Tonight has been the third of the twenty-three-date Rock’n’Roll Means Well tour. Drive-By Truckers and The Hold Steady are taking turns to headline, and in Atlanta, in deference to the Truckers’ local roots—most of the band live in nearby Athens—The Hold Steady had taken the early slot, and demonstrated that they had friends of their own in the building: the signature shout-along refrains of “Stay Positive,” “Constructive Summer” and “Massive Nights” had all but drowned out the band. Even by his own hyperactive standards, Hold Steady frontman Craig Finn had been animated, whirling and twitching and conveying the impression that his guitar strap was all that was holding the constituent—and apparently unrelated—parts of his body together (he dances about as much like a late-thirtysomething white guy from Minnesota as might be imagined). It’s a jarring, compelling spectacle, these wordy, coolly literate songs, soundtracked by the supercharged bar blues of The Hold Steady, delivered by this seething, bespectacled, anxious apparition: Bruce Springsteen trapped in the body of Elvis Costello.
It was always going to be Drive-By Truckers’ night, though—most of the audience had looked like one or other member of the band, many men sporting beards rivalling those of drummer Brad Morgan, women favouring the high-piled hair of bassplayer Shonna Tucker despite the style’s recent disgracing by Sarah Palin. Patterson had lumbered on ahead of his group looking, in silhouette under the spotlight, like a grizzly stalked by hunters. He’d beamed out at the crowd, just beamed, until Cooley had cranked up “Three Dimes Down.” From there, the Truckers had unleashed a stellar selection of their bleary boogie, culminating in a furious version of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World,” Finn joining in on backing vocals, followed by a barrel through Jim Carroll’s “All the People Who Died,” involving a certain amount of instrument-swapping between the Truckers, The Hold Steady, road crew and friends of the bands.
Tonight’s show has also, like this tour as a whole, functioned as a heartening national unity ticket, set as it is against the backdrop of the final stages of a sensationally rancorous presidential election. Drive-By Truckers and The Hold Steady appear, at first glance, a positively cartoonish illustration of America’s enduring North-South divide. The Truckers seem almost an archetype of Southern rock—thick of facial hair, heavy of riff, lyrically interested in drink, despair and defiance. The Hold Steady seem an hysterically stereotypical exemplar of Northern college indie—wordy, nerdy, bespectacled. What can be said of both bands is that, in both cases, there’s far more going on than the passing observer might conclude. The Truckers, Hood in particular, have omnivorous musical interests (over dinner before the show, Hood had launched, quite unprompted, into an impassioned and detailed soliloquy on the genius of Squeeze) and a lyrical outlook that is curious, compassionate and really not terribly philosophically congruent with much of the writings of Lynryd Skynyrd. The Hold Steady, for their part, rock as hard as any old-school bar-room rattlers, the unreconstructed fretboard-wringing of lead guitarist Tad Kubler suggesting what might have resulted had Steve Gaines survived the 1977 plane crash which wiped out Skynyrd, then—in an admittedly unlikely career move—successfully auditioned for The Attractions (Kubler has also impressed the heck out of me, at least, with what must be the first unironic live deployment of a twin-necked Gibson since the release of Hotel California).
Another thing the two groups have in common, for the next twenty shows at least, is a hell of a tough act to follow.
THE ATLANTA TABERNACLE is the kind of place that bands tell themselves they’ll play in one day, as they toil to make the endurance of lesser dives and dumps feel worthwhile. The room itself is spectacular enough—a former Baptist church and hospital, built in 1910, now a 2,600-capacity venue with three layers of seating beneath a soaring ceiling. However, it’s the separate backstage annexe that has all present grinning involuntarily as they wander the corridors. The catering is terrific, the toilets are clean, the dressing rooms sufficiently plentiful that a visiting journalist and photographer get one to ourselves and—these things really do matter much more to the itinerant musician than the colour-sorted M&Ms of popular legend—there’s a washing machine and tumble dryer. As Drive-By Truckers’ soundcheck thuds through the walls, The Hold Steady’s bassplayer, Galen Polivka, sorts piles of socks, shirts and boxer shorts. “Living the dream,” he smiles, and he’s not entirely joking.
