Drive-By Truckers Kick Off Brooklyn Bowl Run With Resounding Anthems (SHOW REVIEW/PHOTOS)

When you tell someone you are going to a Drive-By Truckers show you get one of two responses. It is either, “cool, that should be an awesome show” or “they worth seeing live?” The answer to the second response is trickier than one would think. On the surface, they look like a southern rock band – jeans, flannel shirts, lots of facial hair, etc. —  and although their roots are firmly planted in the south (Patterson Hood & Mike Cooley grew up in Alabama), their politics and core musical sensibilities branch liberally into seemingly incongruous territories.  

The other problem with the answer is that they are really more like two bands because Hood and Cooley have very different vocal styles and alternated the lead, song-by-song all through the show which raged for just north of 2 hours. If it helps paint a picture, Cooley has a very clean vocal style to match his clean look.  He plays his guitar precisely and although his music has an edge, that edge is twangy and melodic.

Hood, on the other hand is rugged and well worn. He delivers his lyrics as stories that are bursting out of him and plays with a desperation that oozes all over the stage. The songs he sings have the storytelling quality of James McMurtry, but are delivered with the subtlety and grace of John C. Reilly character on a meth bender. You would think that the constantly alternating between lead styles would have a deleterious effect on the show, but somehow it seems normal and …right.

The five-piece band – Hood & Cooley on guitar and vocals, Brad Morgan on drums, Matt Patton on bass and Jay Gonzalez on organ & guitar – strutted onto the stage to the Jim Carroll Band’s “Wicked Gravity” which seemed like an odd choice at the time, but proved to be exactly the opposite. Everyone in the audience could tell that they were about to kick off their three-night run at the Brooklyn Bowl with purpose. They immediately broke into “The Living Bubba”, a song about the musician Gregory Dean Smalley who kept playing gigs until he died of AIDS in the 1990’s.  Hood and Cooley continued to alternate through a 21 song, guitar-drenched set which incorporated many of the highlights from their 13-album discography, before finishing with a three-song encore.

The songs came fast and furious and were peppered with big guitar solos that seemed to come out of nowhere. One had to pay close attention to the stage to keep track of the guitar interplay among Hood, Cooley and Gonzalez. The band played quite a few of their more political (left) songs with a particularly impassioned version of their anti-gun song “Thoughts And Prayers” which peaked with Hood preaching the lyric “Stick it up your ass with your useless thoughts and prayers”.  

Most of the songs had a “live life to the fullest message”, almost begging the audience to stay present and purposeful. Examples of these seize the day anthems included: “Plastic Flowers On The Highway” a tribute to a friend who was killed in a car crash before he was to join the band; “Used To Be A Cop” a song about regrets of a life poorly lived; and the anthem “Let There Be Rock” which concludes with the lines, “And I never saw Lynyrd Skynyrd, but I sure saw AC/DC with Bon Scott singing, ‘Let There Be Rock Tour’.”

If there was any doubt the core sensibility of the Drive By Truckers, it was answered by the last four songs of the night. They did a hard rocking rendition of Warren Zevon’s “Play It All Night Long”; their scathing condemnation of people who still cling to the confederate flag “Surrender under Protest”; an inspired rendition of the Ramones’ “The KKK Took My Baby Away”; and brought it all back, full-circle with a “leave it all out there” version of the Jim Carroll Band’s “People Who Died”, which included the two guitar techs rocking out alongside the band in true rock and roll fashion, and left the crowd spent, satisfied and understanding the true nature of the band.

Buffalo Nichols opened up the evening with a very solid set of blues. He played a number of songs from his eponymous album. He played most of the set on a resonator guitar but switched to acoustic and electric as well. He was able to hold the crowd’s attention nicely as a solo act, which is quite the accomplishment for a fairly large crowd in a decent-sized venue preparing to rock out with the Drive By Truckers. His playing and vocals were equally strong and is well worth your time should he come your way in the near future.

Drive‐By Truckers Setlist Brooklyn Bowl, Brooklyn, NY, USA 2021

 

 

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