MUSIC

Truckers set to park at Rev Room for gig

Drive-By Truckers — Brad Morgan (from left), Patterson Hood, John Neff, Jay Gonzalez and Mike Cooley — return to Little Rock for a show Wednesday at the Rev Room.
Drive-By Truckers — Brad Morgan (from left), Patterson Hood, John Neff, Jay Gonzalez and Mike Cooley — return to Little Rock for a show Wednesday at the Rev Room.

— Part of what makes Drive-By Truckers such a fascinating band is the way its songwriters have managed to make distinctly Southern rock sound literate and thoughtful.

Across nine studio albums, the Truckers’ catalog includes songs about moonshiners, rockers, incest, race-car drivers, murderers,thieves, cancer, heart breakers, the heartbroken, suicide, tweakers, crooked bankers. And the thing is, these are often plainspoken stories told with hard-won wisdom along with, sometimes, wry humor and even a political slant. Songs that could just as easily be Southern gothic short stories straight out of something by Flannery O’Connor or Larry Brown.

The Truckers are returning to Little Rock for a show at the Rev Room on Wednesday.

It was 1996 when co-founding guitarist/singer/ songwriter Mike Cooley, an Alabama native, teamed with his pal Patterson Hood (his bandmate in an alt-rock group called Adam’s House Cat) to form Drive-By Truckers. Since then, Cooley has authored some of the band’s most memorable songs - “Daddy’s Cup,” “Marry Me,” “Zip City,” “Carl Perkins’ Cadillac,” “3 Dimes Down” and “Cottonseed,” just to name a few.

In a band of writing talent- Hood and former member Jason Isbell are songwriting giants - does the 46-yearold Cooley ever feel pressure when composing?

“The only pressure I feel is the pressure I put on myself,” Cooley says in his deep, laconic style from the home he shares in Birmingham, Ala., with his wife and three kids. “I push myself pretty hard, but having other people write songs actually takes a lot of pressure off of me. Also, it’s good to work on somebody else’s songs.”

It was 2001 - when the band unleashed its third album, the sprawling two-disc Southern Rock Opera, an album in part about coming to terms with the legacy of Lynyrd Skynyrd, rock ’n’ roll in the New South and, in Hood’s words, “the duality of the Southern thing” - that critics and fans really took notice.

Strong albums like Decoration Day, Dirty South and A Blessing and a Curse, with their swampy, ’70s-rock soaked grooves followed, as did the double album - and first after Isbell’s departure - Brighter Than Creation’s Dark (with the most Cooley songs, seven).

The group was also the subject of The Secret to a Happy Ending: A Documentary About the Drive-By Truckers, a film by Barr Weissman, which screened at the Little Rock Film Festival in 2010.

While the band isn’t touring to tout a new record - its latest release is 2011’s fine Go-Go Boots, with its soulful covers of two Eddie Hinton songs and which was recorded during the sessions for 2010’s The Big To-Do - Cooley does have a new project on the shelves.

The Fool on Every Corner, released last month, is Cooley’s first solo album. Recorded live, the record finds him doing acoustic versions of 11 of his DBT songs, as well as a new tune, the tender character study “Drinking Coke and Eating Ice,” and his version of Charlie Rich’s “Behind Closed Doors.”

“I was thinking of something I could do that was unexpected and different,” he says of choosing to cover the classic by Arkansas native Rich, “so I jotted that down.”

And for years, Cooley confides, he had a cassette of him performing a karaoke version of that song in Amsterdam during a night off from touring with the Truckers. The version on The Fool on Every Corner is much better, he says with a laugh.

Any chance of the sweet “Drinking Coke and Eating Ice,” showing up on a Drive-By Truckers album?

“No,” he says quickly. “I just wanted something new on this live record. It’s not a masterpiece, but it’s not the worst thing I’ve ever done.”Drive-By Truckers 8:30 p.m. Wednesday, Rev Room, 300 President Clinton Ave., Little Rock Opening act: Houndmouth Tickets: $20 advance, $22 day of show (501) 823-0090 revroom.com

Style, Pages 21 on 01/22/2013

Upcoming Events