Rock and Hard Places (46 page)

“‘Zip City’ is my favourite Drive-By Truckers song,” agrees Hood.

“Yeah,” nods Finn. “There’s something tender, in a weird way, about that song.”

Hood laughs incredulously, as well he might. “Zip City,” from the Truckers’ 2001 epic
Southern Rock Opera
—a hugely ambitious concept album studying what Hood calls “the duality of the Southern thing” as expressed in the lives and works of such Alabama totems as Skynyrd, Bear Bryant and George Wallace—is a typically mordant Cooley lyric, recalling thwarted teenage lust for an underage girl resident in the titular Alabama hamlet. The song is, it’s fair to say, somewhat unkind to her family (“Your brother was the first-born, got ten fingers and ten toes/And it’s a damn good thing ’cos he needs all twenty to keep the closet door closed”).

“Tender meaning wounded,” insists Finn. “Painful to the touch.”

“Man,” hoots Hood. “You should have been there the day the girl turned up at the show.”

In other respects, the two groups are very different. Drive-By Truckers hold open house backstage more or less until showtime, and arrive onstage with nothing planned beyond the first song—the set from thereon is improvised according to the mood of the room and the band. The Hold Steady take turns by alphabetical order to write a setlist, and prefer to be left alone before the show, listening to music—including, in Atlanta, The Cars’ “Let’s Go” and Boz Scagg’s “Lido Shuffle.” They engage in a clearly ritiualised circle of high fives just before taking stage. Then, of course, there’s that North-South thing . . .

“I know we had to cancel those UK dates when Tad got sick,” says Finn (Kubler had been hospitalised with pancreatitis a few months previously). “But my plan was to buy one of those Newcastle United shirts with [Newcastle’s sponsors, a building society] ‘Northern Rock’ on it. But really, you can’t say Northern rock and have people understand what you mean the way you can with Southern rock.”

“I’m envious about that,” says Hood, “because I fuckin’ hate the phrase Southern rock. But I always loved music that had a real sense of place—Springsteen’s Jersey Shore, The Ramones’ Queens, The Replacements being so obviously from Minneapolis. When I was in high school, I didn’t know what any of the stuff they were singing about was, but I wanted to.”

“When I watch a movie,” nods Finn, “I get really obsessed with
the location, almost to the point where I can’t concentrate on the film. When I get to spots on tour, I need to walk around for a while, just to understand where I’m at. I think that’s very much part of writing, just being rooted, figuring out where you are.”

Are there worries, putting together a tour like this, that there’ll be locations where one band gets called back for three encores, while the other gets showered in empties?

“We broke up North first,” says Hood. “The South and the Midwest were difficult for us. Actually, the South was brutal for us. All our songs are about small, fucked-up little hick towns, and in the South the only places where there are venues to play tend to be college towns which are full of kids who just got the fuck out of some small, fucked-up little hick town. The last thing they want to hear is someone singing about where they came from. They want to hear someone singing about somewhere exotic. Like Minneapolis, or Brooklyn. And I love that. I also like the fact that both our new records end with songs that namedrop directors, and they’re almost representative polar points—John Cassavetes [in The Hold Steady’s
Slapped Actress
] and John Ford [in the Truckers’
Monument Valley
].”

“We were on this tour this summer,” says Craig, “and we hadn’t really done the Southeast much at all, and we went to Baton Rouge, Oxford, Charleston—roadhouses, you know, putting 400 people where 300 people should be, and it was great.”

“The lines in this country now,” says Hood, “are more red state/ blue state, rather than North and South, because so many Southerners moved up North in the hundred years after the war.”

There is laughter all round at this reminder that Hood is the only one in the room who comes from a place where “the war” is shorthand for the US Civil War, rather than World War II.

The collective regard for each other notwithstanding, is there a sense of competition between the bands?

“It’s not super-competitive,” says Finn, “but if someone goes on before you and plays really well, you want to do at least as well.”

