Drive-By Truckers Talk Two New Albums

Music is often considered cyclical, like the solar eclipse or crop rotation, and sometimes bands find themselves singled out as direct inheritors of a much older band’s vision. A number of critics have pegged Drive-By Truckers as inheritors of The Band’s vision – even though the Truckers have yet to appear on an album doing back-up duty, which was how the members of The Band initially found prominence.

However, the Athens-based southern rockers will nullify that potential counterpoint with their presence on soulstress Bettye Lavette’s The Scene of the Crime (set to drop September 25 on Anti-). Truckers vocalist and founder Patterson Hood spoke with Paste about the collaboration, as well as his band’s next album, due early next year.

How’s the record coming?
We spent like five days recording and we’re off to a pretty great start. Wednesday of the first week, we ended up nailing like six songs. [Guitarist Mike] Cooley’s really been writing – he hit kind of prolific streak. He’s usually a two-real-strong-songs-a-year kind of guy. And all the sudden we’re working on this record with like eight new Cooley songs. I’ve always been kind of partial to his songs anyway, so the more the better for me.

How will that affect the album overall?
He’s written like six of my favorite songs this band has ever done. He self-edits so much that usually before anybody hears them it’s already passed a lot of inspections. I attempted one time to try to use his method to see if it helped, and it didn’t. I just ended up writing very few songs and the quality wasn’t any better – probably less than when I was writing a lot. So I’ve kind of gone back to my old method of just writing everything but the kitchen sink.

You said you had a couple of song titles here and there.
”Two Daughters and a Beautiful Wife” is a song we wrote about a horrible thing that happened in Richmond, Virginia to some people that we knew. A murder. An entire family we knew that was murdered in Richmond [during] New Year's of last year. They were particularly friends with Wes and Jill Freed. Wes, who does our artwork. And you know, Richmond was one of the first towns that our band broke when we started playing out and touring. I think the first time we played in Richmond we played on a bill with a band that the father of the family was in. He and his wife had come to a number of our shows, and all of that. And Cooley has a song called “A Ghost to Most” that I think should probably be a single or something, if there’s still such a thing. I don’t know if there’s still such a thing.

I’ve been reading about this album you’ve been working on with Betty Lavette...
Every worse case scenario you can imagine, career-wise, happened to her. So she goes into Muscle Shoals in ‘72, and she signs with Atlantic and made what everyone perceived to be a really great record. Then something went wrong and no one really knows what happened. Atlantic shelved it and it didn’t come out for like 30-something years. It finally got reissued in Europe a few years ago and became this kind of cult thing, then got reissued in America. And that lead to her getting her current record deal with Anti-. So we’re kind of doing the follow-up to her finally having a breakthrough, which was kind of scary, because it’s a big responsibility to think about as long as she’s been doing this and for her to finally have a little bit of momentum going, and all the sudden they put her in the studio with a bunch of crazy people. (Laughs)

I read that she was trying to overcome her bitterness with this album. How do you think your band helps her do this? Do you think you bring even more of an edge to her music?
(Laughs) Probably so! We took her back to Muscle Shoals, which is why she’s calling the record The Scene of the Crime. It’s a different studio than the one she recorded in the first time, but it’s right down the street. And my dad [David Hood, who recorded with Lavette in '72] is playing on this record. We got him to play on a few songs, since that gave it a little bit of continuity.

I certainly think we probably pushed her into some areas that she may have initially been a little reluctant to go in. I won’t say it was easy, and at times I won’t even say it was fun. It was really one of the hardest things I think we’ve ever done as a band, because we wanted to be very true to her vision and true to our own instincts also and we’re all kind of hard-headed people. So it definitely at times was a little bit of a clash of the titans.

What was the outcome?
I think it’s beautiful. I’m really, really proud of it. It’s got moments that might be a little more rock and roll than what she’s done in the past then it’ll turn around and have moments that are extremely kind of old-school soul, which is something that all of us as a band have always been obsessed with. We covered an Eddie Hinton song, and Eddie Hinton is like everyone in our band’s all-time favorite artist.

Tell me about the Willie Nelson and Elton John covers.
Those are my two favorites on the record, I think. The Willie Nelson cover was “I Need Somebody to Pick Up My Pieces.” And we just cut it really sparse with Spooner Oldham playing piano and my dad on a bass, John (Neff) on pedal steel and our drummer playing on all the record. My favorite song on the record is the Elton John song. It’s a song on Tumbleweed Connection called “Talking Old Soldiers.” I gotta give her credit for that one, cause it never would have dawned on me to cut that song in that kind of context. She made it her own, and in her hands it became about pretty much her surviving long enough to have seen funerals of most of her peers, and the kind of toll that that in itself took on her. I think it holds up with any of the great songs from the soul era, and to happen, you know, 38 years after the soul era is pretty remarkable in my opinion. We cut it really, really sparse too. And that voice is all you needed. I mean, when she’d start singing, anything that had been a controversy 10 minutes before kind of melted away.

And she performs in the studio! It’s not like she comes in, in her sweatpants and goes through the motions, or whatever. I mean, I’m talking it’s like a performance. She goes in there and she attacks that vocal like it’s in front of Carnegie Hall or the Apollo or wherever, and she don’t like second takes, she sure don’t like third takes. She’s very demanding, which is all great. We’re a band that has tended to gravitate toward the earlier takes too, so that aspect of our relationship was pretty compatible.

It was Andy from her record label, a guy named Andy Kaulkin, it was his idea to pair her with us, and I think she went along with it initially to appease him figuring she would then either whip us into her vision of what it was supposed to be or get rid of us. And when that didn’t work out it was a bumpy ride at times but he had a vision for what the record could and should be, and really kind of stuck to it and kept us all pushing in the same direction in order to achieve it.

You talk about your dad having recorded with her on that album in 1972. What did he remember about that?
When the record got reissued in Europe, someone sent him a copy of it and at that time I don’t think he had heard anything from it since the day they recorded. ’72 was kind of their peak period—in like a three-year period right there that was kind of between sessions with Paul Simon and Rod Stewart. And so a record that never really came out pretty much was forgotten, you know, for lack of a better way of putting it. So years later when he heard the record, he was like, ‘Wow, this is really good, why didn’t this come out? What happened to this record?’ It was a record that we actually played a lot of times on the PA before we played shows.. So when we got the phone call inquiring if we’d be possibly interested in working with her, it was like, “Have you ever heard of Bettye Lavette?” and I’m like, “Oh yeah!” I was jumping up and down.

Do you think you’ll tour together?
I doubt it. We’re pretty busy right now. The touring we’re doing this fall is the kind you do between records as opposed to the kind of touring you’re doing when you’ve got a brand new record you’re pushing. We might play a show. There’s been some talk of doing a T.V. thing together or something. But I don’t really see us touring.

When we first got the job to do the Bettye Lavette record, one of the first things that I wanted to do was get Spooner to be the keyboard player, and that all worked out, and the chemistry between he and us was so good making that record that we asked him to do our next record with us, and be there as part of the band from start to finish. He’s such a soulful player.

Was this the first time you recorded with both him and your dad?
Dad played on three songs on my solo record that hasn’t come out. There’s a finished, unreleased solo record floating around out there somewhere that my dad’s on. I’d never played with him and Spooner together, and actually I don’t think I ended up playing on any of the songs that dad is on, on the Bettye Lavette record. Which is kind of a bummer. Maybe that’s something for another record.

Related links:
DriveByTruckers.com
BettyeLavette.com
Anti.com

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