plorentz's Full Review: The Dirty South [Digipak] by Drive-By Truckers
In the fall of 1997, I moved from my beloved Wisconsin to Savannah, Georgia for a financially abbreviated stint as a grad student. As a lifelong Midwesterner, I’d cultivated a sort of fascination with the South, the kind of bemused, academic half-interest in its stories, its geography, its culture and its people that only comes from a quiet, underlying disdain; I’d read a lot of Faulkner, and I loved (and still love) a lot of the “southern gothic” bands of the late 80s – the Connells, drivin’ n’ cryin’, Guadalcanal Diary – but I felt a certain superiority to it all, a comfortable removal. Like an entomologist who has to suffocate a butterfly if only to get a better look at its beauty, my interest in the South was necessarily linked to my own semi-unconscious contempt for it.
Until one July afternoon seven years ago, as I spent four hours on a Trailways bus traveling from Macon to Savannah, and saw the place firsthand, up close and personal. Heading out of the wooded hills of northern Georgia across the hot, flat fields of the state’s gut, where it seemed like everything was covered in clay dust, and even the cracked asphalt of the highway had a funky red tint, I felt this was the farthest away from home I had ever been – not just in terms of geographical miles – but also, well, in terms of everything. As the bus gradually coughed up the remainder of its human cargo in places called “Vidalia” and “Pembroke”, leaving me increasingly alone in my back-of-the-bus seat, I began to understand the power of the place, and just how bogus my supposed natural Midwestern superiority was.
Maybe I’d just heard one (hundred) too many hometown jukebox heroes drunkenly shouting the words to “Sweet Home Alabama” at the Log Cabin Tavern, but as I almost reluctantly got off the bus in downtown Savannah, I’d realized that I had wholly misunderstood the South, in that I seemed to think that the South (or anyplace, really) could be understood, and thus, smugly dismissed: Awwh, they’re just a bunch of illiterate, inbred bigots, or Awwh, they’re still fighting the Civil War down there, or… Whatever.
I didn’t like the South any more as the Milwaukee skyline crept back into my view on the return trip; in fact, I really hated it. But I had a much greater respect for it too.
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I arrive at a new album by the Drive-By Truckers with the same sense of ambivalence. Truth be told, the pan-Dixie quintet (of real truck drivers, by the way) represent musically everything about the south that makes me not want to live there. Not only are their songs as confrontational as one of their previous album titles - Alabama Ass-Whuppin’ - might suggest; but they’re soaked through with ghosts and legends; and perhaps their greatest offense (or strength, or virtue, depending on where you’re coming from) is that they so whole-heartedly believe in them. Though some of our country’s greatest firebreathing Christian zealots have made the South their grand international headquarters, a completely separate, and entirely secular, and uniquely southern mythology has sprung up alongside them – one that outlines just as many rules, rituals, plagues and punishments, heroes, villains, and prophets as the Old Testament itself.
This is where the Drive-By Truckers newest album, The Dirty South, comes from.
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I remember an indignant discussion I had with one of my fellow students, about how she and her husband couldn’t get a decent bottle of Merlot in Alabama. But, then, there was also that guy at the gay bar who, in between well-rehearsed and oft-recited tales of who slept with who, and who shot who in the head as they slept, spoke so lovingly and poetically of Savannah - talking about how the only way to live in the city was to rub its belly and make it purr - that I felt like I was being seduced by a grim, gossipy travelogue.
But, you don’t really need a narrator in Savannah. The stories are simply part of the air that you breathe. You may not know them, but you can always feel them; and you really can’t escape from them.
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The Drive-By Truckers are storytellers. Last year’s Decoration Day focused primarily on intimate, ambiguous and complex relationships between people, like a brother and sister both serving prison sentences for producing four babies from their incestuous union, or a son who denounces his father and the foolish family feud that got him killed; or a man who keeps a gun in his closet so he’ll stay true to his wife (who would most certainly use it on him if he didn’t). On the other hand, the songs of The Dirty South are larger, almost canonical in scale, regional in scope.
Where the stories of Decoration Day were mostly the kind that don’t get told outside a close, closed circle of family or friends, the kinds of stories which only get repeated in whispers, in dark corners, over meticulously wrought hors d’oeuvres at a funeral dinner; the stories of The Dirty South are the kind that everyone knows, the kind that shape the identity of a county or a town.
