood. “We never really thought of ourselves as a Southern rock band. We made a record about that, but that was never quite us. We loved a lot of different stuff. I was obsessed with these old-timey country records and hip-hop albums when we started the band, and I think you can hear R.E.M. and the Replacements in some of our songs.”
Tonight at Flicker they shed their “Southern rock” identity, if only for one boozy, boisterous night among the heathens, and they offer a first glimpse of their fourth and maybe their best album (it’s this writer’s go-to). Named after the Southern tradition of commemorating the deceased and departed, Decoration Day beautifully expands the scope and depth of their Dirty South simply by getting personal, by drilling into their own experiences, by documenting their own disappointments and regrets and compulsions and divorces. They’re telling their own stories, some half-remembered and others too painful to forget.
“Back then we felt like we were on top of the world for the first time in our lives,” Hood says, “but Decoration Day was an acknowledgement of who all and what all we had lost along the way, whether it was the family farm that you gave up, or the guy who was supposed to be in your band, or the divorces. You lost a lot when you’re chasing your dreams. All of that is on this record.”
Excerpted from Definitive Decoration Day by Stephen Deusner. Reprinted with the permission of New West Records and the author.