Category: Music

So, who’s your pick? That dude from Cypress Hill or Chuck D.? The Ruler of the Funky Buddha or The Mouth That Roared? I’m talking about who the new lead singer for Rage Against the Machine should be, of course. The highest-profile radical rock band in the land needs a new mouthpiece, and those seem to be the prime names being bandied about. I wish I could say I’m surprised that no woman’s name has come up, though it’d be a much more radical move to let a femme voice (and perspective) harness the phallic power of Tom Morello’s axe than another Boy Acting Serious and Important. Like Public Enemy before them and like many other great agit-rock acts, Rage’s rage seemed as much about macho posturing as inspiring a livable revolution, and incorporating a little girlie action into their Godzilla-like roar might be a refreshing new direction. All of which is a roundabout way of offering my own suggestion for a new lead singer: Ani Difranco!

Why not? Difranco could use the commercial boost after watching her cult diminish over the last few years, and Rage could use someone with the ability to connect their political sloganeering (and the power of their Molotov-cocktail music) to the physical and emotional realities of everyday life. Sounds like a match to me.

For those outside her core demographic — (very) young, smart, left-leaning (white) women — Difranco can be an acquired taste. After dismissing her for years, like so many others have, as a strident feminist folkie (and “folkie” is the bad word here, not “feminist”), Difranco finally won me over in 1998, when I stumbled onto “Fuel,” a cut from her Little Plastic Castles album. Righteous and caustic, funny and quirky, down-to-earth but with an unexpectedly visionary twist, “Fuel” still sounds like the “protest” song of the decade to me. The song begins with Difranco walking by a Manhattan construction site where a slave cemetery has just been found (“May their souls rest easy now that lynching is illegal/and we’ve moved on to the electric chair”), a sight that triggers a personalized, stream-of-consciousness State of the Union address that encompasses everything from bankrupt politics to crass corporate culture to our isolated citizenry — all conveyed in a thrillingly conversational, everygirl voice. Then Difranco snaps back to real time, still standing over the unearthed cemetery, with a desire to dig even deeper: “down beneath the impossible pain of our history/beneath the unknown bones/and the bedrock of the mystery” to a place where “there’s a fire just waiting for fuel.” Morello’s quicksilver guitar could be the sonic match needed to ignite the blaze.

Okay — time to cut the crap. Won’t happen, right? Rage’s sound is too monolithic to make room for someone whose rhythms and desires seem so deeply personal. Besides, married and past 30, Difranco’s radicalism knows too many shades of grey to embrace the reckless abandon of Rage’s revolution.

The political genius of Difranco’s art is her ability to demonstrate, without ever seeming too willful, how an ethical outlook and subsequent emotional responses can inform how you relate to a lover and a friend as much as it informs how you relate to your country. With the new, two-disc, two-hour torrent of images and ideas, Revelling/Reckoning — essentially her marriage album — Difranco makes this connection plainer than ever. What Difranco has done in the process — perhaps unintentionally — is leave her kids’ cult behind and craft a great adult pop album — a hard thing to do in a genre clogged with the dispiriting self-regard of people like Sting and Don Henley.

The two records have distinct personalities: Revelling boasts fuller arrangements, making the most of Difranco’s unique jazz/funk-folk. Reckoning is more intimate and introspective, boasting a more captivating group of songs. Each record lives up to its title. Revelling starts off, on “Ain’t That The Way,” with Maceo Parker background vocals and Difranco scrunching up her voice like the “Left Eye” Lopes of funk-folk. The message: “Love makes me feel so dumb.” Difranco restates this theme of romantic happiness a bit more slyly on “Marrow”: “I’m a good kisser/and you’re a fast learner/and that kind of thing could float us/for a pretty long time.”

