‘Southern Rock Opera’: How Drive-By Truckers Saluted Lynyrd Skynyrd In Song
A concept album with a difference, the Athens, Georgia band’s third LP remains an essential roots-rock release.
In artistic terms, Drive-By Truckers’ ambitious third album Southern Rock Opera is now recognized as a magnum opus, yet this sprawling masterpiece emerged from a goofy idea which its creators initially took less than seriously.
Its genesis dates back to a road trip taken by vocal and guitar frontman Patterson Hood and bassist Earl Hicks prior to the Truckers’ formation. In spring 1995, the two friends found themselves in a U-Haul truck, traveling from Alabama to Georgia, where Hicks was about to take up residence. To pass the time during the drive, the two friends devised what they initially believed might be a screenplay instead of an album.
“The truck didn’t have a radio, so our rambling talk somehow morphed into this idea for a movie,” Hood recalls in a 2021 interview on the band’s official website. “It was about the mythology surrounding a fictitious rock and roll band loosely inspired by stories I knew from growing up in Muscle Shoals [in Alabama] and close friends who had worked with Lynyrd Skynyrd in the early days.”
Hood and Hicks formed Drive-By Truckers shortly after Hicks moved to Athens, but their Lynyrd Skynyrd concept went onto the back burner while the band made its first two albums, 1998’s Gangstabilly and the following year’s Pizza Deliverance. However, the Truckers kept coming back to Hood and Hicks’ screenplay idea and they finally turned it into an album with 2001’s Southern Rock Opera.
Effectively, the record weaves the history of Lynyrd Skynyrd into a narrative about a fictitious rock band called Betamax Guillotine, whose story unfolds within the context of the South during the 1970s. It features 20 tracks and runs for over 90 minutes, yet as an entity, Southern Rock Opera has never felt flabby. In fact, it presents a rip-roaring array of candid, roots-y hard rock songs ranging from the anthemic likes of “Guitar Man” and “Let There Be Rock” through to the adrenalized “Ronnie And Neil” (which examines the actually non-existent feud between Neil Young and Lynyrd Skynyrd) and the mournful, epic “Angels And Fuselage”: an impressionistic lament recalling the tragic 1977 plane crash which claimed the lives of Skynyrd vocalist Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines, and backing vocalist Cassie Gaines.
However, while the finished record excited the band, simply getting it out there proved to be a challenge. Without a label deal, Drive-By Truckers took the DIY route and – with the help of an early Kickstarter-type fan-based campaign – pressed and released Southern Rock Opera through their own Soul Dump Records in September 2001. The persistence soon paid off: Reviews such as David Fricke’s Rolling Stone rave (“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”) led to the Drive-By Truckers’ signing a new deal with Mercury/Lost Highway Records – and the repressed 2002 edition of Southern Rock Opera bringing this singular roots-rock outfit to a much wider audience.
“All of our lives were drastically changed by this ridiculous album,” Patterson Hood recalled in 2021. “Before it came out, most people told us we were crazy. We already knew that, but we did believe in what we were doing and how we were going about it. It somehow made sense to us and as it turned out, seemed to capture some kind of mood of the people who heard it. It somehow seems to still resonate with people two decades later.”
