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Drive-By Truckers | Southern Rock Opera

Undoubtedly the highest possible form of flattery and honour.
CD, UMG/Lost Highway

Tekst: Maurice Dielemans

The title here doesn’t lie. Southern Rock Opera is the Drive-By Truckers' powerful and superb tribute to the rise and fall of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s 70’s southern arena rock ‘n’ roll. Southern Rock Opera is already a classic record about the band that wrote the book on Southern rock. The Drive-By Truckers released it some year ago, but now it has been re-released on the well-known Lost Highway record label. But this double-CD package is more than just a fine collection of twenty songs to honour the late great Ronnie van Zandt of the travelling band Lynyrd Skynyrd and the days when it was OK to rock. Soutern Rock Opera epitomizes southern romance and it deals with the misconceptions of the South as the Drive-By Truckers inject lots of extra volume with their wilful vein and a good sense of self-parody.

Ronnie made history when he wrote Sweet Home Alabama as a response to the social commentary on the redneck racism in Neil Young’s Southern Man (from the legendary After The Gold Rush record). Neil he simply loved Ronnie’s Sweet Home Alabama. Ronnie and Neil ended up as good friends in the end. But in 1977, Ronnie Van Zandt, only 29 at the time, was killed in a tragic plane crash, along with Skynyrd guitarist Steve Gaines, his sister Cassie Gaines, and the group’s road manager Dean Kilpatrick. Neil Young helped to carry Ronnie in his casket in the ground. After 30 years the Drive-By Truckers are brilliantly retelling this classic story in a song that is simply entitled Ronnie And Neil. Let them guitars blast for Ronnie and Neil!

The first act of Southern Rock Opera tells the story of a boy growing in North Alabama. It’s 1979 and the still awful disco music has driven a fork into rock’s heart, but our hero listens to Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, Queen, Thin Lizzy, and lots of Lynyrd Skynyrd. When he moves to the city the hero of the story gets a funny haircut and becomes a punk rocker for some other reason. He unsuccessfully tries to be one of them and talks down his southern accent. Drive-By Trucker Patterson Hood sings about sniffing glue when he was a young boy and how he now drives around with his friends in his old car. Dead, Drunk And Naked is about him and his old pale Jack Daniel. It’s a song about white trash and growing up in small-town America.

The second and final part (disc two) of Southern Rock Opera finds our hero with the trials and tribulations of his past. He is too tired of walking around like some kind of zombie and our hero wants to go back to his roots. He is beginning to have hallucinations of long hair and turning three electric guitars up really loud and hard. Patterson sings about the Blue Oyster Cult concert when he was just 14 years old. He sings that he never saw Lynyrd Skynyrd, but he sure saw Molly Hatchet, with 38 Special and the Johnny Van Zandt band. Let There Be Rock brings back the memories to Patterson and our hero of Bon Scott singing with AC/DC and Ozzy Osbourne with Randy Rhoads in ’82. In Women Without Whiskey it is the never-ending struggle with women and the bottle. If he makes it through this year, he thinks about putting the bottle down, but he knows he that he never will escape this kind of living. It’s one of the many true and exciting tales on the Drive-By Truckers’ Southern Rock Opera.

Though many years have elapsed since the good old rock ‘n’ roll days of the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Drive-By Truckers surely proof that the overdriven and rebellious country rock of Skynyrd and such still rocks like that mean old highway 72. The whole idea of an opera project on two discs can be compared to Wilco’s Being There, but the storytelling songs on Southern Rock Opera rock really hard and loud. Musically it isn’t as pretentious or ambitious as you might expect, but it’s very much in style of the mid-70’s rock. This album is without any doubt the highest possible form of flattery and honour. The South will rise again!

» 28 september 2002 » artikel doorsturen » artikel afdrukken

http://www.kindamuzik.net/recensie/drive-by-truckers/southern-rock-opera
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