But Reckoning is the real keeper, with “Your Next Bold Move” starting with this: “Coming of age during the plague/of Reagan and Bush/watching capitalism gun down democracy/it had this funny effect on me.” It’s a defeat song, chastising the ineffectualness of a “left wing that was broken long ago,” but what makes it remarkable is how effortlessly the song’s emotion segues into the more personal skepticism of the following marriage songs, “Reckoning” and “So What.” And so it is with the whole of the record, as the political defiance of a song like “Subdivision” (“White people are so scared of black people/they bulldoze out to the country/and put up houses on little loop-dee-loop streets/while America gets its heart cut right out of its chest”) mingles easily with the romantic travails of a song like “Sick of Me” (“The first person in your life/to ever really matter/is saying the last thing/that you want to hear”), making it all sound like part of the same struggle.

So while the job might sound tempting, Difranco probably won’t be too concerned if Rage’s invite never arrives. Judging from Revelling/Reckoning, she’s got more serious battles to wage.

You can e-mail Chris Herrington at herrington@memphisflyer.com.

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Music Notes

by CHRIS HERRINGTON

The Premier Player Awards, held at The Pyramid Thursday, April 5th, may have been the site of a New Orleans invasion, but Memphis artists still stole the show. This annual awards ceremony, sponsored by the local chapter of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, is essentially the local Grammys, and this year famed New Orleans funk band the Meters took home the Governors Award, the Premier Player’s highest honor. Three-fourths of the original Meters lineup (drummer Joseph Modeliste was a no-show) closed the show with a half-hour greatest-hits set.

The Meters minus one were fine. I may have gotten more of a charge from staying home with my Wild Tchoupitoulas record, but The Meters were still much better than younger New Orleans groove bands Galactic and Astral Project on a night when five of 14 performers fell loosely into the “jam-rock” category, encompassing the good (Meters, North Mississippi Allstars), the so-so (FreeWorld, Galactic), and the so, so bad (the tepid noodle-jazz of Astral Project).

The Meters may have walked away with the show’s biggest honor, but the night really belonged to locals the North Mississippi Allstars and fast-rising Cory Branan. The Allstars took home their second straight award for Best Band and also picked up the Outstanding Achievement Award, besting competition like platinum-selling Three 6 Mafia and hot producer Paul Ebersold for the award that band patriarch Jim Dickinson won last year.

Singer-songwriter Branan won the Phillips Newcomer Award and seemed genuinely surprised, explaining, “I don’t even have a record out,” but thanking voters for keeping their ears to the ground. Branan, who received fervent applause whenever his name came up, also gave arguably the night’s best performance with a typically edgy and heartfelt reading of his song “Tame” during a songwriter’s showcase with Nancy Apple and Keith Sykes.

In all, 21 awards were given, with Steve Potts (drums/percussion), Jim Spake (woodwinds), and Jackie Johnson (female vocalist) joining the Allstars as repeat winners.

The show opened with a “Mardi Gras parade” led by eclectic Best Band nominee FreeWorld and spiked by cameos from Jackie Johnson and last year’s rap winner Lois Lane. Performances from Best Female Vocalist nominees were among the show’s strongest segments. Ruby Wilson delivered a blistering rendition of the Etta James standard “At Last,” with sax man Jim Spake, fresh from winning his eighth woodwinds award in the program’s 16 years, getting a nice showcase. And female vocalist winner Johnson joined nominee Susan Marshall-Powell for a powerful run-through of William Bell’s “You Don’t Miss Your Water” and a gospel number.

Spake’s brief acceptance speech, in which he issued a casual plea for voters to check out a wider range of local music, was one of the few interesting thank-yous of the night. Gaffe of the night award has to go to host Larry Raspberry, who revealed himself to be probably the only person left in Memphis who hasn’t seen The Poor & Hungry when he mistakenly said the film was a documentary while introducing director and Best Band Award presenter Craig Brewer.

The most decorum-free performances of the night came from a couple of Best Band nominees and likely sources: Big Ass Truck, a club band that’s been around so long now they’re probably underrated, were a highlight, dedicating a performance spiked by Steve Selvidge’s animated guitar to late local musician Craig Shindler. And Lucero gave the most out-of-place and, consequently, the most interesting performance of the night with a willfully perverse reading of their slow, loud, and mean live staple “No Roses, No More.” Technical problems dulled the performance’s force, though, and it was hard to tell if the deliberate change of pace won them new fans or drove potential converts away.