In between soundchecks, with the accordion practice of The Hold Steady’s Franz Nicolay providing a soundtrack from an adjacent dressing room, Hood and Finn gather to survey the road ahead. Rock’n’Roll Means Well: discuss.
“I came up with the name for the tour,” says Finn, “but it’s based on one of Mike Cooley’s lyrics [in the song ‘Marry Me,’ from the Truckers’ Decoration Day]. I thought there was something in that was kind of what people who understood rock’n’roll would . . . well, we’re both kind of older, as bands, and we have a pretty good take on what’s cool about rock’n’roll. And, you know, there’s a humour in there.”
Finn is thirty-seven, Hood forty-four. For Finn, success has come late, and quickly. He first took the stage with The Hold Steady in his adopted New York in 2003—partly inspired into action, he wants it noted, by seeing Drive-By Truckers live—and has already led them through four albums even as they discharged a relentless touring schedule. For Hood, this is all he has ever wanted to do, ever since he saw Bruce Springsteen on The River tour, having spun his disapproving parents a sensationally elaborate web of deceit to explain his night away from home. Rock’n’roll was founded as a youth cult, and perhaps for that reason there remains a reflexive tendency to snigger at those who insist on practising past the point of that first fervid flush. Both men acknowledge this, but insist that they are (at least slightly) wiser, as well as older.
“It’s that middle era of touring where I think the problems are,” says Hood. “In the early days, you’re in the van and you’re just glad to be there, and you go and you go and you go. The middle is where it’s getting better, but it’s still really rough, and it’s nothing like you think it’s gonna be when it gets better—you’re riding in a bus for the first time, but it’s a shitty bus, and breaking down all the time, and the aircon don’t work, you get a record deal, and it turns out it sucks.”
“That’s also when the partying can kind of get a little weird for a while,” says Finn, “before you think, ‘I don’t wanna feel this way all the time.’ Now, I can go on tour like a normal human being, whereas two or three years ago, I was just on tour.”
The formalising of the Drive-By Truckers/Hold Steady mutual admiration society into this tour took place by email between Hood and Kubler after the two met in New York last summer. Hood loves The Hold Steady: the line “I’m trying to hold steady” in a newish Truckers song, “The Righteous Path,” is a deliberate homage.
“And I just thought,” says Hood, “this tour might be the best chance I ever have to see them play.”
Hood’s favourite Hold Steady song is “Chill Out Tent.”
“That’s the one that made me fall in love,” he declares. “I heard it a couple of times before I really listened to it, and the first time I got it, it was like . . . wow. Let me hear that again. But I’ve been on such a big kick with the new album lately, and I’m really loving ‘Lord, I’m Discouraged.’ Y’all have got the best titles.”
“I stole that from Charley Patton,” admits Finn, acknowledging the legendary Delta bluesman. “Well, that and the fact that whenever I upset my mother, she’d shake her head and sigh ‘Discouraging.’ My favourite Truckers song changes daily, but I was thinking about two. One is ‘Zip City,’ which is Cooley’s song, and one is ‘Heathens,’ which is Patterson’s. They both feature cars that have gone into ditches. I was thinking there should be another song, and it should be the ditch trilogy.”
“‘Zip City’ is my favourite Drive-By Truckers song,” agrees Hood.
“Yeah,” nods Finn. “There’s something tender, in a weird way, about that song
.”
Hood laughs incredulously, as well he might. “Zip City,” from the Truckers’ 2001 epic Southern Rock Opera—a hugely ambitious concept album studying what Hood calls “the duality of the Southern thing” as expressed in the lives and works of such Alabama totems as Skynyrd, Bear Bryant and George Wallace—is a typically mordant Cooley lyric, recalling thwarted teenage lust for an underage girl resident in the titular Alabama hamlet. The song is, it’s fair to say, somewhat unkind to her family (“Your brother was the first-born, got ten fingers and ten toes/And it’s a damn good thing ’cos he needs all twenty to keep the closet door closed”).
“Tender meaning wounded,” insists Finn. “Painful to the touch.”
