Truckers reshaping Southern rock

There's not a lot of between-song chatter on the deluxe version of It's Great to Be Alive, the new live album from Drive-By Truckers. But just before "Made Up English Oceans," band co-founder Mike Cooley tells a brief story of the time presidential candidate Jimmy Carter came to visit Cooley's hometown of Tuscumbia, Ala. Also visiting town that day was the Ku Klux Klan.

"They weren't wearing Jimmy Carter buttons," Cooley tells the crowd at San Francisco's historic Fillmore Auditorium, and then has a few choice words for those old Klan members.

Cooley recalls that day in Tuscumbia in late September from his home in Birmingham, where he lives with his wife and three children. He has just finished the laundry and will pick up the kids, ages 12, 10 and 8, from school a little later.

"I don't know if they were protesting Jimmy Carter or his agenda, but when they show up you know they're not in a good mood," says Cooley, who played trombone in his junior high school band. "I was there with the band in formation when he got out of the car and the Klan was there in their stupid robes. I didn't understand it. Some people are just not happy. They get out of bed every morning with an ax to grind."

It's this kind of imagery -- a progressive Southern Democrat and Old South hate -- that Cooley and his band have never shied from writing about.

"It leaves an impact on you," Cooley says.

Indeed, the Truckers' breakthrough album, 2001's Southern Rock Opera, was a concept album about the South, race, Alabama governor George Wallace, Lynyrd Skynyrd and what fellow Trucker Patterson Hood called "the duality of the Southern thing." And after the June slayings of nine black church members in Charleston, S.C., Hood, whose father, David, played bass in the famed Muscle Shoals rhythm section, wrote a guest editorial, "The South's Heritage Is So Much More Than a Flag," for The New York Times.

Cooley, 49, and Hood formed the Truckers in 1996 in Athens, Ga., from the ashes of their former band, Adam's House Cat. The group -- whose current members include drummer Brad Morgan, keyboardist and pedal steel guitarist Jay Gonzalez and bassist Matt Patton -- will headline a Little Rock show tonight at the Rev Room. Brent Best, whose latest record, the excellent Your Dog, Champ, is out on Little Rock-based Last Chance Records, will open.

The Truckers have released 10 studio albums and three live albums (including the limited edition Live at Third Man from 2011), almost all with cover paintings by artist Wes Freed, and have gone a long way toward reshaping the sound and attitude of Southern rock.

Behind main songwriters Hood and Cooley, the band has traversed the Southern experience in smart and insightful songs about the working class, wasted nights, crashed vans, meth addicts, drunks, race car drivers, mechanics, outlaws, good love, bad love, suicide and Walking Tall's Buford Pusser, all drawing on a mix of rock 'n' roll, country and a little bit of folk with a streak of plainspoken bluntness and wisecracking humor thrown in (this is, after all, the band that called two of its albums Gangstabilly and Pizza Deliverance). Imagine Tom T. Hall and Merle Haggard hanging out with the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd at Rowan Oak and you're getting an idea of what the Drive-By Truckers are about.

The 35-track expanded version of It's Great to Be Alive is a career overview that finds the group in fine form. The album progresses with Hood and Cooley, who write separately, switching lead vocals from track to track and hits many of the band's high points -- "Marry Me," "The Living Bubba," "A World of Hurt" (from where the set gets its title), "Ronnie and Neil," "Where the Devil Don't Stay" and others.

"We wanted to have all the fan favorites as well as many that we don't get to play live all that much," Cooley says.

An old Adam's House Cat song, "Runaway Train," is even included.

"We started doing that song again a few years back. It was really one of our best songs [in Adam's House Cat] and it also fits with the material we're doing now. This band ended up being what we were trying to do in Adam's House Cat," Cooley says.

For the Truckers' last studio album, 2014's English Oceans, Cooley wrote six of the 13 songs, a step up from the usual handful he contributes.

"I'm still trying to figure out how to write songs on the road," he says. His writing often comes easier at home in Birmingham, but it's not easy.

"It still takes a lot of discipline. I'll go clean out the refrigerator or rearrange my desk drawers or find something else to do for some reason before I start to write."

A solo record of new songs may also be in his future, Cooley says. Hood has released three albums under his own name and Cooley has one himself, 2012's live The Fool on Every Corner, which included acoustic versions of some of his best Truckers' output and a cover of Charlie Rich's "Behind Closed Doors."

"I'm trying to write one," he says of an album of his own. "I love playing in this band. It's the thing I live for. I have an outlet for the songs I write without feeling pressured. But I've come to realize that I don't think this whole career, or whatever it is, will be complete if I don't do a solo record of original songs."

Style on 10/20/2015