This year’s winners were: Harmonica: Blind Mississippi Morris; Woodwinds: Jim Spake; Brass: Scott Thompson; Guitar: Preston Shannon; Strings: Susanna Perry Gilmore; Live DJ/Turntable Artist: Michael “Boogaloo” Boyer; Rappers: Three 6 Mafia; Drums/Percussion: Steve Potts; Bass: Dave Smith; Keyboards: Tony Thomas and Charlie Wood; Female Vocalist: Jackie Johnson; Male Vocalist: Jimmy Davis; Choir: O’Landa Draper’s Associates; Teacher: Jackie Thomas; Engineer: William Brown; Producer: Paul Ebersold; Newcomer/Phillips Award: Cory Branan; Community Service/John Tigrett Award: WEVL FM-90; Outstanding Achievement: North Mississippi Allstars; Songwriter: Kevin Paige; Band: North Mississippi Allstars.

So, who’s your pick? That dude from Cypress Hill or Chuck D.? The Ruler of the Funky Buddha or The Mouth That Roared? I’m talking about who the new lead singer for Rage Against the Machine should be, of course. The highest-profile radical rock band in the land needs a new mouthpiece, and those seem to be the prime names being bandied about. I wish I could say I’m surprised that no woman’s name has come up, though it’d be a much more radical move to let a femme voice (and perspective) harness the phallic power of Tom Morello’s axe than another Boy Acting Serious and Important. Like Public Enemy before them and like many other great agit-rock acts, Rage’s rage seemed as much about macho posturing as inspiring a livable revolution, and incorporating a little girlie action into their Godzilla-like roar might be a refreshing new direction. All of which is a roundabout way of offering my own suggestion for a new lead singer: Ani Difranco!

Why not? Difranco could use the commercial boost after watching her cult diminish over the last few years, and Rage could use someone with the ability to connect their political sloganeering (and the power of their Molotov-cocktail music) to the physical and emotional realities of everyday life. Sounds like a match to me.

For those outside her core demographic — (very) young, smart, left-leaning (white) women — Difranco can be an acquired taste. After dismissing her for years, like so many others have, as a strident feminist folkie (and “folkie” is the bad word here, not “feminist”), Difranco finally won me over in 1998, when I stumbled onto “Fuel,” a cut from her Little Plastic Castles album. Righteous and caustic, funny and quirky, down-to-earth but with an unexpectedly visionary twist, “Fuel” still sounds like the “protest” song of the decade to me. The song begins with Difranco walking by a Manhattan construction site where a slave cemetery has just been found (“May their souls rest easy now that lynching is illegal/and we’ve moved on to the electric chair”), a sight that triggers a personalized, stream-of-consciousness State of the Union address that encompasses everything from bankrupt politics to crass corporate culture to our isolated citizenry — all conveyed in a thrillingly conversational, everygirl voice. Then Difranco snaps back to real time, still standing over the unearthed cemetery, with a desire to dig even deeper: “down beneath the impossible pain of our history/beneath the unknown bones/and the bedrock of the mystery” to a place where “there’s a fire just waiting for fuel.” Morello’s quicksilver guitar could be the sonic match needed to ignite the blaze.

Okay — time to cut the crap. Won’t happen, right? Rage’s sound is too monolithic to make room for someone whose rhythms and desires seem so deeply personal. Besides, married and past 30, Difranco’s radicalism knows too many shades of grey to embrace the reckless abandon of Rage’s revolution.

