Drive-By Truckers – Mezzanine, San Francisco, CA. 13/2/2008

San Francisco’s Mezzanine, best known for indie rock, dance, and electronic acts, seemed like a strange place for a Drive-By Truckers concert. Once the music started the polished dance venue felt like a grimy Southern bar. Both bands weaved their particular stories into the minds and hearts of the audience and we forgot about our surroundings for a little while.

The night started with equally grimy The Felice Brothers, who fitfully looked like they just woke up as hired hands in a barn and started playing music. The New York Americana band is well known for driving around the country in a wheezing “short bus,” a miniature school transport usually reserved for kids that need to wear helmets. At Mezzanine they played the kind of Catskill-folk that raised the rafters, quite a feat for an opening band. The subject material was just as filthy and Whiskey-soaked as the brothers onstage. Accordion sighs and ramshackle percussion filled “Ruby Mae,” a murder ballad based on a true story of a cabaret singer strangled to death in New York and buried in Times Square.

The Felice Brothers’ rousing last song (‘Frankie’s Gun’) brought to mind Dylan’s stint with The Band, especially the seminal The Basement Tapes. The main vocalist brother (Ian) sounds like a young Bob Dylan and even his tousled hair resembled Dylan’s disheveled beauty. ‘Mercys’ chorus repeats the line, “let me love you from behind” and the snake oil charm of the band made the love seem toothsome. Those are the type of subjects the Brothers are interested in and their straining anti-harmonies didn’t fail to honor the dregs and the varmints of the past through song.

Drive-By Truckers came onstage with a blast of light revealing the foreboding artwork by ongoing band artist, Wes Freed. The first song (‘The Man I Shot’) matched that image well as the Truckers ran through the first song of the night from a set that equally mixed material from Brighter Than Creation’s Dark with perennial favorites. ‘The Man I Shot’ follows the story of an American soldier after his tour in Iraq and how he’s struggling with nightmares of shooting another man. The haunting chorus by Patterson Hood sent shivers, “He was trying to kill me / He was trying to kill me / Sometimes I wonder if I should be there? / I hold my little ones until he disappears.”

The early addition of old songs like Decoration Day’s deafening ‘Sink Hole’ was a welcome surprise and the night was full of them. ‘Sink Hole’ is a story about a man wishing death on a devious banker foreclosing his struggling family farm was followed by the equally old song ‘Uncle Frank’ from the band’s second album (Pizza Deliverance). It was balls-to-walls rock that smashed and continues one of the Trucker’s shining achievements as the number one provocateurs of anti-cliché images of the South. Sure Patterson, Mike Cooley, Shonna Tucker and the gang poke fun at societies belief that everyone is having sex with their mother anywhere below Illinois, but their primary focus is conveying smart stories that have musical merit/heart.

Their songwriting nucleus may have shifted last year with the amicable departure of Jason Isobell after his divorce with Tucker but the band has fortified in other areas. The addition of Tucker as a writer and singer on ‘I’m Sorry Huston’ and ‘Home Field Advantage’ played out perfectly onstage. She commanded the stage like a smokier Neko Case. Cooley songs like ‘Lisa’s Birthday’ and ‘Zip City’ for the final song were the true highlights of the night though. The crashing din around him trounced the wonderful piano work of Spooner Oldham sadly.

By the time of the encore Patterson was rightfully drunk from the cooler of Whiskey and other beverages in the middle of the stage so he brought out his friend Craig Wilson to play guitar for him. The night was full of honky tonk stompers (‘Three Dimes Down’) and quiet moments of country (‘Daddy Needs a Drink’ or ‘Lisa’s Birthday’) but the Trucker’s infamous Bruce Springsteen State Trooper melody was a brilliant part of the encore. The irreverent crashing of Souther rocker ‘Buttholeville’ served as bookends.

Before Bacchanalian closer ‘People Who Died’ the Truckers had weaved through familiar territory. As fans we heard the usual tales of drunks, pervasive poverty, loveable losers, and stubborn good ol’ boys, set against a milieu of trailer parks and Southern gloom. The Athens, GA band still speak of “the duality of the Southern thing,” pride and regret: the pride of coming from a special place with a distinct history, speaking in a different accent, and a feeling of discomfort, too, about some of that history and attitude. May “the Southern thing” live on.

Setlist:
1) The Man I Shot
2) Sink Hole
3) Uncle Frank
4) Do It Yourself
5) I’m Sorry Huston
6) Tales Facing Up
7) Lisa’s Birthday
8) Daddy Needs A Drink
9) Two Daughters and A Beautiful Wife
10) 3 Dimes Down
11) Dead, Drunk, and Naked
12) Guitar Man Upstairs
13) The Living Bubba
14) A Ghost To Most
15) You and Your Crystal Meth
16) Goode’s Field Road
17) Lookout Mountain
18) Zip City
19) Let There Be Rock

Encore:
20) Home Field Advantage
21) The Opening Act
22) Shut Up and Get On The Plane
23) Buttholeville
24) State Trooper
25) Buttholeville (reprise)
26) People Who Died