“It’s the good kind of competition,” says Hood. “I wouldn’t respect ’em if they didn’t go up there and absolutely try to wipe the stage with us every night. That’s good for the rock.”

This last line is delivered utterly absent of irony. Something else
the two bands have in common: an unswerving belief in rock’n’roll as a means and expression of redemption and succour. Even on nights it feels like neither of those things.

 

“MAN,” SAYS COOLEY, leaning on the bus, in the parking lot behind a Tallahassee nightclub called The Moon. “That was like fucking your sister. I mean, respond, goddammit.”

It’s one night and another Drive-By Truckers set later. Cooley’s gift for deadpan coinages is no surprise: his songs heave with glorious zingers. It is clearly his view, however, that these have been insufficiently appreciated this evening: the Truckers went on first, playing to a room barely half-full, and barely half-full at that of Sunday drinkers who seemed to be coming down off a big weekend.

“The one time of day I don’t want to be alone,” he continues, “and where is everybody? This is Florida, dammit. Holler. Show me some titties.”

Today has been a study in the unglamorous reality of the touring life: overnight on the tour bus, all day hanging around a venue in the kind of town in which there’s nothing much to do but hang around the venue. At one point in the afternoon, Cooley had discovered i) a golf cart, and ii) the interesting fact that you can start one by jamming a bottle opener into the ignition, but there are only so many piles of empty beer cartons a grown man can satisfyingly drive through in a day. The only thing which has distinguished today from hundreds of others like it that Cooley has had, and hundreds more he is yet to have, has been the quite startling manifestation in the backstage parking lot of rooster-haired funk god George Clinton (he lives up the road, for reasons surpassing understanding, and is apparently a friend of the venue’s owner).

And the show, at least in the Truckers’ view, hasn’t gone all that brilliantly. They’re back in the bus, consuming the superb roast dinner that bassist Shonna Tucker has concocted on the onboard kitchenette from locally sourced organic meat and vegetables. Hood, as ever, is talking eight beats to the bar about music—about his father’s recent induction into the Alabama Music Hall of Fame (David Hood played bass in the legendary Muscle Shoals rhythm section) and about the album the Truckers have just made as a pick-up band for Booker T,
with Neil Young contributing guitar (Hood plays me some rough mixes: the version of Outkast’s “Hey Ya” is astounding).

By common consent, tonight belongs to The Hold Steady. From the moment they bound on to their intro tape, David Lee Roth’s “Yankee Rose,” they’re focused, furious, determined to wring what gold there is from the base metal of a smallish, diffident audience. The group’s enthusiasm swiftly proves overwhelming, and the screams—actual screams, by the end—for an encore are rewarded with the biggest convening yet of The Drive Hold By Steady Truckers supergroup. Hood appears in a Barack Obama t-shirt to help out on The Hold Steady’s creeping, malevolent take on AC/DC’s “Ride On,” and further Truckers wander on for Blue Oyster Cult’s “Burning For You,” The Band’s “Look Out Cleveland”—Cooley has not deigned to change back out of his after-show apparel of sweatshirt, pyjama bottoms and slippers—and The Hold Steady’s “Killer Parties.”

In normal circumstances, all that both groups would now have to look forward to is another interminable bus ride. However, the schedule is disrupted by one of those strange, surreal surprises that makes the bumpy bunks and boredom of touring worth enduring: would we, someone asks, care to drop by Clinton’s studio, where he is not only awaiting us, but has apparently switched on the Mothership—the famous flying saucer stage prop in which Clinton would descend stageward in his 70s heyday. And so, at two in the morning, two vast tour buses follow a car through the outskirts of Tallahassee, to a house distinguished only by a poetically apposite address—1300 Hendrix Road—and by colourful flashing lights in the windows. The bemused groups troop inside, through a couple of recording studios, past walls of gold and platinum albums won by Parliament and Funkadelic, to the source of the illuminations: the Clinton mothership, now parked permanently in one room in the complex. The craft’s pilot duly appears, poses for photos, offers handshakes, bestows blessings and exits without betraying the vaguest hint that he knows or cares who any of these people are, or why they’re in his house at this hour. Patterson leans unsteadily on my shoulder.

