Far more than on any of the Drive-By Truckers’ previous albums, Go-Go Boots rises like smoke from the old Muscle Shoals country-and-soul sound. Having recorded with Bettye LaVette andBooker T. Jones, and having spent a lifetime listening to classic soul albums by Bobby Womack, Tony Joe White, and especially Eddie Hinton, it was inevitable that the Truckers eventually produce this album.
We knew they were pin-your-ears-back rock and roll. But here in Go-Go Boots, the Truckers are country, and here, too, the Truckers are soul and rhythm and blues. It looks funny, on paper - the words country/soul mashed up like that - but maybe in the end it comes down to this one shared ethos: the harder life gets, the more clamantly it calls for art, for music, for beauty - for the slow celebration of loss or pain that is mournfully, beautifully defiant.
It seems a paradox that while the Drive-By Truckers’ sound is so unique; it is still part of a greater and larger family. Some of the other greats - particularly in the South - were spawned from their culture, while others came from the deeper rootstock of the southern landscape itself. Of course in the long run the landscape has a significant say in what kind of culture develops; it’s all tangled together, all connected, and everything shares bits and strands of those fragments, again like a pastiche of random and beautiful genomes. Each of the three vocalists - Cooley, Patterson, Shonna - is distinct; each aches in its own way with sometimes gravelly and other times smooth sweet wistful broken-glass hurt and yearning and reluctant. Patterson’s songs, of course are almost always willing, in the great Southern tradition, to take on the Man - or anyone else - as are Cooley’s, when the cause is big and just.
Their sound - so distinctly theirs - comes nonetheless from history and the past. It’s all a big tangled beautiful mess, and it all comes out of Muscle Shoals, where, as Patterson’s father, legendary bassist David Hood, astutely notes, the South once did something right with respect to race relations, once-upon-a-time, and when it most mattered.
In their documentary, The Secret to a Happy Ending, Patterson speaks of the South’s “duality thing.” Visually, the documentary shows a symbolism of this duality nicely: the fecund green clamor of summer (play it loud), insects shrilling high in the canopy as if giving voice to a fever in the land that may or may not be a madness; and in winter, the bare raw limbs, the signature of a thing - things - going away. Similarly, the Truckers, while walking on the dark side of the street in their songs, seem, despite it all, unable to avoid stumbling into cathedrals and columns of light, as in Mercy Buckets.
A little about Go-Go Boots: it doesn’t make a lot of sense for me to wax long about what you’re going to hear. The incantatory, almost child-like refrain of clamant happiness, “I do believe/I do believe,” with its big-band rock-chord super-anthem kicking in, then - a song about family, and the memory of being loved - a rock song about one’s grandmother! - sets the tone for all that is to follow, fireplace poker bludgeoning be damned.
You hear the bona fide country in Cooley’s Cartoon Gold, complete with rambling banjo run, and the undefinable ache and wonder at life, in the vocals - and you hear the I’ve-been-done-wrong-by-life-bit-am-still-here, still-hurting, hurting-so-good slowing- down soul sound.
So many of the songs on this album will end up being favorites, and anyway, it’s not fair to say one song’s better than any other - but damn, the first Eddie Hinton song on this album - Everybody Needs Love- is awfully fine. The Truckers hardly ever cover anyone else’s songs, but here they’ve chosen two by their late friend, Hinton. This is a big deal and when you hear the two songs you’ll understand what a good idea it is. You’ll also see how directly their country-soul sound resonates with his.
What is country-soul? The glib description, “You can’t pin it down but you know it when you hear it,” isn’t very satisfying. It’s not enough to say it’s funky, or has “that slow steady soul beat, that drive.” It’s not enough, technically, to say it places John Neff’s pedal steel with Jay Gonzalez’ B-3 and piano, or, on other songs, his Wurlitzer - but that’s true enough, too. Maybe the best way to understand what country-soul is is to listen to Everybody Needs Love again. It’s got a great vocal reach - a beautiful, no-holds-barred straining greatness - mixed with the Memphis backside style of drumming-compliments of Brad Morgan - that Al Jackson made famous on Wilson Pickett’s Midnight Hour. Here, it’s perfectly in sync with the story, and the mood, the message. It’s got the great back-up chorus coming in, the piano and Hammond B-3 assuming greater authority, the farther into the song you go. We could be talking about genetic strands being inlaid, so deeply and intensely does this sound take over a listener. After only a couple of playings, it seems like the song inhabits you, has always been in you. This is what constitutes a classic.
The DBTs are getting to that age where, battered and scarred, they have deeper wonder for the fact that they’ve survived. They’re not any wiser - they were born wise, have always been wise, possessing the instincts (a gift of their landscape) that Flannery O’ Connor (who almost surely would have been a DBT fan) called “wise blood.” But with their old wisdom, they have the compassion of the survivors, now.
Sweet, you say? How can a song about a preacher bludgeoning his wife with a fireplace poker be sweet? Well, they are still the DBTs, after all. Maybe that one’s not the sweetest of the bunch. But even it has something intangible in the sound-something less dark, less desperate: something that is somehow fuller.
There’s something else in these songs - happiness. Not joy, but the rare, more sustainable and enduring thing, a happiness earned by exploring the darkness, and surviving.
Something undefinable has changed within the Truckers. They’re still rocking on, but a few more strands of lightness of being, and happiness, have infiltrated their being. They’re happier. Do not hold this against them, nor worry that it will corrupt their blues and rock, their snarl and anguish. Instead, the happiness will continue to whet these things - the things for which their old fans love them. Theirs is an earned happiness, and therefore does not temper or weaken their sound. Indeed, this new light forges the sound - the rock. You can hear it in every chord. It’s their finest yet.

