Drive-By Truckers: Southern Rock Opera : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

The rock opera isn't dead; it just smells funny - in this case, like whiskey breath, tour-van stink and the smoking wreckage of Lynyrd Skynyrd's 1977 plane crash. In two discs and twenty songs, Dixie's Drive-By Truckers explode the yahoo baggage of 1970s Southern rock in a roaring memoir of growing up white, loud and desperate in the former Confederacy. Southern Rock Opera deserves a fistful of stars just for the "Free Bird"-via-Crazy Horse squall of guitarists Mike Cooley, Rob Malone and Patterson Hood. But SRO also shakes with narrative electricity; Hood and Cooley, the main writers and vocalists, confront the contradictions of their heritage head-on. In the brilliant stomp "Ronnie and Neil," Hood uses the North-South friendship of Neil Young and Skynyrd's Ronnie Van Zant ("Their feud was just in song") to address the communal burden of Young's "Southern Man" stereotype: "Church blew up in Birmingham. . . . All of us take the blame," Hood sings, like Don Henley with a throat full of hot gravel. Even in the whoop-ass arena-rock fantasies "Let There Be Rock" and "Road Cases," the Truckers can't help lamenting the loss of the good-ol'-boy innocence that went down with that Skynyrd plane. But there's no glory in just hangin' around on the ground, either. "Living in fear's just another way of dying before your time," Cooley declares amid rebel-fire guitars in "Shut Up and Get on the Plane." Southern Rock Opera is a tragedy only if you don't play it really loud.

DAVID FRICKE
(RS 888 - January 31, 2001)