Drive-By Truckers

Drive-by Tuckers at Vicar Street, Dublin, 10th May, 2014

The spirit of the south took over Vicar Street on Saturday night, and it could scarcely have been more all-pervasive had there been a Confederate flag hung up as the backdrop to the stage.

Why? The Drive-By Truckers, that’s why.

Despite a foray into various shades of alternative, the Truckers remain fairly grounded in a genre of music that should have been rendered irrelevant by at least three or four of the reinventions of rock that have occurred since Lynyrd Skynyrd were doing it in the ‘70s. But somehow there is a down-home familiarity to it all, a kind of honest, rootsy authenticity that leaves songs about the simple life in the good ol’ home town in the state of Alabama worth listening to.

Support act Heartless Bastards set the tone well with a distinctly country flavoured brand of hearty blues rock, balancing out a heavy garage-y tone with a plaintive acoustic guitar and the booming, yet sweet and melodic vocals of frontwoman Erika Wennerstrom.

Likewise the Truckers opened up with guitarist Mike Cooley leading the way on acoustic guitar, starting the band off on a gentle folk footing before they launched headlong into the full-on electric guitar and keyboard soloing that was to come.

When the time came the Truckers proved that they could rock out and raise hell with the best of them, but the raw, emotive power of their songs never quite got left behind in all the foot stomping and headbanging either. Love Like This and Two Daughters and a Beautiful Wife came welling up from a place of true heartbreak and sadness, the disarming complexity of the lyrics somewhat at odds with the occasionally bland familiarity of the instrumentals.

Accuse them of un-originality all you like, at least they’ve got something to say. As they powered through to the show’s climax, the anthemic Hell No, I Ain’t Happy burst forth like a tornado of apathy turned to rage, with enough of the crowd finding the song sufficiently relatable to yell along to the rousing chorus.

When most bands return to the stage for an encore, it’s usually under the pretence of reluctantly relenting to give the fans one more tune before they hit the road, but when the Drive-by Truckers remerged at the end of the show the reason seemed different. They seemed like they were just having too much damn fun up there, and weren’t ready to quit just yet.

And oh boy did they have fun with the encore, with Cooley and fellow guitarist Patterson Hood furiously shredding their way through seemingly never-ending solos. The band eventually departed from the stage one by one, leaving the other still playing. First one guitarist, then the other, then the keyboardist, leaving only bass and drums to jam alone. Drummer Brad Morgan was the last to depart, but not before pummelling his kit one last time before taking his bow and walking off, leaving only the lingering wall of reverb that still endured after the final knees up jam.

Drive By Truckers Photo Gallery

Photos : Alessio Michelini