The DBTs have actually shared the stage with the current Skynyrd incarnation six times in the last year or so. I mean, he could always say the most profound things in the very most simplistic language, and I really like that.”Īs well as earning praise from some of America’s top music publications, Hood and his mates got the thumbs up where it really counted: from the surviving Skynyrd members themselves. “I’m always drawn to well-written songs-that’s probably where my deepest passion lies-and Ronnie Van Zant’s songwriting was amazing, you know, and in the best of ways, ’cause it was so completely non-artsy or unpretentious or whatever. Because it was quite obvious when I really started listening to ’em how much it was something that I would like, you know. And I was interested in what it was about the initial hoopla surrounding them that had kept me from appreciating how good they were. “That’s what drew me in initially, anyway. “And it’s such an incredible story,” he adds. It’s like the more I studied and really learned about Skynyrd, the more I really appreciated and kinda fell in love with their music and what they had done.
“It started out so differently from what it became,” he explains, “and somewhere along the way it became more personal. Hood, now 38, says that the idea behind Southern Rock Opera first took form as an outline of a screenplay that will probably never get filmed. I think it took getting far enough away from where I was from to where I was able to kinda make up my own mind about it.” “I guess it was from my rebellious nature,” relates Hood, on the line from his current residence in Athens, Georgia, “and from havin’ it shoved down my throat for so long. And he grew up in Alabama, the Sweet Home State.
One of the weirdest things about the project was the fact that singer-guitarist and main songwriter Patterson Hood-the son of famed Muscle Shoals session bassist David Hood-didn’t even become a devoted Skynyrd fan until he was in his 30s. It’s even more unlikely that such a CD would get critical raves from the likes of the Village Voice and Rolling Stone.īut that’s what happened in 2001 when the Drive-By Truckers released Southern Rock Opera, a two-disc epic sporting tunes about Skynyrd’s misunderstood friendship with Neil Young (“Ronnie and Neil”), its being falsely judged as racist for flying the Confederate flag (“The Three Great Alabama Icons”), and the October ’77 plane crash that took the lives of, among others, vocalist Ronnie Van Zant and guitarist Steve Gaines (“Angels and Fuselage”).
culture, focusing on the legend of doomed Dixie rock act Lynyrd Skynyrd. It doesn’t seem likely in today’s musical climate that any band would record a 90-minute concept album about 1970s rock and southern U.S. ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT, JAN.
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