Saturday, April 10
Drive-By Truckers w/ Langhorne Slim
Busters’s, Doors @ 8pm; Show @ 9pm. $20, $23 Day of show. 18+
I first stumbled upon the Drive by Trucker’s Patterson Hood one night at a bar in Athens, Georgia, shortly after splitting a bag of mushrooms with a good friend. I had heard about Hood in Flagpole Magazine, Athen’s free weekly paper, and decided to go on the spot. This must have been sometime around the summer of 1999, back when I did such things.
Each week Flagpole devoted an entire section of the paper to 3-sentence blurbs about all the shows playing around town that week. Hood’s 3-sentence blurb about an upcoming Thursday night show must have caught my fancy, because by around 10:00 that night my friend and I had already jack-legged our way through a small crowd at Tasty World to a seat for some drinks and giggles while catching the end portion of opening act (and country superstar legend) Redneck Greece Delux. If I recall, Greece played his hit “Rednecks, White Socks & Blue Ribbon Beer,” and the mushrooms kicked in shortly before Hood took the stage.
Hood played by himself, standing with an electric guitar slung low across him, hollering into the microphone songs about unapologetic gun-toting rednecks with their drugs, kin-based sexual relationships, and repressive Christianity.
A week later at the now defunct High Hat, I caught the first of several Drive By Truckers shows during that hot and enjoyable summer in Athens. These were always sweaty, always loud, always joyous. That summer I scripted a film scene in my mind that featured their song “Too Much Sex (too little Jesus)” and tried to muster up the courage to see if they would take me on tour with them as an unpaid roadie so I could write a ‘band-on-the-road’ story for Flagpole.
I never got the nerve to ask them, which is a bummer, because the Drive By Truckers were one hell of a band in ‘99. Of course, they are a hell of a band now, too. Though the venues have gotten bigger and more expensive, though the line-up has been added to- and subtracted from, and though the audience base now includes the kind of frat guys who used to attend David Allan Coe shows, the sound coming from the stage remains just as it always was: sweaty, joyous, loud.—Danny Mayer
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