Maximum C&W
Drive-By Truckers’ Hollywood hoedown at the Avalon
By Ron Garmon
“Why are men with clubs circling me?” A plangent question for the corner of Hollywood and Ivar on a Tuesday night, but the bald guy with the bullhorn wasn’t entirely accurate, since one of the two grinning security cops wielded only a video camera recording his spastic anti-Scientology harangue in front of the Hollywood Guaranty Building. “There’s no truth in this building! This religion was started by …” the overamped marble-mouth groped briefly for a suitable epithet, “a science-fiction writer!”
Buoyed by this surreal invocation of standards (or verisimilitude, at least), I rounded the corner on Vine to the historic Palace – now known as The Avalon – only to endure a routine industry fuckaround at the door. We hillbilly boyz never stand when we can lean, so I absorbed much of the Pernice Brothers’ set through the venue’s elderly walls while chatting with some road guys from the North Mississippi Allstars. The Pernices were doing some choice wailing within for a sprinkle of boulevard scenesters and faux-rednecks within. Hundreds of their sartorial kinfolk were queued up outside, and the main floor was packed when the curtain went up on the All-Stars.
Sons of fabled Memphis studio wizard Jim Dickinson, Luther and Cody woodshedded as thrash-blues punks DDT before forming the Allstars with bassist Chris Chew in 1996. A sophisticated amalgam of Delta blues, field hollers, Southern rock, and way-back-yonder funk that non-Dixie reviewers mistakenly term “raw,” their music is reportedly a tribute to the psychedelic stupor traditionally induced by corn squeezins, a beverage subtle as sake and lethal as Lithium. The long, epically-jamming set they uncoiled was pure busthead raga; a sustained and furious blast of roots-rutting boogie that set the crowd to swaying and feminine asses grinding along the balcony rail. The magnificent “Mean Ol’ Wind Died Down” seemed to go on for a lysergic eternity and “I’d Love to Be a Hippy” (off their new album Hernando) even longer, with Chew howling the vocals like Little Milton’s oversized ghost. The barflies dug on the paltry ambition of the title, chuckling and slopping their drinks with bongwater carelessness.
I was sorry to see them go and sorrier still to endure the glacial wait for the headliners. Patrons got drunker, friendlier, flirtier, and more combative in roughly that order. The ambient social atmosphere began to feel like Bob’s Country Bunker out of the movie The Blues Brothers, and I saw more than one solitary male gnawing on his beer can, eyes glittering with distant mania. Finally, mellow sounds bubbled out from the stage and the lights went up on the Drive-By Truckers. Roots-rock revisionists whose 2001 Southern Rock Opera was a masterpiece of gumbo prog based on the career of Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Truckers brought us all gently down with a little cry-in-your-beer psychedelia. The set slowly matured into a full-on three-guitar onslaught which faded into the screwhead old honk of “The Night GG Allin Came to Town,” a hilarious Randy Newmanesque account of Memphis reaction to the late punk rock cretin’s shoving a microphone up his ass in 1991. The audience was ecstatic by the end, letting loose a few Budokan whoops as it piled in front of the stage.
I was lounging on a sofa along the back wall scribbling notes when one of the roadies from the Allstars dropped by. Regarding the tumult with some alarm, he leaned down and urged me treat the Allstars right in my review, heah?
“Have no fear, Bubba,” I drawled. It’s a Yankeefied world out there and ol’ boys like us have to stick together.
2008-02-14
Published: 02/13/2008
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