Aural Fixations

DRIVE-BY TRUCKERS
Southern Rock Opera
(Drive-By Truckers)
It's hard to explain what it means to be Southern. To far too many outsiders—and that means pretty much anybody born west of Texas and north of Virginia—the South has never been anything but a cauldron simmering with ignorance, violence and overt racism. An awful lot of Southern folks fight a constant uphill battle for redemption for an ugly past most of them are too young to remember clearly. But this fight goes unnoticed by the world at large. It's much easier to think of the South as a place of flag-waving rebels, backwoods rednecks and bloodthirsty KKK members than as a part of the contemporary United States.

As a result, like other regions of the U.S.—from Hollywood to New York to Boston—the South is known more for its stereotypes than for its people. Two of the biggest icons that represent the South for most people are the late Alabama governor George Wallace and Southern rock epitomizer Lynyrd Skynyrd. Both stood up with pride for their Southern roots, both were vastly misunderstood and both passed into history stamped with labels they would have preferred not stick. Wallace was less a flaming racist than a pandering politico who would do anything for votes; he spent the last 15 years of his life trying in vain to make up for the harm done by his earlier ambition. Contrary to popular belief, Skynyrd wasn't a band of stereotypical rednecks out to jump-start a revival of the Confederacy. It was a group of men fiercely proud of the heritage with which they grew up and determined to show the world, through classic rock guitar riffs and an unrecognized sense of humor, that as much good came from the South as bad.

Both icons failed in their missions. Both became symbols for a racist South that is slowly fading from existence. Both passed into legend for the wrong reasons. Both became perfect examples of what Drive-By Truckers leader Patterson Hood calls "the duality of the Southern thing." Hood and his bandmates became so fascinated with this dichotomy and how it related to their own Southern heritage that they wrote an album about it. The aptly titled Southern Rock Opera purports to tell the story of Betamax Guillotine, an Alabama rock band named for the way Ronnie Van Zant supposedly died*, but the loose storyline is really just an excuse for the Truckers to put the South under a microscope. The Georgia-based, Alabama-bred quintet examines Wallace, the Muscle Shoals Sound, the Alabama obsession with football, the history of Lynyrd Skynyrd and their own childhoods with wry humor and a literary bent more Larry Brown than William Faulkner. They ask the question, "What does it mean to come from the South?" (more)

Refreshed

STEVIE RAY VAUGHAN AND DOUBLE TROUBLE
Live At Montreux 1982 & 1985
(Epic/Legacy)
It will be a sad day when the well runs dry. More than eleven years after Stevie Ray Vaughan's death, the releases keep coming, and damned if some of them aren't just killer. Case in point: Live At Montreux 1982 & 1985. This is a double-disc set of SRV and Double Trouble's two landmark appearances at the Swiss jazz festival. Eleven of the nineteen songs here were previously unreleased, and some of them were reportedly taken from video of the event. The fidelity is flawless, though the mix is uneven in spots. That's a minor quibble. (more)