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As author of 2021 book “Where the Devil Don’t Stay: Traveling the South with the Drive-By Truckers,” Bloomington-based music journalist Stephen Deusner knows the band’s 2001 breakthrough recording, “Southern Rock Opera,” adds up to more than an exploration of Lynyrd Skynyrd and that band’s tragic 1977 plane crash.
Florida’s Lynyrd Skynyrd, known for iconic hits “Free Bird,” “Sweet Home Alabama” and “Gimme Three Steps,” provides the framework of “Southern Rock Opera” as heard in songs such as “Ronnie and Neil,” “Cassie’s Brother” and “Shut Up and Get on the Plane.”
But Drive-By Truckers, co-founded by Alabama natives Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley, also used the double album “Southern Rock Opera” to provide perspective on their own lives in music and misperceptions of the South.
“I think it gets misread as something that’s just about Skynyrd,” Deusner said. “But it’s more largely about Southern myths and the Southern myths that get mistaken for reality. … It’s about collective delusion, in a way.”
Hood, Cooley and their fellow Drive-By Truckers will launch their “Southern Rock Opera Revisited” tour Friday at Old National Centre. In promotional notes for the tour, Hood wrote that he’s expecting more than a nostalgia trip when playing the 20 songs of “Southern Rock Opera.”
“We feel that the record, while somewhat timeless, also has a current timeliness to it considering the social and political issues of today,” Hood wrote.
Deusner, who grew up in Tennessee, said the topics of Southern masculinity and Southern symbolism resonate in 2024—just as they did in 2001 and they did 50 years ago when “Sweet Home Alabama” reached No. 8 on Billboard magazine’s singles chart.
“It’s remarkable how the things they were discussing on this album are things we’re still discussing 23 years later and probably will be 23 years from now,” Deusner said.
Hood, who grew up in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, wrote “Ronnie and Neil” about the misunderstood friendship between Skynyrd singer Ronnie Van Zant (one of six people who died in the 1977 plane crash) and Canadian rock star Neil Young.
One of Cooley’s songwriting contributions on “Southern Rock Opera,” “Guitar Man Upstairs,” describes the friction between an older man who lives in an apartment building he views as being populated by “the punks and the freaks.”
Recorded and released before Jason Isbell spent six years in the lineup of Drive-By Truckers, “Southern Rock Opera” stands as a successful swing-for-the-fences effort by an underground band.
“It was ridiculous,” Deusner said. “It was a double album about Lynyrd Skynyrd at a time when nobody released double albums and Lynyrd Skynyrd wasn’t a big deal for indie rock kids.”
Deusner, whose work has appeared in music publications Uncut, No Depression and Pitchfork, moved to Bloomington with his wife, Melody Barnett Deusner, an art historian who teaches at Indiana University.
The subject of Stephen Deusner’s next book is “Garth Brooks in … the Life of Chris Gaines,” a largely derided 1999 album in which country superstar Brooks adopted the persona of a fictional pop singer.
“People are going to love it or they’re going to hate it,” Deusner said of the book. “They’re going to think it’s stupid or they’re going to think it’s a lot of fun. I had fun with it.”
Drive-By Truckers
- When: 8 p.m. Friday.
- Where: Egyptian Room in Old National Centre, 502 N. New Jersey St.
- Tickets: $53 to $64.
- Info: Visit livenation.com.
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