The political genius of Difranco’s art is her ability to demonstrate, without ever seeming too willful, how an ethical outlook and subsequent emotional responses can inform how you relate to a lover and a friend as much as it informs how you relate to your country. With the new, two-disc, two-hour torrent of images and ideas, Revelling/Reckoning — essentially her marriage album — Difranco makes this connection plainer than ever. What Difranco has done in the process — perhaps unintentionally — is leave her kids’ cult behind and craft a great adult pop album — a hard thing to do in a genre clogged with the dispiriting self-regard of people like Sting and Don Henley.

The two records have distinct personalities: Revelling boasts fuller arrangements, making the most of Difranco’s unique jazz/funk-folk. Reckoning is more intimate and introspective, boasting a more captivating group of songs. Each record lives up to its title. Revelling starts off, on “Ain’t That The Way,” with Maceo Parker background vocals and Difranco scrunching up her voice like the “Left Eye” Lopes of funk-folk. The message: “Love makes me feel so dumb.” Difranco restates this theme of romantic happiness a bit more slyly on “Marrow”: “I’m a good kisser/and you’re a fast learner/and that kind of thing could float us/for a pretty long time.”

But Reckoning is the real keeper, with “Your Next Bold Move” starting with this: “Coming of age during the plague/of Reagan and Bush/watching capitalism gun down democracy/it had this funny effect on me.” It’s a defeat song, chastising the ineffectualness of a “left wing that was broken long ago,” but what makes it remarkable is how effortlessly the song’s emotion segues into the more personal skepticism of the following marriage songs, “Reckoning” and “So What.” And so it is with the whole of the record, as the political defiance of a song like “Subdivision” (“White people are so scared of black people/they bulldoze out to the country/and put up houses on little loop-dee-loop streets/while America gets its heart cut right out of its chest”) mingles easily with the romantic travails of a song like “Sick of Me” (“The first person in your life/to ever really matter/is saying the last thing/that you want to hear”), making it all sound like part of the same struggle.

So while the job might sound tempting, Difranco probably won’t be too concerned if Rage’s invite never arrives. Judging from Revelling/Reckoning, she’s got more serious battles to wage.

If you wanted to get analytical about it, you could conclude that the rise of angry, adolescent-oriented hard rock over the last half-decade has something to do with the resentment Gen Y kids have for their boomer parents. The higher divorce rates and increase in latch-key childhoods over the last 20 years have changed the tone of teen anger: In the heavy-metal Eighties parents were just accused of spoiling a good time, of taking away your best porno mag, but kids who respond emotionally to Marilyn Manson and Eminem are coming from a deeper source of emptiness. That may be a conclusion that cultural gatekeepers like Bill Bennett and Lynne Cheney share about music they no doubt hate, but it’s also as undeniable as connecting the dots between economic good times, a second baby boom, and consumer-friendly mall-pop.

Crumbling families as a subject for art, much like the life experience itself, is commonplace these days. But good rock-and-roll that deals with it directly is rare, and what makes Everclear’s Art Alexakis so compelling right now is his ability to articulate that particular strain of anguish. As someone who went through it as a kid and has a daughter he’s putting through it right now, Alexakis is able to convey the pain of broken-home childhoods from two angles. He takes the familial dysfunction that young hard-rock bands like Korn and Papa Roach traffic in and makes something of it — with insight and honesty but without whiny solipsism or a loss of good humor.

Alexakis’ journey from late-grunge fluke to the poet laureate of divorced-dad rock has not been a predictable one. Everclear arrived in 1993 with the forgettable grunge of the aptly titled World of Noise then made a commercial dent with the 1995 follow-up Sparkle and Fade. That record, which gave the band its first hit with “Santa Monica,” crystallized their muscular grunge into a more identifiable sound and reflected a more discernible personality at the music’s core. But the band finally started to come into its own with 1997’s So Much for the Afterglow. The title/lead song was a new peak for the band, the Beach Boys harmonies of the intro running into Who/Nirvana power chords and launching an ambitious song that said more about the surprising growth of the band’s music than any critic could. “This is a song about the everyday occurrences that make me feel like letting go,” Alexakis asserted, and so it was. The album also included the hit single “Father of Mine,” a strong commentary on Alexakis’ own single-parent childhood and the first time he hit his great subject head-on.

