DBT Lyrics project no. 2

This is fun, so I'll do some more.

This is my analysis of Patterson's "Let There be Rock," a key track from "Southern Rock Opera." As always, my comments are in brackets:

Dropped acid, Blue Oyster Cult concert, fourteen years old,
And I thought them lasers were a spider chasing me.
On my way home, got pulled over in Rogersville Alabama, with a half-ounce of weed and a case of Sterling Big Mouth.
My buddy Gene was driving, he just barely turned sixteen.
And I'd like to say I'm sorry, but we lived to tell about it
And we lived to do a whole lot more crazy, stupid shit.
And I never saw Lynyrd Skynyrd but I sure saw Molly Hatchet
With 38 Special and the Johnny Van Zant Band.

[This song is impossible to talk about without talking about the album is comes from. "Southern Rock Opera" was DBT's breakthrough, both commercially and artistically. Before "Southern Rock Opera," DBT was basically a local alt-country band, although they toured all over the place. They played drunken, stumbling electric country music with weirdly morbid lyrics. An intriguing group with a few great songs ("The Living Bubba" and "The Night G.G. Alin Came to Town" which are flat out great, are from this period), but not a first tier band. A great little group that could deliver onstage, but not the kind of band you'd devote a lot of time thinking about. They were clearly a group with "potential."

"Southern Rock Opera" changed all that. It's worth explaining that the record was mostly recorded live, and the band actually had to go out and raise money from investors to make the damn thing. They also had to recruit more musicians to play on the damn thing, seeing as how a concept record about Lynyrd Skynyrd really needed female backup singers on some tracks, and seeing as how it would just be fucking lame to do it without three guitars. This extra guitar slot eventually became the reason they recruited a chubby 23 year old named Jason Isbell to join the touring band. Turned out he could sing and write songs pretty good too. Jason lost weight from smoking cigarettes and rocking out, got a better haircut, and became a star in his own right. Although he can sometimes look a little world weary these days. Drinking a fifth of whiskey onstage everynight for five years will do that to you.

"Southern Rock Opera," despite sounding like a coked-up Skynyrd demo tape, is in many ways a punk record. Homegrown and independent. When they released it, it got the band unprecedented attention and led to their getting a record deal. (Actually, their first record deal fell apart, but they ened up on the estemable New West records where they still are.) But more importantly, it redefined what the band sounded like. Instead of playing slightly kitchy country music, they invented a super heavy duty crunchy guitar roar. This incarnation of the DBT essentially sounded like a cross between Lynyrd Skynyrd and the early Replacements. It doesn't make sense on paper, but it sounds perfect. This record also marks Cooley's debut as a mature songwriter. Several of the best songs on the record are his, including "Zip City," "Shut Your Mouth and Get Your Ass on the Plane" (which includes the great line "the price of being sober's being scared out of your mind"), and "Women without Whiskey."

"Southern Rock Opera" is a concept album about Patterson's relationship to rock music and to Alabama. There are reflections about Southern racism, about Lynyrd Skynyrd, about the costs of living the rock star life, and about the sometimes painful class issues of the South. "Let There Be Rock" is in many ways the central song on the album. Patterson celebrates fucking up and rocking out. "But I lived to tell about it," seems like the moral of the story, except that it isn't. HE might have lived to tell about it, but lots of people DON'T live to tell about it. "Southern Rock Opera" is haunted by dead people. The first song is actually about kids dying in a car crash.]

One night when I was seventeen, I drank a fifth of vodka, on an empty stomach, then drove over to a friend's house. And I backed my car between his parent's Cadillacs without a scratch.
Then crawled to the back door and slithered threw the key hole, and sneaked up the stares
And puked in the toilet.
I passed out and nearly drowned but his sister, DD, pulled me out.
And I never saw Lynyrd Skynyrd but I sure saw Molly Hatchet
And the band that I was in played "The Boy's are Back in Town."

