Drive-By Truckers lyrics

GOODE’S FIELD ROAD

Honey, take care of the children, make them do as they’re told I got a meeting in the morning down at the end of the Goode’s Field Road Nothing much for a man in my position A man like me don’t last too long in prison And all those friends down at Police Department will act like they never had anything to do with me Started out down at the junk yard taking orders from a moron And a man my size don’t like taking orders from anyone Bought myself an old beat up wrecker, built an empire with my labor brains and sweat But it’s hard to make an honest living and a man takes any help he gets Nothing much for a man in my position, a second mortgage and three college kids’ tuition and all them friends that I helped along the way Will act like they never had anything to do with me But you and me, we had us some good times and I’ve always been a family man deep down. Ain’t much a believer of hiring work from “out of state” but they’ll be asking questions when I’m found. They’ll be asking questions when I’m found Honey, take care of the children, pay the house off when the salvage yard gets sold And you don’t know nothing when the insurance man asks questions Bout what went down at the Goode’s Field Road Patterson Hood / Drive-By Truckers © Razor and Tie Music (BMI)

Patterson Hood – Guitars and Vocals / Mike Cooley – Guitars / John Neff – Pedal Steel / Shonna Tucker – Bass / Spooner Oldham – Wurlitzer – David Barbe – Guitar / Brad Morgan - Drums

Drive-By Truckers

CD REVIEW

CD: Drive-By Truckers

Drive-By Truckers "Brighter Than Creation's Dark" (New West) *** ½

THE eighth album from this protean band completes one of the widest mood swings in recent rock history. After specializing in thematically cohesive albums and a revitalized brand of Southern rock, the Athens, Ga.-based Truckers are now all over the place.

That figures, given the changes in the group's core makeup. Rock-leaning guitarist Jason Isbell has gone solo, founding guitarist and pedal steel player John Neff is back, soul eminence Spooner Oldham plays piano and organ on the new album (in stores Tuesday), and bassist Shonna Tucker contributes her first songs.

The result is a sprawling, 75-minute immersion in the dynamic between Patterson Hood's Neil Young/Tom Petty-influenced folk and rock and Steve Cooley's mix of Rolling Stones, stone country and Band-flavored folk-rock.

It's tied together by the Truckers' customary focus on characters coping "in a world turned cold," pushed to the edge by various forces -- internal compulsions, military orders, financial desperation. It's not just good old boys this time. In "Goode's Field Road," a successful family man carefully plots his own demise.

The CD starts with a dream of heaven and ends in an encounter with John Ford, whose words of wisdom have been clearly heeded by the Truckers: "Tell them just enough to still leave them some mystery/A grasp of the ironic nature of history." That's a wrap.

--Richard Cromelin

------------------------
and another review by Stephen M. Deusner at http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2008/01/brighter-than-creations-dark.html

Why hasn’t Shonna Tucker been singing all these years? Brighter Than Creation’s Dark is the bass player’s third album with the Truckers, but the first where she writes and sings. Showcasing her rich voice and subtle twang, her slow, soulful songs “I’m Sorry Huston” and “The Purgatory Line” not only fit in well with the Truckers’ tapestry approach to Southern rock and Southern life, but actually expand on it, providing a feminine counterpart to Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley’s masculine songwriting. Ostensibly, Tucker is filling the position recently vacated by ex-husband Jason Isbell, who in five years had become an important element in the band’s three-guitar/three-songwriter attack. Despite his absence, Brighter Than Creation’s Dark may be the Truckers’ best and most expansive album since Southern Rock Opera—more tuneful than 2004’s The Dirty South, and less staid than 2006’s A Blessing and a Curse. The band expands its familiar rock sound with forays into soul (two members are progeny of Muscle Shoals musicians), Southern boogie, and AM-gold country—all in service to tales of hard-drinking fathers, vengeful ghosts, weird Harolds and director John Ford. Hood writes about Iraq vets on “The Man I Shot” and “The Home Front,” delicately and convincingly examining war’s emotional toll on soldiers and their families. But Brighter Than Creation’s Dark belongs to Mike Cooley, who contributes seven of his best, most rousing songs about hard-luck characters—the kind you know and probably avoid—proving the Truckers are at their best singing about people at their worst.
====================================
Folks, you gotta be checking this group out. Hard to define them. Garage-bandy with true grit. I haven't heard them without Shonna singing, but Shonna good. Real good.

Live Music Thrives as CDs Fade

The Media Equation
Live Music Thrives as CDs Fade
DAVID CARR
June 23, 2008

A little over a week ago, Patterson Hood, a guitarist and singer in the Drive-By Truckers, stood in front of a sleepy but amped noon crowd at Bonnaroo, the music festival in Manchester, Tenn., explaining profanely that it was time to, um, wake up. As he kicked into “The Righteous Path,” a song from the group’s new-ish record “Brighter Than Creation’s Dark,” it was if the space in front of him was filled with sunburned bobble-heads, each bouncing in unison to every word: “Trying to hold steady on the righteous path, 80 miles an hour with a worn-out map.”

Like much of Bonnaroo, the set was a display of the fealty between band and audience so thunderous that you barely hear the sound of a dying business.

Yes, the traditional music industry is in the tank — record sales are off another 10 percent this year and the Virgin Megastore in Times Square is closing, according to a Reuters report, joining a host of other record stores. That would seem to be bad news all around for music fans — 70,000 of whom showed up in this remote place to watch 158 bands play — and for Mr. Hood and his band.

Not so, he says.