Stories how hard-working men inevitably get replaced by machines (“The Day John Henry Died”); and how patriotic, god-fearing family men often get sent off to die on battlefields in foreign lands, but rich actors who idealize war on the silver screen never do (“The Sands of Iwo Jima”); or how great Sun Records was, even if Sam Phillips was a gawd-damned sum’bitch (“Carl Perkins’ Cadillac”); or how, suddenly, everyone in the county seems to be getting cancer, and nobody outside the county much cares.
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And there were all these palatial homes with their grand flowering gardens, all this flora and all the shadows and the salty smell of the Savannah River, all the Spanish moss hanging from the ancient trees that shaded the city’s many squares, memorializing the great generals of the War Between the States; on one side of the square, street people congregate around a bench, and on the other side, there’s a wedding party having their picture taken, the groom in a slick, military dress uniform. Even as the clouds are speeding up and getting darker overhead.
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In a song called “Tornadoes” Patterson Hood sings about the “the night all the shit went down” in that awe-struck, reverential tone of bewilderment people use when they speak of such things - And I hear that missing trucker ended up in Kansas (or maybe it was Oz) - amidst thunderous piano chords, and verses that trudge along like a newly homeless family surveying their personal wreckage the morning after, stepping slowly and deliberately so as not to miss some personal treasure, something that might still mean something to them: I swear. It sounded like a train.
Like Athens, Georgia’s drivin’ n’ cryin’ before them, the Drive-By Truckers attempt to reconcile the rumbling anthemic arena rock of their heroes Lynyrd Skynyrd, with the thoughtful, melodic balladry and social comment of R.E.M. And they do it with uncontested honesty, intelligence, and energy. There’s not much out there right now that rocks quite as hard as the opening “Where the Devil Don’t Stay” and there’s nothing quite as heartbreakingly lovely and mournful as Hood’s meditation on one of rock music’s forgotten casualties “Danko / Manuel” and there’s nothing quite as infuriating, stubborn, and, well, damned scary, as the charging rocker “Never Gonna Change”, a horrifying (yet, fiercely contagious) eruption of rage, defiance, and unabashed xenophobia:
Daddy used to empty out his shotgun shells and fill them with black-eyed peas
He’d aim real low and tear out your ankles or rip right through your knees
With fourteen songs, coming in at well over an hour, The Dirty South is expansive, and seemingly endless, but there are really no wasted moments. Each song stakes out its own territory on the album, and nothing feels like filler. In fact, it’s the album’s near-infinity (in addition, perhaps, to the non-evolutionary nature of the band itself) that empowers and unifies it most: there ain’t much difference in the man I wanna be and the man I really am…
We ain’t never gonna change.
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People like to talk about Southern Hospitality, but I mostly felt threatened by the place. I didn’t like how quick people were to strike up a conversation with me, and how immediately they sensed I was a foreigner. It weirded me out how extreme wealth and extreme poverty could live on either side of the same narrow street. And it weirded me out even more that such a place could be so unspeakably beautiful.
I remember walking one Wednesday evening along Water Street – a place my landlord ominously described as “dark” – having inadvertently gotten off at the wrong busstop; knowing, on one level, that this is a place I should not be, that this place is dangerous - but simultaneously feeling a sense of awe walking by the storefront churches alongside families dressed up like they were on their way to a wedding – and listening as the street sprang to brilliant life with the sounds of a half dozen different gospel choirs, sounds I’d never imagined I’d ever hear outside of the movies.
Still, I made sure I never get off at that stop again.
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BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:
“The Dirty South” by The Drive-by Truckers
New West Records
Released 8/24/04
Produced by the Reverend David Barbe
71 min.
SONGS: Where The Devil Don’t Stay – Tornadoes – The Day John Henry Died – Puttin’ People on the Moon – Carl Perkins’ Cadillac – The Sands of Iwo Jima – Danko / Manuel – The Boys from Alabama – Cottonseed – The Buford Stick – Daddy’s Cup – Never Gonna Change – Lookout Mountain – Goddamn Lonely Love
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