The past year has been a tumultuous one for Drive-By Truckers. First, in a protracted ordeal, the band parted ways with guitarist Jason Isbell, who now seems on track for a successful solo career. Then, in early summer, the group had to assuage the apprehensions of soul legend Bettye LaVette, with whom they had been teamed as a backing band for the singer’s latest album.
Happily, though, the year concluded on a positive note for the Athens, Georgia-based Truckers. Having been released to great fanfare, the LaVette album went on to land on several Best Album lists for 2007. Then, in the fall, the Truckers set about making their first album since Isbell’s departure.
Titled Brighter Than Creation’s Dark, the new release should put to rest any fears that the Truckers’ chemistry has been disrupted. Unleashing a heady mix of fuzzed-up riff rock, rootsy acoustic shuffles, and Crazy Horse-like guitar excursions into the wild blue yonder, the album boasts a crazy-quilt ambition reminiscent of the Stones albums of the early ’70s. In the following interview, main Trucker Patterson Hood talks about Isbell's departure, the making of Creation’s Dark, and his ambivalence about the whole notion of “Southern rock.”
The band endured a lot of turmoil during the past year. Given that, did the sessions for the new album go smoothly?
Actually they did. There was little discussion about anything. It all happened very fast. We recorded 18 of the 19 songs in the first 10 days. We had been working on several of them live. We did a three-week acoustic tour—something we had never done before—about a month prior to going into the studio, and tested a lot of the songs in front of the audiences. By the time the tour ended we had about 12 songs worked up.
The circumstances of Jason Isbell’s departure have been couched in cryptic terms. Can you elaborate on the reasons he left, and how that affected the direction of the music?
Whether it’s a personal relationship or a musical relationship, things sometimes just run their course. His contributions—especially on Decoration Day and Dirty South—are just phenomenal. He wrote some of the best songs on those albums, and his playing was fantastic. But by the time we made A Blessing and a Curse, it had become a situation of, how much can you compromise, in order to make something work, without things sounding compromised? That album skated that line. And then when we went out and toured behind the album for all of 2006, the personal stuff got worse. It didn’t make for a happy year, for anybody.
The other thing is, we got busy with the Bettye LaVette project, and that was going to conflict with Jason’s schedule for putting out his record. Jason had been sitting on his solo record forever. A lot of it was recorded years ago, and he really wanted to release it and tour behind it. One thing led to another, until it just seemed a natural time to move forward, separately. None of this is a put-down of him, at all. Things just happen. We just grew apart.
You mentioned the Bettye LaVette album. Did you take anything away from that project that carried over to the new Truckers album?
Yes, a lot. For starters, there was the involvement of Spooner Oldham. We’ve known Spooner forever, and have worked with him just a bit in the past. We brought him in for a day when we were making Decoration Day, to play on one song. That was a great experience, and we always talked about wanting to do something more substantial with him. When the opportunity to work with Bettye LaVette came, it was natural to call on him to be involved. He bridges the gap between her history and our history. And of course he and my Dad [legendary bassist David Hood] are contemporaries. They’ve played together off and on for decades.
Anything else?
Strictly on the music side of the scale, on the LaVette record I’m fingerpicking the electric guitar throughout. My resolution for 2007 was to become proficient at that. That was the first chance I got to apply that technique. And that, in and of itself, gave a different slant to my guitar sound. Also there’s the fact we’ve always recorded our albums with the attitude that the song is king. Whatever we do live is tossed out the window when we go into the studio. It’s all about what serves the song. That’s why there’s often a big difference between how the records sound, and how we sound live. It’s fun to do a live record, and a lot of our stuff is recorded live-in-the-studio, but still, the approach we take is to let the song dictate the amount of guitar—or whatever. On this album we took that approach to the next level as well.
Your primary guitars are two Les Pauls, right?
Yes. I've got a fairly new one, one that's just a couple of years old. And I've also got a '69, that's really my baby. They’re both Goldtop Deluxes. The ’69 model was a gift, a really nice wedding present from a friend. I had never owned a guitar of that caliber. I came up playing pretty crappy guitars, although a couple of years prior to getting the Les Paul I had moved up to an SG.
What about the Les Paul appeals to you?
We tune down a whole step, and the weight of the Les Paul is really conducive to that. Most guitars don't take to "tuning down" very well. Tuning down a whole step, on most guitars, makes the strings "flappy" and makes them go out of tune. The Les Paul was the first guitar I owned that could handle that, and still sound really good. Getting the second Les Paul was an extension of having the first one. I love the '69 so much that going on tour, and putting that guitar on a plane, became a traumatic experience. I didn't want to risk it getting stolen. So I got the second guitar as a backup.
Beyond the fact that you can tune down a whole step, what else about the Les Paul appeals to you?
I love the tone, and I like the dynamics—the sensitivity having to do with volume. If I play harder it plays louder, and if I play soft, it plays quieter. I feel I have control of the dynamics, according to how I actually play, more so than with other electrics. I still play the SG occasionally as well. It's a great guitar. But unlike a lot of players I tend not to switch guitars much when playing live. Unless I break a string, I tend to play the same guitar throughout the whole show.
Let's touch on the concept of "Southern rock." Do you consider Drive-By Truckers a Southern rock band?
When people say we're a Southern rock band, I think, "Well, we wrote an album about a Southern rock band, and used that as a palette for telling that particular story." Telling that story served as a way to explore certain themes—like Civil Rights, and George Wallace, and so forth. For the next couple of albums we continued to experiment with similar directions, but I never considered that to be the end-all of who we were. Sometimes it became frustrating. As I said before, everything is about serving the song. If a song calls for a certain instrumentation, that’s the instrumentation we're doing to serve that song. The fact that we got lumped into the "Southern rock" category was a strange by-product of the Southern Rock Opera project.
But obviously you are a fan of bands like Lynyrd Skynyrd.
Yes, but that doesn't necessarily mean I'm a huge fan of Southern rock, or all Southern rock. There are certainly some exceptional records that are considered part of that genre, but generally the ones I like, to this day, are albums that sort of transcend that tag. They happened to be Southern rock albums, but that's not really what drew me to them in the first place. What drew me to Lynyrd Skynyrd in the band's heyday was the quality of the songwriting. When you look at those albums from purely a songwriting perspective, it’s an amazing body of work. Van Zant did some things that to this day I couldn’t fathom being able to pull off. How he was able to keep things so simple—to pull that off without ever talking down to his audience, or dumbing down—is a beautiful thing. There’s nothing dumb about those lyrics. He was able to take on some pretty big issues, or provocative ideas, and challenge his listeners and the band's audience without ever seeming to be doing that. I find that really impressive.
How far into the future do you try to look? Do you try to envision where the Truckers might be three years from now?
I'm about to start writing again. I feel some stuff brewing—some new songs. And once I finish them we'll definitely record them. But I don't like to think too far ahead.
We do our best work when we do things in our own way, even if that way doesn't necessarily go along with conventional wisdom. So far we really haven't made a wrong move. As long as we're running with things in a positive way, I don't see any reason why we can't continue in the same direction.