After a three-year hiatus, Everclear released two albums in 2000, the dubiously connected Songs From an American Movie Vol. One: Learning How to Smile and Songs From an American Movie Vol. Two: Good Time For a Bad Attitude. The conceptual framework of this prestige move is ambiguous; I still haven’t figured out what that title means; and the hard-rockin’ Vol. Two is the band’s worst record since their debut. But Vol. One is a shock.

On Learning How to Smile, Alexakis and company finally find their true voices as a great classic-rock band, referencing Jimmy Page and “Brown-Eyed Girl,” John Prine and “the Otis Redding.” In the most underappreciated pop coup of the year, the band came out of the guitar maelstrom of their previous work with a career album more likely to please fans of Tom Petty and Aerosmith than fans of Nirvana and Sonic Youth. This is their cornball pop move — sampling Public Enemy and “Mr. Big Stuff,” bringing in horns and background vocals and strings — and it’s the one that I adore.

But it’s also Alexakis’ D-I-V-O-R-C-E album, with an overture that contains the following central image: “The only thing that ever made sense in my life/is the sound of my little girl laughing/through the window of a summer night/I sit alone in the backyard/wishing I could be inside.” If you’re wondering why he has to stay outside and only hear her through the window, the rest of the album provides enough context to fill in the gaps — he’s simply there to deliver the child-support check.

Alexakis only comments on his daughter directly at the beginning and end of the album, but she informs all of the relationship songs in the middle of the record, a group of courtship-and-marriage memories that glow with the knowledge of what’s been lost and the damage that’s been wrought. The songs also charm with inspired details of the low-rent dating life that Everclear’s younger and more vague modern-rock competitors can’t touch — such as the plastic welfare-office chair that Alexakis first spies his future bride in and this magic moment from “Here We Go Again”: “There ain’t no place I’d rather be/than watching dirty movies/in that happy room with you/sleeping on a mattress/in the corner/eating Chinese food.”

Everclear isn’t the world’s greatest rock-and-roll band — far from it. But on Friday night at The Pyramid, stuck between the pre-fab modern rock of Lifehouse and the bloated bellowing of Rob Thomas and Matchbox Twenty, they might sound like it.

The Glands

It’s my heart that’s in the right place but my head that’s in the
clouds,” the Glands’ Ross Shapiro sings on “Swim,” thus summing
up his band’s peculiar charm. The Glands are a rare thing indeed: an Athens
band that doesn’t seem to be influenced by any other Athens band. They don’t
belong to the eclectic Elephant 6 collective, and their tight blend of pop and
rock is miles removed from the loose jangle of early REM or the party-movin’
workouts of the B-52s.

The band’s eponymous sophomore album, released last year on
Atlanta’s Capricorn Records, is a glorious hodgepodge of styles, ranging from
witty, intelligent pop to crunchy, guitar-driven rock to contemplative folk.
It’s a friendly record, one that sounds immediately familiar yet is strikingly
original and resourceful in its execution.

One of the first things you notice on the album is its sense of
spontaneity, a result, perhaps, of the band having no set approach to making
the record. “Sometimes there is no real plan to how something is supposed
to go,” says Shapiro. “So we’ll go into it with the plan to
experiment until something good comes out of it.” Such playfulness is
evident throughout The Glands, from the yawning violin in the coda of
“Swim” to the great tectonic bass shifts that move
“Lovetown” to the seemingly lackadaisical construction of “I
Can See My House from Here.”

The album’s diversity of sound comes not only from the band’s
loose approach to recording but also from its use of multiple studios and
producers. In addition, the Glands are listed as co-producers on each track.
“The different studios,” Shapiro explains, “have different
ambiences. Each producer works in a different way, and since our songs go all
over the place, it’s good to have no set habits. Plus, they’re all kinda part
of the band.” The result is a surprisingly diverse collection that shifts
moods often and easily, constructing hooky pop songs and murky soundscapes
with equal success — and never using the same trick twice.

