Raging hard on the Drive by Trucker’s 1999 national anthem to prurient politics
I am taking care of a pack of dogs this Sunday night. Some friends of mine are traveling west to Louisville to see the Drive By Truckers. They’ll be home late. It’s nice to feel needed.
The Truckers occupy a special place in my heart. I graduated from high school in Montgomery, Alabama, and then promptly moved to Athens, Georgia, in mid-August 1993. Officially, my time at the University of Georgia overlapped with the worst four consecutive years in the school’s storied football history.
But the music was fire, and I ended up spending the better part of 7 years in Athens, if not all of it enrolled in the school. Michael Stipe still dropped in to town for local coffees or to check id’s at the odd downtown club. Widespread Panic anchored the region’s music festivals. Vic Chesnutt was winning Flagpole music awards. You could head to the Manhattan to catch the 8-Track Gorilla and then amble on over to the 40 Watt for a set from Olivia Tremor Control.
And these are just the people you know. There was Squat in the basement of Half Moon Pub. Neal Pattman at High Hat or any number of fraternity parties. The Normaltown Flyers at Allen’s. The Vigilantes of Love wherever and with whomever. Not to mention the endless out-of-town bands looking to soak in the Athens scene for the night (which, to be fair, they often found empty quiet and distracted).
I got my first taste of the Drive by Truckers as I was on my way out of town, during that last extended summer shack-up at the future Peach Melba’s, our last go before emigrating to the slackwaters of Lexington. Turns out, the Truckers, too, had recently relocated to Athens from Alabama, where an early incarnation of the band was known as Horse Pussy.
On a tip from Flagpole magazine, a friend and I split a sack of mushrooms, caught a cab downtown, and jacklegged our way through the small crowd at Tasty World, as opener Redneck Greece Deluxe strummed Johnny Russell’s “Red Necks White Sox and Blue Ribbon Beer.” Trucker co-frontman Patterson Hood followed Greece, the headliner to a 17 person crowd, an electric guitar slung low and (if I recall correctly) plugged into a single small amp that sat on a stool next to him.
Hood opened with Bulldozers and Dirt; I was hooked. Came home singing. Woke up singing. And by noon had purchased Gangstabilly and Pizza Deliverance at Wuxtry.
That summer, I spent days in my un-air conditioned Honda delivering chicken wings to apartments across the greater East Side of Athens, Oldies 97.1 from Atlanta on the radio dial; and nights hightailing it downtown after work with whomever we could muster, if we were lucky to catch a sweaty second Trucker set at the High Hat. “Zoloft,” “Steve McQueen,” “The Living Bubba,” “Too much sex, too little Jesus.”
I was drawn to Hood and the Truckers because they were punk as fuck and red state as hell and for a time I could feel the spit and sweat and laughter from just off the stage at the High Hat or Tasty World or wherever we saw them that summer. Those first two albums exude a music—a tempo, an imagery, a world—that have gone on to inform much of my own writing.
“The President’s Penis is Missing,” from Pizza Deliverance, is the Trucker’s ode to the 1999 impeachment of Bill Clinton.
The singalong bar-room chorus goes like this:
The President’s penis is missing, ole!!
We searched high and low, every night, everyday
Lord, won’t you come down and redeem us
Has anyone seen the President’s penis?
In my time in Athens, the song’s immediate referent was a Democrat schlong, hidden in the mouth of the President’s 22-year old college intern. The prurient sex-moralists pursuing the search were generally a tight-sphinctered nabob of humorless Republicans (and, let’s be honest, probably Tipper Gore).
The song’s chorus was joyously mocking. The nerve of those prurient penis hunters, Ole!. It was the 90s. These impeachers were laughable, and so we laughed. In the CD liner notes, the Truckers actually stage-direct the chorus: “(now the entire press corp. erupts in song:)” Walter Cronkite and Randolph Hearst and John Glenn appear.
And yet, at the heart of the song is an earnest spoken-word moral composition.
Them outer space people would laugh if they’d seen us
All this talk about cum stains and oral coitus
Meanwhile, the whole world suffers from hunger and meanness
But we’re more concerned with the President’s penis
A quarter-century later, as the nation finds itself recently hooked on a new presidential fuck-trial, I wonder if the Truckers have dusted off their President’s Penis and have requested my dog-pack friends to report back from the show in Louisville.
Nowadays, we all in Lexington are jiving a Republican penis, ole!, this time hidden in the hoo-ha and not mouth of a middle-aged adult film star who ultimately received payout for her services and not a 22-year old intern on her knees for no pay, from what I gather. The silly prurient tight-ass rabble who are prosecuting this Republican penis? Best represented by the liberal Hollywood actor Robert DeNiro and a mob of let love rule #resistanceDems. These pure people, I hear, are now pushing jail time.
Oh lord, won’t you come down and redeem us, indeed.
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