It was a night for frozen asses. Like those of the CITY SC fans downtown. But in the Pageant, five miles west, a few hundred Drive-By Truckers fans cozied up on Saturday night for two hours of piping-hot rock and roll.
The mood was enhanced as the Truckers kept it dark on stage, the band bathed in moody purples and dramatic fog in front of a macabre backdrop of evil-kitty shapes, a complement to the first few songs’ minor chords and dirt-goth narratives.
With the balcony closed and additional table seating throughout the main floor, it was a more intimate gathering compared to the DBT’s previous visit to St. Louis, an outdoor amphitheater set at Open Highway Music Festival.
In age-old Truckers fashion, the band’s two singers, Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley, took turns driving for a two-hour trip with the band’s double, and often triple, guitar attack cranked to the point that my Apple Watch’s decibel threshold system was already begging me for mercy just seconds after the band took the stage.
The Truckers have pushed some buttons in recent years by writing about overtly progressive subjects, but Saturday night’s show steered clear of their most pointedly political songs and leaned into the spirit of their latest, more-nostalgic album, Welcome 2 Club XIII.
In fact, the show kicked off with three straight songs from Club XIII, setting the tone for the set’s first half, dominated by deeper cuts defined by DBT’s trademark guitar crunch, thick washes of sound and talky Hood songs such as “Driving” and “The Sands of Iwo Jima,” the latter given a cinematic spoken-word interlude.
Hood’s strangled-yokel voice has been called an acquired taste but only by those who haven’t seen him live, where he works the crowd with go-for-broke passion and rafter-raising vocal charge, as on “Buttholeville” when he somehow turned lines like “Sometimes I feel like shit” into cathartic singalongs.
Truckers shows are a setlist crapshoot with very few guarantees and oodles of variables, and Cooley had an especially strong night as the DBT lottery wheel landed on some of his best songs, some expected (“Gravity’s Gone,” “Women Without Whiskey”) and some less played on this tour (“Birthday Boy,” “One of These Days”).
Cooley is a cunning guitar hero, whether providing echoing whale-sound embroidery to Hood’s new “We Will Never Wake You Up in the Morning” or getting into guitar screaming matches with Hood, showcasing a musical chemistry that has lasted damn near 40 years.
Let’s also hear it for under sung DBT secret weapon Jay Gonzalez, who handled the organ, electric piano and most of the evening’s slide guitar duties, at times playing the keys and guitar simultaneously albeit always surreptitiously in the shadows.
As for the rhythm section, drummer Brad Morgan has now entered his Father Time phase with his long white beard, appropriate for a timing titan who has long been one of rock’s most economical drummers. And Matt Patton continues to smile his way into the pocket, locked into Morgan’s kick drum with swirling bass lines.
The Pageant got cool covers, too — first when a rousing “Hell No I Ain’t Happy” morphed into a menacing recitation on Prince’s “Sign o’ the Times,” with Hood going off script after the Hurricane Annie verse, updating the song to include contemporary hellscapes before taking off his Gibson and hoisting it high into the air like a rock and roll warrior ready for battle. Later, “Buttholeville” gave way to a terrifying version of Springsteen’s “State Trooper” with Hood turning Bruce’s pleading moan into an unhinged death cry.
The band also delivered a pounding “Righteous Path,” likely in recognition of a new sober support community of DBT fans named after the song who were having their inaugural gathering Saturday night.
After a scorching run through Cooley’s “Self Destructive Zones,” the band closed with a feverish cover of Jim Carroll’s “People Who Died.” You know when Hood goes to the handheld mic that shit’s about to get real, and as a mystery roadie materialized to play guitar, Hood did some on-his-knees proselytizing while his hair attempted to get as far away from him as it could.
It was a suitably climactic end to a night of furious rocking from a veteran band that never lets up.
This story has been updated.
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