Despite this eclectic quality, The Glands is a genuinely
cohesive collection. Holding all the disparate elements together, Shapiro’s
voice — utterly devoid of affectation — exudes a laid-back charm. Sonically,
it falls somewhere between Tom Petty’s matter-of-fact Southern drawl and Bob
Dylan’s nasal whine, but it also suggests such newcomers as Mercury Rev’s
Jonathan Donahue and Doug Martsch of Built to Spill. But Shapiro’s voice
displays more resonance and distinctiveness than those comparisons suggest; he
is no better or worse a singer than those above but very different,
simultaneously disaffected and completely relaxed.

Genuinely intriguing and sharply crafted, his lyrics possess a
conversational quality that matches his vocal style. There are flashes of
insight on songs like “Straight Down” and “Favorite
American,” and “Soul Inspiration” bristles with an alarming
ambiguity. However, he conveys more meaning in the sound of his voice than in
the words he sings, so lyrics remain secondary to the album’s overall
sound.

The rest of the band — Doug Stanley, Andy Baker, and Neil Golden
— display a funky versatility, genre-hopping from indie to pop to straight-
ahead rock with a dexterous flair. The opener and would-be single,
“Livin’ Was Easy,” shuffles into a drum-heavy breakdown inspired, it
would seem, by Pavement’s “Summer Babe.” It laments having to leave
behind the simple pleasures of life — “Why did I go?/The livin’ was
easy/I had a room of my own/and the weather was warm.”

“When I Laugh” thumps along with a relentless momentum
and some endlessly catchy backup doo-doo-doo-doo-doos. “Swim,”
heralded by a short string intro, changes gear to upbeat pop, tricked out with
a bubbly piano theme. Taken together, the first three tracks comprise a
perfect opening: endearing, inviting, and unflaggingly upbeat. It’s not until
the fourth song, the beautiful, ponderous “Mayflower,” that the
momentum slows.

Through the course of 13 songs, the Glands also touch on classic
rock with pieces like “Straight Down” and “Work It Out,”
which actually have guitar solos, as well as slower, moodier pieces like the
evocative “Ground,” which centers on a start-stop guitar theme and a
spiraling organ solo.

But the album’s literal and conceptual centerpiece, “I Can
See My House from Here,” is its own creation entirely. A steady-moving
pop song at heart, it piles layer upon layer of percussion, guitar, vocals,
and a variation of the piano line from the Four Seasons’ “Oh What a
Night.” It has the spaced-out vibe of a remix, yet every sound feels
vital and central.

For collectors, the vinyl edition of The Glands contains
five extra tracks, which, on the whole, are fairly minor. Only “Something
in the Air” is truly worth seeking out. Its propulsive tempo and crisp
guitars match the mood of “Straight Down” and “Work It
Out,” while Shapiro’s boyish la-la-las and casual lyrics complement
“Livin’ Was Easy” and “Swim.”

Such a rare band has accomplished an even rarer feat: The Glands
have created a small masterpiece of precise sound and easy intimacy, and
Shapiro’s richly textured voice, paired with the band’s exacting work, reveals
new depth and detail with every listen.

The Glands

With The Go and The Final Solutions

Tuesday, March 20th

Last Place on Earth

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Music Notes

by CHRIS HERRINGTON

Rockabilly Revival

To the extent that longtime Memphians Jesse Lee and Jimmy Denson
have been recognized, it’s usually been in relation to Elvis Presley. The
Denson brothers grew up with Elvis in the Lauderdale Courts housing project
and their father ran the Poplar Street Mission, which helped the Presley
family start their lives in Memphis. Jesse Lee Denson, roughly two years
Elvis’ senior, is said to have given Elvis some of his earliest guitar
instruction and mentoring. But thanks to a new import release from London’s
Ace Records — Long Gone Daddies: Original ’50s Rockabilly & Rock ‘n’
Roll from the Modern Label — listeners can check out how the Denson
brothers fared as artists in their own right.

