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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 Southern Rock Opera was never a “hi-fidelity” record; it was made in a warehouse on now-outdated digital recording gear that was glitchy and beat to hell.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 finally 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.
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DECORATION DAY CAME OUT IN June 2003. The record was, as Hood puts it, “the kid that went on to do real well.” But its conception started five years prior, when Hood wrote “The Deeper In” during the spring of ‘98. Back then, the record was going to be called Heathens and it was going to follow-up Southern Rock Opera. The Truckers were on the road doing 200, 250 shows a year, touring Pizza Deliverance and on the cusp of that Alabama Ass Whuppin live record. “We were constantly working and constantly moving, and I wrote probably 200 songs during the 4-year era that [Decoration Day] came from,” Hood remembers. “I was very prolific at that time, writing on the road in longhand on legal pads in a bumpy van.” As soon as he got “The Deeper In” jotted down, he knew Decoration Day was going to be the Truckers’ masterpiece. “And I had that in my head the entire time we were writing it,” he continues. “I was going through a divorce, we were all living way too hard—not even just in the partying sense. I mean, we were pushing ourselves to beyond a limit for years straight. It could have killed us.”
The Truckers were, as Hood puts it, “an older band” then—maybe too old to be gigging so damn much—but the songs were connecting, and folks were liking his music for the first time in his life. “We all felt like this was our last chance Texaco, to get to do this ride we dreamed of doing our whole life,” he admits. “So we were out there full-throttle, in our mid-thirties and late-thirties, touring like a bunch of 20-year-olds.” Hood met a 21-year-old Jason Isbell at a mutual friend’s house in Athens in 2000. A bunch of them were sitting around, picking guitar, smoking dope, hanging out. Isbell was a friend of a friend who’d just come into town from Memphis. “He played me a song he had just written, and I thought it was one of the greatest things I’d ever heard in my life.” Hood returned the favor, playing a then-unreleased and unrecorded “Heathens.” Isbell never recorded his song, but he and Hood just clicked, you know?
A year later Isbell met the Truckers when they were putting on a show in the same house Isbell met Hood at. They’d all gathered there so SPIN’s Eric Weisbard could witness them play—to color a story he was writing about them and Southern Rock Opera. The location wasn’t Hood’s first choice, that’s for sure. “The place we were going to play went out of business the week before, so we were scrambling,” he recalls. “We were not getting along well with our other guitar player [Rob Malone], and he saw it fit that night to no-show.” Malone instead went to New Orleans with his girlfriend, leaving the Truckers with an empty chair. Isbell was hanging around, and Patterson invited him to sit in with the band. “It was magic.”
Southern Rock Opera had already hit the shelves but it wasn’t even supposed to be a Truckers record. The initial concept was to instead have it come out under the name Betamax Guillotine, a nod to the myth that Lynyrd Skynyrd vocalist Ronnie Van Zant was beheaded by a VCR in the plane crash that wiped out the band. Skynyrd weren’t virtuosos, but they were hard-working. The Truckers were (and still are) undoubtedly both: not some boogie band but a crowd of whip-smart gothic novelists plunging deep into key-stroke riffs. Their material was never exotic, but familiar—lived in and recognized as such, especially by a fanbase that helped the band raise $20,000 to distribute Southern Rock Opera. “At some point, the band was getting some traction,” Hood elaborates. “We were starting to pull people in towns, get a reputation. It’s like, well, fuck—we’d be crazy not to piggyback that onto this, because this is working. Then it became a Drive-By Truckers record.”