“Andrew,” he says, “It’s been a long day, and I’m tired, and I’ve had quite a lot to drink, but ...”

Yes, I reassure him. That’s a spaceship. And that was George Clinton.

 

THE LINE AFTER “Rock’n’roll means well” in “Marry Me” is “... but it can’t help telling young boys lies.” I bid farewell to Drive-By Truckers and The Hold Steady outside Clinton’s studio, and commiserate with them on the sixteen-hour drive between here and their next assignation in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Both these bands are, as they freely admit, old enough to know better, but both are full of people still driven to scratch furiously at that itch caused by that first brush with Bruce Springsteen, The Replacements or whatever you’re having yourself. And somewhere in America, though that person may not know it yet themselves, is someone who was in the crowd at the four shows played or the nineteen still to go, and who is, twenty or even thirty years hence, going to struggle for sleep on a bus, curse a flat crowd, be introduced in bewildering circumstances to a legend of popular music and his flying saucer and wonder whether to thank or blame Drive-By Truckers and The Hold Steady.

 

 

 

I
HAVEN’T BEEN TO Iceland since I wrote what appears below, stitched together from three assignments—one for
The Independent
, one for
The Sunday Times
and one, as it turned out, for reasons explained shortly, for nobody. What happened, essentially, was this. For the first time ever, Iceland exported a famous pop group, The Sugarcubes, from which emerged an even more famous pop singer, Björk. The inevitable result was that everybody in Iceland, more or less, then formed a pop group of their own. Most of these, as is the way of such opportunist clusterfucks—see Manchester circa 1990, Seattle circa 1993—were neither use nor ornament, but this did not deter the pertinent departments of Iceland’s government from displaying the blithe largesse with public money characteristic of Scandinavian societies. Frequent flights and generous accommodations were laid on for foreign music, arts and travel journalists interested in visiting Reykjavik—and the aeroplane seats and hotel rooms filled briskly as word spread of Iceland’s aptitude for sodden revelry, and (not incidentally) of the frostbitten island’s womenfolk, whose poleaxing beauty was secondary, as an attraction, only to their cheerful, enthusiastic and altogether refreshing lack of discrimination where visiting males were concerned.

There were two severe, and eventually terminal, problems with this otherwise splendid arrangement. One was that commissioning editors rapidly
grew bored with—and suspicious about—story pitches involving Iceland: one began to run up against responses like “What, again? Won’t this be the fifth new Bjork and/or Sigur Ros you’ve interviewed this year?” The other was that we serial junketers failed to organise ourselves—somebody, on one of the flights back, should have struggled to their feet and reminded the whimperingly hungover and hopelessly lovelorn passenger manifest that if at least one of us didn’t get something into print sometime soon, our hosts would wise up and we would be reduced, once again, to spending our weekends in places which didn’t seem like some alien planet where everything was just like it was on Earth, but weirder and better.

So I haven’t been back to Iceland. The spirit has been willing, but the bank balance weak—even by the uproarious standards of Scandinavia, Iceland was always very much a place you want to visit on expenses. I therefore missed riding along on any part of the up-as-a-rocket, down-as-a-stick economic trajectory that Iceland pursued over the subsequent decade. So I wasn’t there as Iceland’s financial services industry boomed, bequeathing every citizen with (one prefers to assume) their own platinum-plated snowmobile, and I wasn’t there when the undignified implosion of that same banking sector, which has (or so one reads) reduced Iceland to a subsistence economy under which everyone is forced to dine on thin soup made from puffin beaks, and the currency is now the herring.