Well-lubed and swerving all together: Drive-By Truckers get back to Decoration Day

In 1985, Patterson Hood was about to flunk out of the University of North Alabama. He copped a gig writing album reviews for the college’s paper and enjoyed it, because labels sent him a free LP every week. In fact, it was the only thing about school he ever liked. September rolled in and the Replacements’ Tim hit Hood’s desk. “That record literally saved my life,” he tells me over the phone, docked in Santa Fe for whatever reason. “It changed my life beyond any other record on Earth.” Soon enough he was depressed as shit and ditching his hellhole apartment for late-night, drunken drives with the car stereo turned all the way up. He’d hit the backroads in Muscle Shoals, playing Tim loud every time. “Here Comes A Regular” came on and knocked into Hood like a “blinding light epiphany.” “The next day I told my grandmother I was dropping out of college,” he remembers. “I made her cry, and then I did [drop out].” That’s when he and Mike Cooley said fuck it, let’s start a band and formed Adam’s House Cat together.

I bring this up because Tim and the Drive-By Truckers’ fourth studio album, Decoration Day, are bound to each other. In 2023, which Hood considers to be “one of the hardest years of my life,” Rhino Records released the Tim: Let It Bleed Edition box set, which included a brand new mix from Ed Stasium, effectively rewriting Tim’s legacy as one of the worst-mixed great albums of the 1980s. I liked how “Swingin Party” finally sounded like the bright and splendid hanging Paul Westerberg envisioned it as. Hood dug “Little Mascara,” because you could actually hear Bob Stinson’s goddamn solo at the end of it. A lot of the Truckers’ early albums weren’t properly mixed, either. When Southern Rock Opera was first pressed onto vinyl, the engineers half-assed the job, refusing to master the record for that format. “They just ran the CD master and pressed records out of it, which didn’t sound great,” Hood says. “I was always annoyed about that.” Southern Rock Opera was never a “hi-fidelity” record; it was made in a warehouse on now-outdated digital recording gear that was glitchy and beat to hell. But the Decoration Day songs always deserved a face-lift and they’re getting one, in a spanking vinyl reissue from New West.

Greg Calbi—whose mastering discography includes titles like Born to Run, Marquee Moon, Ramones, Remain in Light, Murmur, Graceland, Gimme Fiction, Boys and Girls in America, No Cities to Love, Currents, Evermore, A Deeper Understanding, and a hundred others—worked with the Truckers for 20 years, on almost every record since The Dirty South. Hood always hoped Calbi would remaster Decoration Day, and they convinced him to do it two weeks before he retired from the business. “He remixed it extremely true to the original mix,” Hood says. “For reasons I’m not quite sure of, it just somehow sounds better. He did all the same panning and settings, following his own notes. He has a Neve console now, so everything sounds really good going through those old boards—it’s like what you’d have at Abbey Road, or something.” This new mix of Decoration Day got the Stasium treatment, so to speak: a perfect record made even more perfect because every slick, hellfire pocket is heard in widescreen.

DECORATION DAY WAS A growing-up record for the already-grown Drive-By Truckers. Good writers are always finding their voice, and the decorated graves on the Decoration Day cover reveal tragic songs about crooked lovers, bastard children, divided families, vengeful farmers, and a Dixie whistle dried up. You can hear the band maturing most on the album’s final song, the Cooley-penned “Loaded Gun in the Closet,” which “shows a growth in all of us that was new, and that’s the fact that the loaded gun stays in the closet. I don’t think that had ever happened in our band before,” Hood says. “Before that, the gun always got pulled out—and that opened the doors to everything we did after that.” He stops himself, scoffing. “Cooley would probably say that was the most full of shit thing he’s ever heard anybody say, but [‘Loaded Gun in the Closet’] was profoundly important to me, even at the time. We were all writing better than we had ever written in our lives. By that time, I’d been writing songs for almost 30 years. But we were really on fire.”

