Drive-By Truckers - It’s Great To Be Alive!

Pitchfork 80

Halfway through the Drive-By Truckers' new live record, Patterson Hood abruptly stops singing four minutes into “Goode’s Field Road”, a dark song with a paint-by-numbers Truckers premise: a junkyard operator makes some bad decisions and ends up committing suicide to avoid being sent to jail. “He was a god-fearing man, he was a family man, he was a hardworking man, trying to raise his family and support everybody the best he could in difficult times and a troubled economy in North Alabama,” Hood says, now preaching in front of the band’s minor-chord sludge. By the time Hood finishes expounding on various histories—social, economic, cultural—of his beloved Lauderdale County, the reason for his very un-rock 'n' roll professorial digression becomes clear: sometimes a story can’t be told in just a song.

There are two or three moments like this at every Drive-By Truckers concert, when Patterson Hood the storyteller interrupts Patterson Hood the songwriter, cramming background information that his songs—novelistic in detail, cinematic in scope—can’t quite contain on their own. That’s because at their heart, the Drive-By Truckers are a storytelling band. It’s easy enough to compare Hood to a prolific novelist and Cooley to a modernist poet, but most of their songs could just easily be labeled: based on a true story. That’s the central tenet of the Hood and Cooley’s indignant premise when they first started the Drive-By Truckers in the post-grunge mid-late 90’s: the idea that a young scrappy band can write heroic songs about their grandparents. Why look further than that?

The stories collected on It’s Great to be Alive!, the sprawling, three-plus hour document of the Drive-By Truckers’ 2014 three-night stand at San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium,are tall-tales mumbled by friends at the bar, family legends passed on through generations, anecdotes from neighbors romanticized and made grand. As such, a Drive-By Truckers concert can feel like a punk staging of the Southern oral tradition that takes place on front-porches and in rocking chairs. Hood and Cooley act out the role of grizzled elders with countless tales up their sleeve, taking turns swapping their story-songs without any semblance of a setlist. That’s why Truckers shows can also be occasionally exhausting: Sometimes you might just not be in the mood to hear Grandpa Hood launch into that seven minute story about Mary Alice and her chemo treatments again.

This is hardly the first live record the Truckers has released in its near 20-year history. It is, however, the first time the band has tried to faithfully replicate what it feels like to attend a Drive-By Truckers concert. The material, which spans from “Runaway Train”, a song by the pre-Truckers late-80’s incarnation Adam’s House Cat, to a half-dozen selections from last year’s English Oceans, is performed by the slimmer, five-piece lineup the band has used since 2012, after various departures, firings and lineup changes. On stage the band has reworked much of its back-catalogue to fit its current streamlined incarnation, which has grown more sophisticated and elegant in the studio as of late (their last few records contain more piano and banjo than distorted guitar feedback). An unhinged rant like “Sink Hole” is now a precise polemic, whereas the mournful pedal-steel coda to “A Ghost to Most” is now a freewheeling, two-guitar improvisation. The modern-day Truckers are particularly good at such shape-shifting, switching from sloppy to stately from one song to the next.

It’s Great to be Alive! is the sound of a veteran band in complete command of its back-catalog. “Box of Spiders” is reimagined as a country-soul centerpiece, another song that gains multitudes when prefaced with Hood’s four minute story about his relatives. “Sounds Better In The Song” is a revelation in its prickly full-band arrangement, and “The Living Bubba,” Hood’s ode to a stubborn musician slowly dying of AIDS, sounds more moving with each passing year, an anthem of persistence and survival for a road-weary band still chugging on.

A carefully curated setlist can go a long way, and the tracklisting here benefits a great deal from some post-hoc sequencing. Tales of defeat and struggle promptly segue into stories of defiance and hope. Soul ballads bleed into rockabilly raves. A song like “Goode’s Field Road” is followed by “Uncle Frank”. Although Cooley’s “Uncle Frank” takes place more than 50 years before Hood’s “Goode’s Field Road”, the two stories may nearly be identical: North Alabama tragedies filled with depression and heartless bureaucracy that conclude with suicide. The one-two pairing serves as a quiet, powerful comment on Southern change and progress, or lack thereof. Like the best live records, It’s Great to be Alive! is a carefully curated document that does a great job pretending to be a raw, unfettered documentation of a single night.

As its partially sarcastic, partially dead-serious title suggests, It’s Great to be Alive! serves as a pointed testament to the Drive-By Truckers’ longevity and continuing relevance. A little less than half of the songs on the record come from the band’s post-Jason Isbell period, from their 2008 subtle masterwork Brighter Than Creation’s Dark onward. The subtle interpersonal drama in recent songs like “Primer Coat” and “Mercy Buckets” are every bit as urgent as older, anthemic statements like “Tornadoes” and “Women Without Whiskey”. Musicians will forever insist that their more recent work holds up alongside their classic material. It’s Great to be Alive! is proof that the Drive-By Truckers’ discography is the rare case where such wishful thinking actually proves true.

“Tell me another story,” Cooley sings towards the very beginning of their latest live record. “Tell me about the lows and the highs.” The Drive-By Truckers spend the rest of It’s Great to be Alive! proving that they’ve always honored that modest request better than anyone.