Two days after Isbell’s first sit-in with the Truckers, they had to take those Southern Rock Opera songs on the road. Hood asked him to tag along, and it turned out to be a godsend. I mean, here came this chubby, unknown picker who was 22 but looked 15—and he was so brilliantly exploding with talent. He had this terrific song called “Outfit,” full of sage advice passed down from father to sun. It was immediately the best Truckers song, until Isbell wrote “Decoration Day.” “That just made us put the pedal to the metal even harder,” Hood beams. Isbell’s mother, a no-nonsense Alabama woman, dropped him off at the Truckers’ van but not without confronting Hood, Cooley, and Brad Morgan. “Don’t kill my boy,” she told the boys, all of whom had spent their thirties drinking and gigging way too much. About to cry, she repeated herself: “Don’t kill my boy.”
“And I damn near did,” Hood tells me. “And that’s something I’ll have to live with forever.”
By the spring of 2002, everyone was buzzing: Hood had just fallen madly in love with a girl that’s now his wife and the mother of his kids; the band jetted off to Europe for the first time, which was “like a movie unto itself,” Hood declares. “Bunch of older redneck kids—no one in the band but me had ever been on a plane before—turned loose in Holland for ten days. We got our first record deal, we got picked up by our first booking agent, who still books with us, and a manager who does not still manage us.” And somewhere in the middle of all that, the Truckers went to Chase Park Transduction Studios in Athens and recorded their masterpiece in a 2-week stupor. “People were loving Southern Rock Opera. It’s like, wait until you hear this shit. We were cocky about it, and I think rightfully so. It was really idyllic.” The songs that came out were messy but proudly so. Hood’s “Sink Hole” was forlorn, shit-mean, and semi-based on The Accountant. Isbell’s “Decoration Day” was an agitated, dead-brother and dead-father lament splintering through piles and piles of guitar noise in a neck-breaking coda. “My Sweet Annette” was a hard-nosed classic, with three guitars screaming in different fonts but never blowing out. Loud like the Meat Puppets but melodic like R.E.M., Decoration Day had an epic, desperate sprawl to it—a Redneck’s Exile On Main St.
WHEN DECORATION DAY WAS FINISHED, yet another tour knocked. The band had been nominated for a bunch of Flagpole awards in Athens—it was their first time being nominated for anything, and they won every category they showed up in. To celebrate, they donned their best vintage suits, crashed the awards ceremony, picked up the brass, and flocked to the nearby Flicker Bar to play their new album in full for the first time. About 75 people showed up to see the Truckers in top form. “We were drunk, but we were good drunk, you know? We were well-lubed and swerving all together,” Hood recalls, laughing. “All the bad shit came later. It was a special moment in time. You can’t recreate that. It just happens.”
Southern Rock Opera was the tape that turned the Truckers into main characters in the South’s 21st-century rock and roll vanguard, a new generation flanked by Kings of Leon, Blackberry Smoke, and Gov’t Mule. But Hood sees Decoration Day as a better successor to Pizza Deliverance. “Instead of being three or four years later, it feels like those people are 20 years older,” he elaborates. “We lived a whole life in that time, and it’s a much more mature look at a lot of the same concepts.” There’s a shared sparseness between “Bulldozers and Dirt” and “The Deeper In” especially, between acts of no-good love that ain’t too proper or beautiful. I say to Hood that “The Deeper In” is one of the most challenging songs I’ve ever encountered. He takes it as a compliment.
At the center of the “Deeper In” story is a pair of siblings stuck in jail for an incestuous relationship that made four babies. It’s an ugly but necessary tale sung with startling compassion, and it was always going to be the first song on Decoration Day. Hood says he read an article in Esquire about the siblings’ story, because they had just gone to prison. “It was a heartbreaking story about something that is obviously one of the great taboos, and rightfully so, but it also was a really human, nuanced look at that rather than just the sensational headlines of it.” He couldn’t stop thinking about it, knowing damn well there was a song somewhere in all of that ungodly, eye-turning unforgiveness. In 1998 he was working sound at a music club and living in the house the Truckers recorded Pizza Deliverance at. It sat on an access road near a big, busy highway. “There was a railroad track between the highway and the access road,” he elaborates. “A train went through my front yard at exactly 3:00 A.M. every morning. I would come home from work at 2:30 AM, open a beer, and sit out there. It sounds like a Southern cliché, but I sat on my porch with a beer and a guitar and watched the train go by, and that particular morning I happened to write ‘The Deeper In.’”
