Best Record of 2001: Day 47
Good morning!
Today we’re taking a quick look at Drive By Truckers’ Southern Rock Opera.
The irony of a concept album about the “duality of the Southern thing” being released in the immediate fallout of 9/11 isn’t lost on me. Drive-By Truckers’ Southern Rock Opera is a concept album that kinda sorta follows the story of the fictional band Betamax Guillotine, which is loosely based on the real band Lynyrd Skynyrd.
That means it takes place in Alabama, and if you’ve ever been to Alabama, you know just how hot, humid, and angry a place can get. It’s a place where the air can kill you and, at the very least, influences every corner of your life. And in this universe, the Confederate flag, muscle cars, and Bear Bryant reign supreme.
Why bother recording a semi-fictional concept record focused on Southern identity and rock music’s place in it? For DBT, it was a way to delve into the South’s influence on American rock while at the same time reckoning with the stereotypes and skepticism that still plague this part of the country. If nothing else, using Lynyrd Skynyrd gave them a sort of scaffolding to work with. The first part starts in the late ‘80s and captures the supercharged existence of people just on the cusp of adulthood and those grappling with one that didn’t quite turn out as planned.
The Skynyrd theme is carried all the way to the final track, “Angels and Fuselage,” which takes on the plane crash the band was in and the one a bunch of them didn’t walk away from.
Or put another way, why not?
This is the band’s only double LP, and it uses all the runway to tell the story they wanted to tell—and the way they wanted to tell it. To my ear, it feels as ambitious as it does claustrophobic. A record made in a place where swamp coolers give their lives fighting a battle they were never gonna win, and where horsepower under your hood says as much about you as your family name.
Structured as a two-part story across its two discs, Southern Rock Opera is the record that put the band on the map and launched a thousand message boards. There are quotable lines around every bend and riffs that hit harder than a midsummer thunderstorm. It sounds as good on Alabama back roads as it does at a suburban barbecue, and while I’m not sure the cargo-shorts collective truly gets the message 100% of the time, it’s not for lack of trying.
Best tracks? Take your pick; there’s plenty of them. No one gets out of Zip City alive.
Bottom Line: This is up against Tricky’s Blowback LP. Shame really, as it’s a solid record that drew an awful seeding. The suburban dads are my people and bands like DBT are our totems. Southern Rock Opera for the win.
Any thoughts on either of these records? Agree/disagree with my take? Sound off in the comments!
Kevin Sent 