“The collapse of the record business has been good for us, if anything. It’s leveled the playing field in a way where we can keep slugging it out and finding our fans,” he said while toweling himself off after the set.

With their epic Southern rock sounds whose influences range from William Faulkner to Lynyrd Skynyrd and the kind of musicians who don’t live for a photo shoot, the Drive-By Truckers were never going to be record industry darlings. As it is, they have found a sustainable, blue-collar business model of rock stardom in which selling concert tickets and T-shirts have replaced selling CDs.

“Thank God they can’t download those,” said Mr. Hood, the son of the famed Muscle Shoals Sound Studio bassist David Hood. “They follow us from city to city, see the shows, get drunk and buy shirts.”

After investing early and continuously in the Web, the Drive-By Truckers have a MySpace page with 37,000 friends, offering four songs from “Brighter Than Creation’s Dark” with almost 800,000 downloads alongside a touring schedule that would put James Brown in his prime to shame. This week, they will be in five cities and two countries (Canada, remember?).

Before file sharing tipped over the music business, bands used to tour in support of a record. Now they tour to get the dough to make a record. Cheap recording technology, along with all manner of electronic distribution, means that bands don’t need to sign with a giant recording label to get their music out there.

It has been going on a while. Ani DiFranco, the singer/songwriter, saw the future back in 1991 and skipped signing with a label, making her own records instead. “She would tour, endlessly, in her Volkswagen bug, and have two envelopes, one for the gig money and one for the record money,” said Scot Fisher, the manager and president of Righteous Babe Records, the label they created.

There are still pop acts that drop a record from on high with the help of a big label and see touring as a nuisance, but Bonnaroo in particular is a place where bands and fans have a much closer relationship, with direct sales of merchandise and recorded product. It can make for intimate ties: a woman in a cowboy hat who was carpeted with tattoos was asked the name of a particular song. “I don’t know what the name is, but I know who it’s about,” she said, with a wink.

In a sure sign of détente between the old and new faces of the business, Metallica, which very publicly went after file-sharers with corrosive rhetoric and aggressive legal tactics, showed up at Bonnaroo.

Back in the day, Metallica had good facts — downloaders were stealing their work — and a bad argument, one that could not stand up to a shift in paradigm where many fans walk around with their entire music collection in a shirt pocket. “We support live music,” the band’s singer and guitarist, James Hetfield, told the cheering hordes.

Established bands like Metallica and Pearl Jam, which also played Bonnaroo, may have taken some hits on overall sales. But the lower (iTunes) and nonexistent (file-sharing) profit margins on recorded product are a little easier to take, because ticket prices have doubled in the last 10 years, according to Gary Bongiovanni, editor in chief of Pollstar, a trade magazine that covers the live music industry.

For some bands, like the jam band Umphrey’s McGee, some music sales are a direct offshoot of the shows. The band reserves five tickets at every show for people who want to tape it and also records every set with room mikes and the sound board. Three-disc sets are burned on the spot and sold for $20. (Other bands have taken to popping the evening’s performance onto a thumb drive and selling that to departing fans.)

“If we can break even on a recording, then the rest of the business will take care of itself,” said Joel Cummins, the keyboard player in the band. “I think that the Internet gives us a way of getting connected with our fans. We get to make the kind of music we like — it’s definitely a little more complicated than just three chords and the truth — and use a long-tail business model to find and play for people who want to see what we can do live.”

The buy-share-trade dynamic was visible all over Bonnaroo, whether it was food, space in the tent or other substances. To one crusty old attendee, it felt a bit like the Yippie camp-in at Spokane that he stumbled onto back in 1974. (Speaking of which, when did tie-dye come back, and how can we make it go away again?)

But for musicians, the network is all part of the business. Selling out, once the death knell for bands seeking credibility, has now become an end in itself.

“This is by far our best record, if you ask me, so the tickets for shows are doing really well,” said Mr. Hood, sounding very much like an old label hand. “But then, the gas prices are killing us.”

E-mail: carr@nytimes.com

Sea Level -- The Best Of

Genre: Rock
Active: 70’s, 80s
Major members: Jim Nalls, Lamar Williams, Chuck Leavell, Davis Causey, Randall Bramblett, Joe English
Biography
Fusion combo Sea Level was formed in 1976 by keyboardist Chuck Leavell, bassist Lamar Williams, and drummer Jai Johanny "Jaimoe" Johanson following their exit from the Allman Brothers Band; guitarist Jimmy Nalls completed the original lineup, which in 1977 issued its self-titled debut LP on the Capricorn label. Honing its distinctive marriage of rock, blues, and jazz through relentless touring, the group returned to the studio to cut 1978's Cats on the Coast, followed later that year by On the Edge; although Jaimoe returned to the Allmans, Sea Level recorded two more albums -- 1979's Long Walk on a Short Pier and 1980's Ball Room -- before dissolving. Leavell later emerged as a sought-after session player and producer, also touring with the Rolling Stones; in 1998, he issued his debut solo LP, What's in That Bag? Sadly, Williams died of Agent Orange-related cancer on January 25, 1983. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Music Guide
Representative Songs:
"That's Your Secret," "Tidal Wave," "Nothing Matters But the Fever"
Representative Albums:
The Best of Sea Level, Sea Level, Cats on the Coast
Similar Artists: Ozark Mountain Daredevils, Steve Morse, Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Dixie Dregs, Blackfoot, Dickey Betts
Influences: Allen Toussaint, Atlanta Rhythm Section, The Allman Brothers Band
Followers: The Dixie Dregs