“Man,” hoots Hood. “You should have been there the day the girl turned up at the show.”
In other respects, the two groups are very different. Drive-By Truckers hold open house backstage more or less until showtime, and arrive onstage with nothing planned beyond the first song—the set from thereon is improvised according to the mood of the room and the band. The Hold Steady take turns by alphabetical order to write a setlist, and prefer to be left alone before the show, listening to music—including, in Atlanta, The Cars’ “Let’s Go” and Boz Scagg’s “Lido Shuffle.” They engage in a clearly ritiualised circle of high fives just before taking stage. Then, of course, there’s that North-South thing . . .
“I know we had to cancel those UK dates when Tad got sick,” says Finn (Kubler had been hospitalised with pancreatitis a few months previously). “But my plan was to buy one of those Newcastle United shirts with [Newcastle’s sponsors, a building society] ‘Northern Rock’ on it. But really, you can’t say Northern rock and have people understand what you mean the way you can with Southern rock.”
“I’m envious about that,” says Hood, “because I fuckin’ hate the phrase Southern rock. But I always loved music that had a real sense of place—Springsteen’s Jersey Shore, The Ramones’ Queens, The Replacements being so obviously from Minneapolis. When I was in high school, I didn’t know what any of the stuff they were singing about was, but I wanted to.”
“When I watch a movie,” nods Finn, “I get really obsessed with the location, almost to the point where I can’t concentrate on the film. When I get to spots on tour, I need to walk around for a while, just to understand where I’m at. I think that’s very much part of writing, just being rooted, figuring out where you are.”
Are there worries, putting together a tour like this, that there’ll be locations where one band gets called back for three encores, while the other gets showered in empties?
“We broke up North first,” says Hood. “The South and the Midwest were difficult for us. Actually, the South was brutal for us. All our songs are about small, fucked-up little hick towns, and in the South the only places where there are venues to play tend to be college towns which are full of kids who just got the fuck out of some small, fucked-up little hick town. The last thing they want to hear is someone singing about where they came from. They want to hear someone singing about somewhere exotic. Like Minneapolis, or Brooklyn. And I love that. I also like the fact that both our new records end with songs that namedrop directors, and they’re almost representative polar points—John Cassavetes [in The Hold Steady’s Slapped Actress] and John Ford [in the Truckers’ Monument Valley].”
“We were on this tour this summer,” says Craig, “and we hadn’t really done the Southeast much at all, and we went to Baton Rouge, Oxford, Charleston—roadhouses, you know, putting 400 people where 300 people should be, and it was great.”
“The lines in this country now,” says Hood, “are more red state/ blue state, rather than North and South, because so many Southerners moved up North in the hundred years after the war.”
There is laughter all round at this reminder that Hood is the only one in the room who comes from a place where “the war” is shorthand for the US Civil War, rather than World War II.
The collective regard for each other notwithstanding, is there a sense of competition between the bands?
“It’s not super-competitive,” says Finn, “but if someone goes on before you and plays really well, you want to do at least as well.”
“It’s the good kind of competition,” says Hood. “I wouldn’t respect ’em if they didn’t go up there and absolutely try to wipe the stage with us every night. That’s good for the rock.”
This last line is delivered utterly absent of irony. Something else the two bands have in common: an unswerving belief in rock’n’roll as a means and expression of redemption and succour. Even on nights it feels like neither of those things.
“MAN,” SAYS COOLEY, leaning on the bus, in the parking lot behind a Tallahassee nightclub called The Moon. “That was like fucking your sister. I mean, respond, goddammit.”
It’s one night and another Drive-By Truckers set later. Cooley’s gift for deadpan coinages is no surprise: his songs heave with glorious zingers. It is clearly his view, however, that these have been insufficiently appreciated this evening: the Truckers went on first, playing to a room barely half-full, and barely half-full at that of Sunday drinkers who seemed to be coming down off a big weekend.
“The one time of day I don’t want to be alone,” he continues, “and where is everybody? This is Florida, dammit. Holler. Show me some titties.”