This collection of obscure first-generation rockabilly sides
crams 32 singles and demos onto one disc, including Lee Denson’s “High
School Hop” and five cuts credited under the moniker “Jesse
James” that were performed by Jesse Lee and co-written with brother
Jimmy. These sides were cut in Los Angeles on the tail end of the rockabilly
wave for a label called Kent. “High School Hop” is a typical genre
exercise that, for all its energy, sounds pretty calculated. But the Jesse
James cuts are a little bit rougher. The surprising “South’s Gonna Rise
Again,” included here in its 1958 singles form and as a previously
unreleased demo, is a nervy, proto-Bocephus, scary-white-boy roots anthem with
group-vocal hallelujahs and lyrics like, “Down south of the Mason-Dixon,
friends/Rebels are a’rockin’ and rollin’ in” and “Save your
Confederate money, my friend.” It may have just been a prideful
rockabilly testament, but in 1958 I bet it sounded pretty sketchy. And then
there’s “Rock Daddy Rock,” which begins with the lustful cry,
“There’s a lot of 13-, 14-, 15-year-old girls .”

The Denson brothers are still in town and are anxious for people
to rediscover their music, which could be a problem. Last I heard, Shangri-La
Records in Midtown was trying to get some of these English-import discs but
wasn’t having much luck. If you’re interested, check with Shangri-La.

New Releases

Significant new records scheduled to hit the racks this week:

Bastard Sons of Johnny Cash — Walk Alone
(Ultimatum Music)

Eric Clapton — Reptile (Reprise)

Daft Punk — Discovery (Virgin)

Idlewild — 100 Broken Windows (Capitol/Odeon)

Los Super Seven — Canto (Columbia/Legacy)

Swag — Catch-All (Yep Roc)

Drive-by Truckers

If, in a fit of utter nerdishness, you were to devise a chart ranking bands for their music and their monikers, I’m pretty sure there wouldn’t be many good-band/bad-name gaps as wide as that of the Drive-by Truckers. The name is pure novelty, and it gives uninitiated listeners every right to expect a cross between the Insane Clown Posse and Southern Culture on the Skids. This problem is only exacerbated by the unfortunate title of the band’s first album — Gangstabilly. But the Drive-by Truckers are not the cornpone attitude-mongers their name suggests, nor does their music — in content or sound — have the slightest bit to do with either “gangsta” or “rockabilly.” What the Drive-by Truckers are is one of the best rock-and-roll bands around right now — the missing link between the proud, smart redneck-rock of Lynyrd Skynyrd and the fierce, sloppy-yet-tuneful post-punk roar of the Replacements and the Archers of Loaf.

Five years after forming and 15 years after co-leaders Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley first hooked up with the band Adam’s House Cat, these Athens-by-way-of-Muscle-Shoals road-warriors may be on the verge of breaking out. Last year, The Village Voice dubbed the group the best unknown band in America, and the current issue of Spin lists them as “on the verge” for 2001. The band hits town this week with the thrilling, late-2000 live album Alabama Ass Whuppin’ under their belts and a “rock opera” on the horizon about Southern culture in the Seventies. The forthcoming record is said to be called Betamax Guillotine, a reference to the rumor that one member of Lynyrd Skynyrd was decapitated by a VCR when the band’s plane went down.

Hood and Cooley both lived in Memphis briefly during the early Nineties — which spawned the song “The Night G.G. Allin Came to Town,” about the late shock-rocker’s infamous Antenna club performance — and the band performs here regularly. I missed their last stop in town, last fall at the Hi-Tone, which was reportedly a perverse and poorly attended affair. But a gig the band played a year or so ago at Young Avenue Deli was a ragged-but-right revelation: loud and anthemic but suffused with conversational good humor, it was one of the best sets I’ve ever seen by a band I knew little about.

