Bluesfest encore 14 years later for Drive-By Truckers

They've never been the kind of band you hear on commercial radio. More likely you'd stumble across them from a personal recommendation.

But once heard, hard to forget. Like the smell of a burning hole in your shirt from the dropping hot ash of a joint, their music will tickle your brain. Your curiosity keeps going back for more, trying to making sense of their thumping rock and eccentric storytelling.

So it's not surprising Peter Noble has signed them up to return to Australia for Bluesfest in 2024 (playing March 28 & 28), with headline shows in Sydney (Metro) on April 1 and Melbourne (Northcote Theatre) on March 31.

Noble brought the Truckers to Australia on their first and only other trip here for Bluesfest in 2009. At the time they had teamed as backing band for Booker T Jones, cutting an album with him and Neil Young, Potato Hole.

Patterson Hood, who founded the band with Mike Cooley, 27 years ago is looking forward to the trip Down Under.

For Hood, the 2009 trip to Australia was a blur.

"We had a 3am layover at LAX and I bought one of those sandwiches from a machine," he says of the 2009 trip to Australia. "And it made me deathly ill and I was sick as shit the entire time there. So I can't wait to come and actually get to see more of the venue than the bathroom of my hotel room. And get to experience it. 'Cause I'm really excited to be coming."

They are indeed, legends of southern rock. You can talk about them in the same breath as Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Allman Brothers, Black Crowes, Marshall Tucker and Tom Petty.

The band's 14^th album, Welcome 2 Club XIII, released in 2022, pays homage to the Muscle Shoals, Alabama, honky-tonk where Hood and Cooley got their start: a concrete-floored dive lit like a disco, with the nightly promise of penny beer and truly dubious cover bands.

"There were no cool bars in town and Club XIII was the best we had-but it wasn't all that good, and our band wasn't particularly liked there," Hood says, referring to the vocalist/guitarists' former band Adam's House Cat.

"From time to time the owner would throw us a Wednesday night or let us open for a hair-metal band we were a terrible fit for, and everyone would hang out outside until we were done playing. It wasn't very funny at the time, but it's funny to us now."

The opening song on the Welcome album is The Driver, which Hood says "might be the most autobiographical thing I've ever written".

"I think that song might cut closer to the core of who I am than anything I've ever written," he says. "As well as, like in a weird sort of way, a life story. 'Cause I've always loved cars and vehicles and just forward motion. I don't have fancy old vintage cars, although I would love to, but I love being on the road.

"I love travelling, I love going places. I learned to drive before I was 10. I learned to drive a stick shift before I was 11 or 12. So I could have told you at eight years old that my 16th birthday would be a Monday so I get my license that day. I've always been like that.

"All the stuff that in that song is true stuff that happened to me or the band, good and bad, while travelling from one place to another. 'Cause, you know, it'll kill ya. The road is a dangerous thing, so you have to be careful and respect it. But it's also a life affirming thing, and I think that aspect of that song cuts at the nature of who I am probably more than anything I've ever written."

Hood, who's father David was bass player and co-founder Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, moved to Oregon several years ago now. The band's stories have always had a southern twist, but they resonant with the entire country these days.

"One of those days I talk about in that song [The Driver] is driving through the Black Hills of South Dakota into Montana. The first time we ever went west was such a profound thing for us, because we all grew up in Alabama and most of us hadn't travelled a lot before we had this band. We were very wide-eyed about it. Even though we were older when we did that.

"We weren't kids when we started the Truckers. Cooley and I had already been playing together for 10 years before we even started this band. So we were in our mid-30s seeing things most of our peers were experiencing in their 20s."

His gift of perspective has served him well.

Consider how he and Cooley run the band: they have never had a setlist.

"We don't do a setlist. The Truckers never do a setlist," Hood says. "We decide the first song before we walk out. Cooley and I go back and forth. I don't know what he's going to do after a my song I'm playing, and he don't know what I'm going to do after that.

"We have hand signals and ways of cueing each other, like baseball players. It keeps us on our toes. The goal is make it go fast, make it seem like we know what we're doing. That makes it fun, and makes us able to play off the room, the crowd and who's there."

Pictured: Drive-By Truckers founding members Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley. Picture by Sanjay Suchak

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