Today has been a study in the unglamorous reality of the touring life: overnight on the tour bus, all day hanging around a venue in the kind of town in which there’s nothing much to do but hang around the venue. At one point in the afternoon, Cooley had discovered i) a golf cart, and ii) the interesting fact that you can start one by jamming a bottle opener into the ignition, but there are only so many piles of empty beer cartons a grown man can satisfyingly drive through in a day. The only thing which has distinguished today from hundreds of others like it that Cooley has had, and hundreds more he is yet to have, has been the quite startling manifestation in the backstage parking lot of rooster-haired funk god George Clinton (he lives up the road, for reasons surpassing understanding, and is apparently a friend of the venue’s owner).
And the show, at least in the Truckers’ view, hasn’t gone all that brilliantly. They’re back in the bus, consuming the superb roast dinner that bassist Shonna Tucker has concocted on the onboard kitchenette from locally sourced organic meat and vegetables. Hood, as ever, is talking eight beats to the bar about music—about his father’s recent induction into the Alabama Music Hall of Fame (David Hood played bass in the legendary Muscle Shoals rhythm section) and about the album the Truckers have just made as a pick-up band for Booker T, with Neil Young contributing guitar (Hood plays me some rough mixes: the version of Outkast’s “Hey Ya” is astounding).
By common consent, tonight belongs to The Hold Steady. From the moment they bound on to their intro tape, David Lee Roth’s “Yankee Rose,” they’re focused, furious, determined to wring what gold there is from the base metal of a smallish, diffident audience. The group’s enthusiasm swiftly proves overwhelming, and the screams—actual screams, by the end—for an encore are rewarded with the biggest convening yet of The Drive Hold By Steady Truckers supergroup. Hood appears in a Barack Obama t-shirt to help out on The Hold Steady’s creeping, malevolent take on AC/DC’s “Ride On,” and further Truckers wander on for Blue Oyster Cult’s “Burning For You,” The Band’s “Look Out Cleveland”—Cooley has not deigned to change back out of his after-show apparel of sweatshirt, pyjama bottoms and slippers—and The Hold Steady’s “Killer Parties.”
In normal circumstances, all that both groups would now have to look forward to is another interminable bus ride. However, the schedule is disrupted by one of those strange, surreal surprises that makes the bumpy bunks and boredom of touring worth enduring: would we, someone asks, care to drop by Clinton’s studio, where he is not only awaiting us, but has apparently switched on the Mothership—the famous flying saucer stage prop in which Clinton would descend stageward in his 70s heyday. And so, a
t two in the morning, two vast tour buses follow a car through the outskirts of Tallahassee, to a house distinguished only by a poetically apposite address—1300 Hendrix Road—and by colourful flashing lights in the windows. The bemused groups troop inside, through a couple of recording studios, past walls of gold and platinum albums won by Parliament and Funkadelic, to the source of the illuminations: the Clinton mothership, now parked permanently in one room in the complex. The craft’s pilot duly appears, poses for photos, offers handshakes, bestows blessings and exits without betraying the vaguest hint that he knows or cares who any of these people are, or why they’re in his house at this hour. Patterson leans unsteadily on my shoulder.
“Andrew,” he says, “It’s been a long day, and I’m tired, and I’ve had quite a lot to drink, but ...”
Yes, I reassure him. That’s a spaceship. And that was George Clinton.
THE LINE AFTER “Rock’n’roll means well” in “Marry Me” is “... but it can’t help telling young boys lies.” I bid farewell to Drive-By Truckers and The Hold Steady outside Clinton’s studio, and commiserate with them on the sixteen-hour drive between here and their next assignation in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Both these bands are, as they freely admit, old enough to know better, but both are full of people still driven to scratch furiously at that itch caused by that first brush with Bruce Springsteen, The Replacements or whatever you’re having yourself. And somewhere in America, though that person may not know it yet themselves, is someone who was in the crowd at the four shows played or the nineteen still to go, and who is, twenty or even thirty years hence, going to struggle for sleep on a bus, curse a flat crowd, be introduced in bewildering circumstances to a legend of popular music and his flying saucer and wonder whether to thank or blame Drive-By Truckers and The Hold Steady.
Rock and Hard Places Page 34