Nearly twenty years after their last full concert together, Jason Isbell reunited with Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley at ShoalsFest, Alabama, to perform it in its entirety for the first time Decoration Daythe 2003 album beloved by fans. A record of social anger which, with the approach of the mid-term elections, has lost none of its relevance.
Patterson Hood flashes an exuberant, devilish grin in front of what is arguably the largest crowd of his career in his hometown as he trades in an acoustic guitar for his horned Gibson SG, an instrument far more suited to the menacing riff he’s about to play.
The final chords of “The Deeper In,” the opening track, have barely died down before the Drive-By Truckers segue into “Sink Hole,” Hood’s incendiary diatribe about a man pushed to the limit to wrest the family farm from the clutches of an unscrupulous banker. Inspired by Ray McKinnon’s short film The Accountant (2001) and the loss of the farm where Hood grew up in northwest Alabama, the song sets the tone for the album released in 2003, Decoration Day.
Before tackling “Sink Hole,” however, Hood spoke to the man standing to the right of the stage and to whom we owed the third guitar that evening: Jason Isbell. “It’s a family reunion”says Hood, pointing to the secret weapon of the group’s golden era in the early 2000s. Fired from the group in 2007, Isbell fought hard for his sobriety, then found success with his fourth solo album, Southeastin 2013.
This unique concert, given on Saturday evening, October 3 at the ShoalsFest in Florence, Alabama, for which Isbell is the programmer, is not only the first time that Isbell has shared the stage with the Truckers for a full set since his dismissal, but also the first time that the group has played Decoration Day in its entirety (the 2002 acoustic set which appears in the box set The Definitive Decoration Day includes all tracks except “When the Pin Hits the Shell”).
In 2003, Drive-By Truckers rode a wave of critical acclaim for Southern Rock Operathe two-disc concept album that made them known across the country when they released their fourth album, Decoration Day.
Published three months after the start of the second Iraq War led by the United States, when the country’s attention was focused on tragedies abroad, Decoration Day shined the spotlight on those who had been trampled by decades of domestic policy that had further enriched the wealthiest and caused the disappearance of millions of middle-class working-class jobs.
But those left behind by Reaganomics and NAFTA were not completely forgotten (“No question of waiting for the runoff! »Hood repeated that Saturday in the last bars of “Sink Hole”). Hood, Cooley and newcomer Isbell turned their tales of divorce, suicide, class contempt, violence and family trauma passed down from generation to generation into dark dramas, punctuated by screaming guitars and biting lyrics that attacked the post-9/11 façade of American unity.
One month before the mid-term elections, in the middle of Trump’s second term, the president’s popularity rating fell below the famous “Bush line”, which had marked the collapse of the latter’s popularity to 39 percent, before a blue wave offered the Democrats the majority in Congress during the 2006 mid-term elections.
As America heads headlong towards the month of November, the working classes remain at loggerheads with the political class. The themes of division that run through Decoration Day from start to finish (the opposition and conflict between families in the title song, the class contempt in “Heathens” and the general unease in “Hell No, I Ain’t Happy”) reflect the feeling of Americans towards their elected officials and towards each other.
Musically, the album showed a group that moved beyond the southern rock mannerisms ofOperadrawing on contemporary influences like Centromatic and Steve Earle, but also on the heroes who had recorded in their region. Just listen to the Rolling Stones-style assurance of “Marry Me,” by Cooley, and “Do It Yourself,” by Hood, a relationship that does not go unnoticed where Jagger, Richards and company recorded part of Sticky Fingers (which fans can relive by visiting the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio and Caution! Stones Ahead, billed as the largest public display of Stones memorabilia).
The characters who populate the grit lit novels of Southern writers like Larry Brown are another source of inspiration for the album’s songs; Brown actually attended some of the Truckers’ early concerts in Oxford, Mississippi. Hood never met him, but he admired the empathy Brown showed in writing about rural people whose limited resources and family history guide their choices, like the characters in Decoration Day.
For writer and musician Michael Farris Smith, who cites the album among the sources of inspiration for novels like Desperation Road And Blackwoodthese themes still resonate. “I’ve spent most of my life saying, ‘OK, give us another five or ten years, or five or ten years, or five or ten years,’ and here we are with exactly the same problems, exactly the same dying cities, and exactly the same things left abandoned as they’ve always been.”he said. “Decoration Day could come out tomorrow, it would be just as relevant as it was in 2003.”
But, like the ShoalsFest concert, Isbell’s arrival is perhaps the most obvious difference between Decoration Day and the band’s three previous albums. “Outfit”, where a father warns his son against forgetting his roots, remains a mainstay of his concerts with 400 Unit today, while his other contribution, the fictionalized account of a deep-rooted family feud, gave the album its title and symbolizes the wider divisions of a nation in conflict with its past, present and future.
After completing Decoration Daywhose performance also included the little-known titles “Uncle Frank” and “TVA”, Hood presents “World of Hurt”, the song which closes A Blessing and a Cursetheir last album with Isbell.
The Truckers left the stage to one of the biggest ovations of the evening, every bit as fervent as the cheers that greeted Isbell’s headlining concert with the 400 Unit, and perhaps matched only by the one that greeted “Dress Blues,” Isbell’s tribute to a local classmate killed in Iraq in 2006. While the war that Trump chose to wage in Iran has lasted for more than seven months with no end in sight, the crowd of several thousand roared as Isbell intoned: “What did they say to you when they shipped you out there to fight in someone else’s Hollywood war?” »