It’s true. There was no better band in America in 2003 than the Drive-By Truckers. They were a more talented but equally self-implosive version of the Allman Brothers circa-Brothers and Sisters. Never too haughty or mystical, Hood, Isbell, and Cooley wrote about the Confederate loam they grew up on with a compassionate but honest, grounded eye. They shrunk the expansive, figure-driven storytelling of Southern Rock Opera down to this flinty, somber microcosm of humanly story. It wasn’t about George Wallace or rock and roll plane crashes anymore, but cars getting pawned for wedding rings, a housepainter’s cautionary tale, brides left at the altar, families living and dying in a multi-generational blood feud, long tours killing marriages, siblings jailed for incest, homes living through a handful of tornadoes. In Decoration Day was a portrait of a place many knew well but not personally.

Because the backdrop of a Truckers album is always a Southern one. It’s all Hood and his bandmates know. Him hearing Springsteen mention his granddaddy’s blue-collar Jersey town, Linden, in “Mansion On the Hill” in 1982 certainly instilled in his art a sense of place. But criss-crossing the country over and over and over with the Truckers well into his thirties helped him make his words about the Deep South make sense. “The South is so conflicted, because there is so much to hate and so much about our reputation is deservedly bad,” Hood says. “But there’s a beauty to that place that’s undeniable and often not talked about enough. And when it is talked about, I was always irked by the fact that the people who would talk about the beautiful parts would try to whitewash the dark, ugly truth. To me, to talk about beauty without acknowledging the other is dishonest and doesn’t serve us well. It makes us look ridiculous. No one’s gonna listen to someone talking about how friendly the Southerners are when all they’re thinking about is fire hoses. You have to acknowledge that, to get to the other part of it.”

The Truckers are a famously left-wing band with roots in Georgia and Alabama, the latter state voting over 60% MAGA in the 2024 presidential election. But over 30% is still a lot of people. “That’s a lot of people from Alabama who feel the way we do, who were mortified before their hamburger meat doubled in price and have been working diligently for decades to try to improve our state and the way we are and the way we’re looked at in the world,” Hood reckons. “I’m proud that our band has given a little bit of voice to some of that.” But that doesn’t make him or the Truckers any less angry.

On Colbert last week, Hood sang “Hell No, I Ain’t Happy” with Isbell on the axe next to him for the first time since 2007, when Isbell left the band to pursue a solo career. To be clear, the duo fixed their bullshit years ago, Hood says, “but even then, we never didn’t love each other.” “Hell No, I Ain’t Happy” is the most punk rock song on Decoration Day, and a long-sober Isbell positively wails on it like he’s 24 and hellbent with balls-out talent. Hood, who now lives in Portland, Oregon, cites his hometown “being under siege” by National Guardsmen deployed to counter anti-ICE protests as a motivating force. “They’re gaslighting people and lying about us on TV. You want to hear about angry Americans? I’ll show you some angry fucking Americans. That song’s more universal than just what the lyrics originally said in 2002 when I wrote it. We’re happy as a band, but we’re not happy about much else. These are fucked-up times, and I’m pissed.”

2,000 shows and 22 years onward, Decoration Day is the most-important Southern rock album of my lifetime and possibly yours. I write now because I found it however long ago and could never get the stories out of my head. The Drive-By Truckers have many children of their own now too—Wednesday, S.G. Goodman, Fust, Waxahatchee, Kevin Morby. The lineage carries on and on. “It’s very validating and it warms my heart a lot,” Hood gestures, “because I do love what we do and I feel very strongly about what we do and what our band has done.” Three decades of hard living, far too many close calls, and enough booze to sedate a town have whizzed right by Hood and his bandmates. They never did get bigger than Jesus but they’ve still got plenty of stories to give away, because there’s forgiveness and living and dying to go find. “We’ve survived a lot of shit and we’re still out there swinging and doing pretty good.”