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"FREE BIRD"
Calling out "Free Bird" at a show is one of the most ubiquitous
running tropes in all of rock 'n' roll. It's something that you yell
out as a joke to your friend's band in a club. But in "Days of
Graduation," the opening number of the Drive-By Truckers' tremendous
Southern Rock Opera, the band darkens the joke several shades
by associating it with one of the other great running tropes in rock
'n' roll: the deadly teen auto crash. And thus begins one of
funniest, smartest, truest, saddest and flat-out rockingest (in the
very best way) albums I've heard in a very long time.
By referencing and taking the piss out of Skynyrd's most parodied
song up front, they can talk about what this record's really about:
the people who first yelled "Free Bird" with no irony at all. Most of
the record is about the regular Southern folks who hit puberty in the
mid-1970s — some dead, some drunk, and some naked. But all of
them have been living the life that got them that way — the rock
'n' roll life, as it was defined in the pre-punk 1970s. You know:
long hair; long solos; short life.
So, it isn't so much about Lynyrd Skynyrd, but about what Skynyrd's
music meant to them. And by extension, rock 'n' roll. The "hero" of
the piece grew up a Skynyrd fan in the 1970s, but chose punk when it
ripped the story of rock in half, and now he's slowly been piecing
his own personal rock 'n' roll story back together.
My own personal rock 'n' roll story ain't so far off, with one
crucial difference: I'm from California, which evokes mellowness and
surfing, not segregation and long guitar solos. So among the many
services this record does is a song like "The Three Great Alabama
Icons," which is mostly about George Wallace, and challenges some of
the preconceptions a laid-back (actually, I'm pretty intense)
surfer-boy (I'd fall off a surfboard on dry land) had about Wallace
and the South. Call it deconstruction of the fables. My favorite is
the fact that Wallace is in hell now, not because he was the worst of
the racists, but because he pandered to the worst just to get votes.
In the meantime the characters are dealing with the consequences of
their rock 'n' roll lifestyle, some of it set to music you'd
automatically associate with "Southern Rock" — the bluesy
shuffle of "Wallace" or the three-guitar onslaught of "The Southern
Thing" — and some of it not. Things like "Women Without
Whiskey," "Let There Be Rock" or "Dead, Drunk and Naked" are square
in the sound the you'd associate with any roots-based rockers of the
past three decades, from the Rolling Stones to The Replacements to
Ryan Adams.
Mr. Adams brings us to today, where we're smack dab in the middle of
the 4th (or is it the 6th?) Rebirth of Rock 'n' Roll™. Of
course, the DBT don't have a hope in George Wallace's hell of being
lumped in with all of the "The" bands currently serving as the poster
children for rock's latest "revival." Too trad. Too retro. But
lemme tell you: the music here is no more (or less) retro-leaning or
-based than The Hives' snotty garage, The Strokes' pretty-boy
post-punk punk or the White Stripes' artsy blues. It's just that this
music hasn't been cool for a long long time, 'cept to the kids who
liked it.
Yet I can't imagine a rock 'n' roller of any stripe not responding to
the sit-up-and-grin opening riff of "Life in the Factory," the
amazing song that would have been the kick-off of Side 4 back in the
day, and their actual summation of Skynyrd's life. "Let me tell y'all
a story," Patterson Hood begins, after telling us a dozen other ones
already, "so far fetched, it must be true." After telling Skynyrd's
(more or less the truth) life story, it's time for the rip-roaring
"Shut Up and Get on the Plane" (yes, that plane) and the even more
rip-roaring "Greenville to Baton Rouge," one of the few places where
they formally invoke Skynyrd's three-guitar sound. But in this case,
they're also evoking Skynyrd's plane crash.
The plane crash frames the album in death, like any good opera. From
the private tragedy of the car crash in the beginning to the
all-too-public Skynyrd crash, we've come full circle. And, at the
end, in the harrowing "Angels and Fuselage," the singer is in the
trees, amid all of the wreckage, wishing for one more round, but
mostly repeating "I'm scared shitless of what's coming next." I think
sure, he might be singing from the perspective of Ronnie Van Zant,
but I'll lay you odds that he's also singing from his own
perspective. And mine. And maybe all of us, really.
"What song is it that you want to hear?!?"
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