It may seem odd for an under-the-radar, regional rock band with only two studio albums to its name to release a live record, especially since the Drive-by Truckers are in no way a “jam” band. But the decision to do so — along with being a possible stopgap while trying to complete the “rock opera” opus — reflects the reality of a cult band that improves on the stage. And while the 70-minute Alabama Ass Whuppin’ may be no substitute for the real thing, it’s still a perfectly paced, kick-ass document that captures the raucous, roadhouse feel of the band’s stage show.

The album kicks off with the slow, grueling grind of Hood’s “Why Henry Drinks,” a song inspired by Hank Williams Jr.’s “Family Tradition.” Neil Young guitars lurch out of the gate and into Hood’s mean, meaty twang, spitting venom with lines like, “Those obnoxious drunks downstairs are fighting and cussing/12 years of me and you don’t add up to a goddamn nothing.” The record then segues into the equally down-tempo suicidal tendencies of the Adam’s House Cat dirge “Lookout Mountain.”

The pace picks up with “The Living Bubba,” a moving, mid-tempo tribute to an Atlanta musician and friend who died of AIDS, and then moves swiftly into the sardonic, up-tempo ode to radio preachers “Too Much Sex (Too Little Jesus).” The record then hits overdrive with the breakneck break-up song “Don’t Be in Love Around Me,” with Hood delivering a matter-of-fact message to an ex-lover: “I’m not in the mood to see you looking at each other like you’re looking at each other right now.”

Alabama Ass Whuppin’ peaks with the unforgettable centerpiece “18 Wheels of Love.” Hood is a good singer, but he’s a great talker, and the jaw-dropping monologue that opens this song is an unintentional testament to the enduring character of Southern speech — the accent, the content, and the delivery all inspire regional ardor. Breathtakingly walking the line between life-affirming laughs and easy yuks, Hood begins his story by announcing, “When my mom and dad got divorced my momma locked herself in her room and didn’t come out for six years.” Hood goes on to paint a picture of his exiled mother, with three TV sets (“just like Elvis, the King, used to have”) and two VCRs on top of each “so she could watch all the shows later that she wasn’t watching when she was watching the other shows.”

But the child support runs out and Hood’s momma has to get a job. “Let me tell you folks,” Hood says in a tough but touching moment. “It’s a mean, mean, cruel world out there for a 55-year-old woman that’s never worked a day in her life.” Hood’s mother finds the kind of job that small-town Alabama affords middle-aged, underedu-cated women — log monitor at a trucking company. There she falls for Chester, “the biggest, meanest motherfucker” at the company, and gets married at Dollywood. Hood explains that his momma’s remarriage happened at a time when he was unemployed and broke so “I wrote my momma this song as a wedding present; it’s called ’18 Wheels of Love’ and every goddamn word is true.” Guitars rise from the din as Hood speaks the last, triumphant line and the song ignites. Other than Clarence Carter’s treatise on the birds and the bees in his version of “The Dark End of the Street,” this might be the grandest extended, spoken-word intro in rock-and-roll history.

After that glorious high note, the album downshifts with a hilarious, impromptu childhood remembrance called “The Avon Lady” and Hood’s “Margo and Harold,” a Randy Newman-worthy tale of being hounded by a pair of middle-aged swingers.

The record then climaxes with a medley of sorts. The band breaks into a noisy, guitar-drenched tribute to a Seventies icon on “Steve McQueen” (“Bullitt was the best movie I’d ever seen/Tore up my go-kart tryin’ to imitate that chase scene,” Hood drawls), before unexpectedly morphing into a vicious, perfect cover of Skynyrd’s “Gimme Three Steps.” And just when you think things can’t get any crazier or more inspired, the band has the guts and heart to segue breathlessly from this McQueen/Skynyrd tribute into a ferocious recitation of the Jim Carroll Band’s classic “People Who Died.”

Somewhere out there Ronnie Van Zandt, not to mention the lost friend saluted on “The Living Bubba,” is flashing a big shit-eating grin.

The Drive-by Truckers

With Old No. 8 and Truckadelic, The Hi-Tone Café, Thursday, March 8th