Drive By Truckers

Last time three years ago or so and 3000 miles away with Annie at Tractor Tavern in Seattle. Tonight at the still-new Terminal 5 venue in Hell's Kitchen, a neighborhood that the hospice patient I visit said the new urbanites moving in want to rename Clinton because it sounds better for property values. Until precisely 9:38, 45 minutes or so into the set, I thought that the lack of smoky air and no sawdust on the floor, replaced by Sony projection TVs, had perhaps gentrified lead Trucker Patterson Hood as well, but then he hawked up and spit on the stage. Only once, compared to a dozen or so at the Tavern, but the bottle of Jack Daniels (or at least a bottle in the JD shape and label filled with an appropriately- colored liquid) got passed among the band members, so call them tamer, hardly tame. Though Trucker singer-guitarist #3, Jason Isbell, has gone solo, this is still an extraordinary band, capable of full on sonic assault featuring three guitars, bass, keyboards and drums. They play loud and they play Southern and they write very, very smart. They are also great value. One's $25 ticket got more than two hours of music, a time still slightly less than at the cramped Tavern where they played for three hours and had my ears ringing for two days. Hood writes mostly of his own demons, crediting rock and roll with saving him from suicide. But, hey, who's not got demons and the trick is to make them live for others, something that Hood, for me, does only intermittently, unlike, say, Leonard Cohen then and the National and Cat Power now. His anthem is "Hell, No, I Ain't Happy," but at this stage in his life, somewhere on the up side of forty I'd say, watching him on stage he seems happy indeed. My reservations aside, three very good things about Patterson Hood -- he lets the music speak for itself, avoiding the mortal sin of between song banalities or political rants; he has the good grace to thank his roadies and, several times, the audience; he has the audacity of assurance to spin a touching, long encore song/monologue called Sixteen Wheels of Love, about the late life love his mother found with a huge trucker named Chester. Co-Trucker Mike Cooley is more interesting in his writing, looking beyond himself to try and make some context of the South, of history, of music, of the working poor and where he connects with it. Check out, from various DBT albums, Uncle Frank, Carl Perkins Cadillac, and Marry Me, with the deathless lyric "Rock and Roll means well but it can't help tellin' young boys lies. " What this all adds up to, tonight reinforced, is a band matched by few and topped by none working today.