[Drunken bravado. Drinking a fifth of Vodka is a bad idea. I should know. But part of the point of doing "crazy stupid shit" like that is to accumulate stories to tell about what you did. You unscrew that plastic cap, toss it off the end of the porch, and act like an asshole. Then you get really sick. These stories are really kind of humiliating, but we keep telling them. Patterson passed out with his head in a toilet after drinking a fifth of vodka. One time I passed out in the passenger seat of my car after puking the better part of a fifth of whiskey all in the window. I think this is funnier than my wife, who was behind the wheel, does. I sincerely hope I'm old enough not to do shit like that anymore.

These dumbass things that we do, for whatever reason, are key to the whole rock and roll experience. We want rock stars to live it up, to be a traveling party. We want that escape from common sense and responsibility. We pay our money down and let them lead us away from the responsibilities of real life for a while. Elsewhere on "Southern Rock Opera" Patterson points out this this image of rock and roll is mistaken. You have to work fucking hard to be any good at rock and roll, and if you are lucky enough to live out your rock and roll fantasy, actually living in a cocaine and whiskey saturated bubble really sucks. As Mike Cooley wrote elsewhere, "Rock and Roll means well, but it can't help telling ya'll boys lies."]


Skynyrd was set to play Huntsville, Alabama, in the spring of 77, I had a ticket but it got cancelled.
So, the show, it was rescheduled for the Street Survivors Tour.
And the rest, as they say, is history.

So I never saw Lynyrd Skynyrd but I sure saw Ozzy Osbourne with Randy Rhoads in 82
Right before that plane crash.
And I never saw Lynyrd Skynyrd but I sure saw AC/DC
With Bon Scott singing, Let There Be Rock Tour.

With Bon Scott singing, LET THERE BE ROCK!

[Bon Scott, or course, died in what might be described as a drinking related accident, and the plan crash that Randi Rhoads died in was completely avoidable. A friend of the band was flying a small plane up and down over the top of a moving tour bus, playing a game. The plane crashed and killed Randi Rhaods, who was a serious and sober young man, instantly.

This is a particularly strange way to end the song. Two completely stupid deaths that we can chalk up to "rock and roll living," and we are supposed to chant along "Let There Be Rock!" Patterson is, in some weird way, honoring these guys for being martyrs. However stupid all this is, for some reason we need it, and these legendary musicians lost their lives to it. The more earthbound albums DBT has made since "Southern Rock Opera" are in many ways about trying to reconcile all the contradictions in this song. In one song Cooley's singing about saving himself by getting married and getting off the road, but three songs later he says "I might have slipped the ring on your finger from a van as it drove away." (Come to think of it, that song refers to Lynyrd Skynyrd too. The refrain is "Lawd knows I can't change/ sounds better in the song than it does with hell to pay." "The song" in question is, of course, "Freebird.")

In many ways, "Southern Rock Opera" fits squarely into the tradition of several great "classis rock" albums. Van Morrison's "Atral Weeks" is also about nostalgia for youthful freedom and sadness for it's consequences. Van end the record on the note of "now I have to say goodbye and move on." Bruce Springsteens breackthrough records "The Wild The Innocent and The E-Street Shuffle" and "Born to Run" are pretty much different treatments of these same themes. This "classic rock" thing is probably deliberate, as part of what "Southern Rock Opera" is about is Patterson's struggle to reconcile the music of the "parking lot" in Alabama with his experience as an outsider. It took him a long time to coming around to appreciating Lynyrd Skynyrd.

We need this youthful bravado, but you really can't base your life on that stuff. "Southern Rock Opera" ends with a song about a plane crash, the fantastic "Angels and Fucelage." "I'm scared shitless for what's coming next," Patterson sings as he imagines his plane crashing into the swamp.

Last time I saw DBT, they were clearly a bit tired of the big rock show thing. This was just before Jason Isbell left, and from the hints we've gotton of the story, there was some real tension within the band. They had also just come of opening for the Black Crows in a serious of big stadium shows. It was still a great show, but there were stretches when they were clearly plowing through the songs, searching for momentum. They found that momentum for several amazing stretches (by any reasonable standard it was a great show, although not one of DBT's best. . . . a mediocre DBT show is fantastic), but you felt a little fatigue. At the end of the last encore, they played a hair raisng version of "Angels and Fucelage" then ended with massive bursts of feedback. The band left their guitars up against the amps when they took their bow and walked off the stage. Perhaps not the happiest statement, but oddly perfect.]