Although they became one of the most enduring bands in the alternative country-rock catalog, Old 97's drew inspiration from a broad range of genres, including the twangy stomp of cowpunk and the melodies of power pop. Formed in 1993 by frontman Rhett Miller and bassist Murry Hammond, the group spent the bulk of the decade posed on the brink of mainstream success, issuing albums that often drew warm reviews but never yielded a substantial hit. Old 97's tightened their sound as the decade drew to a close, retaining their bar-band vigor while introducing a stronger pop/rock sound on albums like Too Far to Care and Satellite Rides. Miller also mounted a solo career in the early 2000s, but the band remained together nonetheless, continuing to release material with their original lineup intact into the following decade.


Rhett Miller and Murry Hammond first partnered up in 1989, when Miller enlisted the latter's help in producing his debut solo album, Mythologies. Although six years younger than Hammond, Miller proved to be a dedicated musician as he canvassed the Dallas club circuit, playing an blend of folk and British-styled pop to local audiences. He also displayed a knack for storytelling, having previously earned a creative writing scholarship to Sarah Lawrence College. One year after Mythologies' release, Miller and Hammond teamed up once again, this time as part of the short-lived Sleepy Heroes.


Although the Sleepy Heroes disbanded after issuing one album, the band's mix of pop and Texas-styled twang helped lay the foundation for Old 97's. Continuing to build upon that sound, Miller and Hammond linked up with lead guitarist Ken Bethea and recorded a demo tape at the Cedar Creek studio in Austin. Drummer Philip Peeples climbed on board shortly thereafter, and Hammond's childhood obsession with trains inspired the band's new name, which paid homage to the country ballad "Wreck of the Old 97." With their lineup intact, Old 97's released the debut album Hitchhike to Rhome in 1994. It garnered positive reviews and began to build the group's alt-country fan base, which they consolidated on the album's follow-up, Wreck Your Life. Issued in 1995 by the newly formed Bloodshot Records -- a label that would also launch the alt-country careers of Neko Case and Ryan Adams -- Wreck Your Life presented Old 97's as a sharp, eclectic country-rock outfit with a pinup-worthy frontman. Such positive attention led to a major-label deal with Elektra Records, who hoped to translate the band's underground buzz into mainstream success.


Old 97's made their Elektra debut in 1997 with Too Far to Care, a muscular album that balanced the band's Texas traditionalism and pop leanings. Many publications placed the band among the leaders of the alt-country movement, and Old 97's toured extensively in support, joining the Lollapalooza tour that summer and playing alongside Whiskeytown for a series of shows sponsored by No Depression magazine. Arriving two years later, 1999's Fight Songs offered another polished, pop-friendly set of songs, allowing the band to sell out 1,500-seat venues during its return to the road.


By this time, Miller had moved to Los Angeles and shed the thick, '50s-style glasses that had become a major part of his image. He and Hammond also began performing in an informal side project dubbed the Ranchero Brothers, although a proposed album never materialized. Instead, the musicians returned their focus to Old 97's, releasing another pop-influenced record with 2001's Satellite Rides. Miller took a temporary leave after its release to work on a solo power pop record, The Instigator, which was released in late 2002. A period of relative inactivity followed, as the bandmembers found themselves in different cities, with several of them starting families.


The hiatus ended in 2004 with the release of Drag It Up, whose subsequent tour featured prominently on the double-disc live album Alive & Wired. Afterward, Miller returned to his solo career with 2006's The Believer, which found the frontman experimenting with strings and orchestral arrangements. Old 97's returned to the studio once again in 2008, though, this time holing up in their native Dallas to help channel the energy of their earlier records. The move worked, and the resulting album, Blame It on Gravity, delivered some of the band's strongest songs in years. While touring the country in support, Murry Hammond launched his own solo career, packaging a wealth of old-timey gospel ballads and locomotive imagery onto the album I Don't Know Where I'm Going But I'm on My Way. Miller also found time to release a solo album, 2009's self-titled Rhett Miller, which appeared one year before the ninth Old 97's record, The Grand Theatre, Vol. 1. Originally intended as a double-album, The Grand Theatre was followed in mid-2011 by a companion record, The Grand Theatre, Vol. 2.

In celebration of the 15th Anniversary, Old 97’s recently announced they will launch the Too Far To Care tour on August 23rd in Houston, TX. The band has confirmed 30+ dates and will perform the classic album in its entirety during the live show. In addition, the concert tour will feature a second set of fan favorites, as well as a solo set from Rhett Miller, in support of his new solo album The Dreamer (Maximum Sunshine Records).

Released in 1997 on Elektra Records, Old 97’s major label debut catapulted the band onto the national scene. The album was followed by six applauded studio efforts, most recently the critically acclaimed The Grand Theatre Volume One and The Grand Theatre Vol. 2 in 2010 and 2011 (New West Records). The tour will feature appearances at the Austin City Limits festival, a two-night stand at the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles and Webster Hall in New York City.

“Too Far To Care was a magical moment for the 97’s,” said Rhett Miller. “Starry-eyed and flush with confidence thanks to our brand-new deal with Elektra, we felt no fear, just giddy excitement. An adventurous producer and a world champion A&R guy shepherded us through the recording process. And when it was all over, we had captured our little bit of lightning in a bottle. I love Too Far To Care and can’t wait to play it in its entirety across the USA.”