The Drive-By Truckers were playing better than ever in 2003. Pedal steel player John Neff, a founding member of the band, had left the group after Pizza Deliverance but not for good. “He hated touring in a van,” Hood reveals. “On the day he quit the band he said, ‘Call me if you’re ever in a bus.’” The Truckers weren’t touring by bus when they recorded Decoration Day, but they knew they were headed in that direction. “Sure enough,” Hood chuckles, “a couple years after [Decoration Day] we did start touring in a bus, and we started having him be part of the touring band.” Shit happened and Neff left the group again in 2012, but he and Hood got through it. There’s no denying the contributions Neff made to Decoration Day, especially on “The Deeper In” and “Heathens.” “I don’t think he was ever better in our band than he was on those songs,” Hood insists. “Those songs really benefited from having him on them.”
Brad Morgan and Earl Hicks are owed some flowers, too—Morgan especially, considering that he’s one of the most overlooked but great, great drummers still pounding away in this world. He’s got the finesse and ear caliber of a session player. “He’s probably so tasteful that people don’t realize how good it is because he’s so not showoff-y. He hates showing off,” Hood says. “But he certainly has the chops to do anything. He’s been the glue that’s kept our band together during some of our more tumultuous times, because he was always ‘big picture’ and thoughtful and logical and calm.” Hicks, on the other hand, was a fine bassist but an even better producer. He produced Pizza Deliverance and Alabama Ass Whuppin by himself and co-produced Southern Rock Opera with David Barbe and Dick Cooper, though he refused a credit on the latter. “He had his own code of ethics, and somehow it was ethically wrong for him as a member of the band to get a co-production credit,” Hood explains. “I thought that was bullshit, because he absolutely co-produced that record and it could not have happened without him.”
Turns out the original idea for what became Southern Rock Opera, a saga of stories about the Deep South’s culture, topography, and politics told through the lens of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s rise and crash, spawned from a conversation between Hicks and Hood. First it was going to be a screenplay, then a double-LP. But Hicks was hard to get along with, Hood admits, and his personality clashed with the rest of the band—especially when they got to doing 200 shows a year. “The road just doesn’t agree with some people,” he continues. “That’s not a character flaw. The road’s hard, and some people just can’t do it. It brings out the worst side of some people. It can easily bring out the worst side of anybody.” Despite Hicks and Hood’s close friendship spanning over 20 years, they had a falling out when Hicks left the band and “haven’t been able to really cure it or heal it,” Hood discloses. “Which is sad, because I sure think highly of him.”
And then there’s the great Spooner Oldham, who recently broke his pelvis playing basketball with Neil Young’s road crew—at 82 years old, mind you. When he was touring with the Truckers, that side of him came out then too. “We were terrified he was going to hurt himself,” Hood laughs. “Spooner, he’ll fall down the steps but he’ll probably land on his feet.” Oldham shows up on Decoration Day, plunking on his Wurlitzer with the same touch that fills up the backdrop in some of the most important Southern recordings ever: Aretha’s “Respect,” Wilson Pickett’s “Land of 1000 Dances,” the Box Tops’ “Cry Like a Baby.” Hell, you can (and ought to) add “When the Pin Hits the Shell” to that lineup. “Spooner is the shit,” Hood cuts in. “If you play a song 100 times with Spooner, he’s going to play it 100 totally different ways. And some of those ways may be radically different. He is the truest form of ‘play it like you feel it.’ I know that’s an old cliché in music, but I don’t think there’s a person that’s ever lived that that’s more true of than Spooner. He feels things in a beautiful way.”
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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.
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.”
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Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.
Listen to Drive-By Truckers’ 2010 Daytrotter session at Big Orange Studios below.
