Music To Wave Your Lighter To: The Drive-By Truckers Roll Though New York

You know those TV commercials for monster truck rallies that scream, “POWER! POWER... POWER... THIS FRIDAY NIGHT, NIGHT... NIGHT…” Well, that was what I kept hearing in my ringing ears in-between songs this last Friday night at the Bowery Ballroom. This weekend the unapologetically southern Drive-By Truckers rolled through Manhattan for one of the last shows of their seven-month, three-legged tour they called “The Dirt Underneath.” This tour, featuring the band’s newly altered roster—all of whom stayed seated, for the most part, during the show—was the bands’ attempt, according to Trucker Patterson Hood, at “basically reinventing and redefining ourselves in front of an audience” before they head into the studio to record their next album.

The crowd was, as is the norm at many DBT shows, dude-skewed, maybe a 10-to-1 ratio at best. The herd of bulls featured more than one mullet and gaggles of middle-aged hubbies who don’t look like they get out much, at least not without their better halves. The man behind us, who apparently hasn’t been out with the guys since his frat days, found he couldn’t contain himself and gagged on his shot, spewing whiskey on our backs. He apologized, but apparently was too far gone to realize such a faux pas mandates at least a round or two of drinks for the wetted. Guys have gotten the teeth kicked out of them—at Truckers’ shows especially—for much less. As if on cue, Hood took a pull off his fifth of Jack and said, “I better sing something that you mother fuckers can sing along to before you start fighting and shit.”

Luckily, the bourbon-soaked histrionics on stage pre-empted the ones behind us, and the Truckers’ music easily took our minds off all else. With a small armory of acoustic gee-tars, banjos, harmonicas and pedal steels, this band of modern-day Faulkners took us on a hayride to Alabama where trailer-park prose and confederate poetry cries out to good old-fashioned rock ’n’ roll. Thunderous anthems melted into whisper-soft ballads, the mood continuously swerving between the sinister and the sublime. The Muscle Shoals key veteran Spooner Oldham sat in the back, adding some historic flavor to an evening filled with other nostalgic nods: a cameo by the inimitable soul siren, Bettye Lavette, whom DBT backed on last month’s release The Scene of the Crime; lighter-waving-worthy covers of Springsteen’s “State Trooper” and Jim Carroll’s punk epic “People Who Died”; and the crowd-pleasing Skynyrd-AC/DC-Molly Hatchet-.38 Special tribute, “Let There Be Rock.” This tour may have worked to remind fans of the Truckers’ softer side, but to us, it was all about the POWER! POWER! POWER!