dbt albums-week 6: southern rock opera

[Iowan]

I get chills up my spine everytime I hear PH sing "is in heeeeeell now".

Me too.

This thread kicks all kinds of ass. Not only dime's excellent presentation, but Kudzu's essential gap-filling goodies. Great stuff all around.

[John A Arkansawyer]

For grins I once listened to Tommy, Quadrophenia, Zen Arcade and SRO in one sitting.

Which one of these things does not belong?

Surely you're not suggesting the great Husker Du Zen Arcade does not belong?? I'd put it ahead of Tommy and probably too close to call with the other two.

Nope, nope, nope. And I'm not suggesting you don't belong, either (though that would be funny insult humor)--you're a listener worthy of those records. But I could make with a straight face the argument that Quadrophenia, Zen Arcade, and Southern Rock Opera are three of the greatest albums ever made and the best single works of each of those bands. I like Tommy perfectly well, and maybe it's just over-familiarity--hearing it pretty much whole on that Isle of Wight record was certainly an ass-kick--but I couldn't say that sort of thing about it anymore.

[dime in the gutter]

random musings/questions re: act 1.

1. patterson harmony on hwy 72 is sublime.
2. who is stanley?
3. caught a quick walking, slick talking guitar picker headin' out my back door.....
4. how do you record 2 lp's worth of three guitar rock and still have enough room for the lyrics?
5. love when patterson says...when company's comin'/a in 3 icons.
6. stated as fact that george wallace is in hell. some harsh judgement for context.
7. when he tied that chain to the front of my car and pulled me out of that ditch that i slid into.....
8. followed directly by don't know what his problem is....
9. props on all the background indiscernible vocals running at the beginning of days of graduation.
10. sireeeen
11. cooley hitting the high note in dead, drunk and naked.

[RevMatt]

Something my other great teacher, John Clellon Holmes, said once about writing novels in the late twentieth century was (paraphrased from distant memory) that North American novelists were writing perfectly good, consistently safe novels, as opposed to the novelists of Latin American, who were swinging for the fences with every book, often falling flat on their faces and occasionally hitting one out of the park, and that it was the Latin American novelists who were writing the books to be remembered by the ages.

Were you a Stegner fellow? If so, mucho respects.

[dime in the gutter]

dbt mentor, historian and sro producer/knob turner/engineer.....dick cooper.


here he is with sam phillips and jerry wexler.

[Zip City]

The three-guitar solo (with cheering) in LTBR is the same melody line as the bass line in A&F's outro

[dime in the gutter]

thrashers wheat take on the rvz/ny fued.

http://thrasherswheat.org/jammin/lynyrd.htm

[John A Arkansawyer]

Something my other great teacher, John Clellon Holmes, said once about writing novels in the late twentieth century was (paraphrased from distant memory) that North American novelists were writing perfectly good, consistently safe novels, as opposed to the novelists of Latin American, who were swinging for the fences with every book, often falling flat on their faces and occasionally hitting one out of the park, and that it was the Latin American novelists who were writing the books to be remembered by the ages.

Were you a Stegner fellow? If so, mucho respects.

Nope. (I wish.) Just an undergraduate hanger-on at the creative writing program at UA-Fayetteville when John taught there.

[Kudzu Guillotine]

The three-guitar solo (with cheering) in LTBR is the same melody line as the bass line in A&F's outro

Smitty will know for sure but I think there's one song that repeats a bit of "Sweet Home Alabama". A lot of that sort of stuff is so subversive that I've never picked up on it, which I guess is kind of the point. I also realize it's a bit of a stretch but apparently it's that sort of repeating of a theme factor that's makes it characteristic of an opera, even if there's no real straight narrative that flows through each and every song. I don't think dime mentioned it in this thread but I believe he has surmised before that some of the songs without the Skynyrd narrative are meant to be by Betamax Guillotine. At least that's his interpretation. I've never really thought of it that way until he mentioned it but it makes sense to me. For whatever it's worth, in that Swampland interview I posted, Patterson mentions several projects that never came to fruition: a DBT's Christmas album, a SRO DVD and a Betamax Guillotine EP. I have no way of knowing for sure but I'm guessing the DVD may have been that aborted idea I mentioned previously about filming a performance of SRO down in Texas. I also remember talk of the Betamax Guillotine EP at the time and remember one of the songs being "Don't Cock Block the Rock". Again, I defer to Smitty as I'm sure he remembers the rest or can at least help fill in the blanks. I think it also warrants mentioning that they had to record SRO twice. If memory serves, something became of the original master tapes and they had to start over from scratch.

[RevMatt]

I didn't grow up anywhere near Alabama. My home is New Jersey. The amazing thing about SRO is that I can totally relate and at certain points I come across my own coming of age story.

One aspect of the record is that it is the story of a musician who comes of age in the late seventies/early eighties. The feeling of alienation from your own community because you are so different from everyone else resonates with me. I was one of those kids who had hundreds of record albums by the time I entered high school. I had a Sound City electric piano and could play "Freebird" which meant I was welcome in just about every basement jam session within three towns. But I came of age "rebelling against the music in my high school parking lot", abandoning Skynyrd for The Clash, The Ramones, Television and The Stranglers. After graduation in 1982 me and two of the guys in my band decided to make a go of it. We played the indie circuit in the northeast.

There are many things that hit home for me. "Days of Graduation" is a song about what was a rite of passage for my generation; the drunken car wreck in the spring of senior year that kills a couple of kids. "Dead, Drunk and Naked" is about the kid who can't keep his partying under control and gets shipped off to rehab. "Zip City" is about the nerdy kid who can only find a date with a girl two years younger and two towns away. "Let There Be Rock" resonates with music fans who came of age in that era. You don't have to be from the south to relate to Southern Rock Opera.

A Craig Lieske story that relates to this thread. He and I were driving into New York last June to play a gig. He had me put on Zen Arcade as we went through the Holland Tunnel, explaining that it was his favorite album to put him in the mood to play. Just before I put the cd into the player I held it up and said, "Northern Rock Opera". He laughed and said he never thought of that one.

[RevMatt]

Something my other great teacher, John Clellon Holmes, said once about writing novels in the late twentieth century was (paraphrased from distant memory) that North American novelists were writing perfectly good, consistently safe novels, as opposed to the novelists of Latin American, who were swinging for the fences with every book, often falling flat on their faces and occasionally hitting one out of the park, and that it was the Latin American novelists who were writing the books to be remembered by the ages.

Were you a Stegner fellow? If so, mucho respects.

Nope. (I wish.) Just an undergraduate hanger-on at the creative writing program at UA-Fayetteville when John taught there.

I had the same status when I was an undergrad at Syracuse. I did an independent study with Toby Wolff. He liked my writing but not enough to give me a Stegner after he moved on to Stanford.

[Zip City]

"Zip City" is about the nerdy kid who can only find a date with a girl two years younger and two towns away.

I never saw it that way. I always felt the narrator was purposely dating a girl two towns away to give himself an excuse to get out of his own town

[Iowan]

The three-guitar solo (with cheering) in LTBR is the same melody line as the bass line in A&F's outro

Repeated musical themes?

Sounds pretty "opera" to me.

[Iowan]

"Zip City" is about the nerdy kid who can only find a date with a girl two years younger and two towns away.

I never saw it that way. I always felt the narrator was purposely dating a girl two towns away to give himself an excuse to get out of his own town

I see it halfway. The 2 years younger was pretty damn common, as it seems that in small towns girls almost always date older guys.

The going two towns away part means that he can't get a girl 2 years younger from his own town due to his preceding reputation.

[Zip City]

The three-guitar solo (with cheering) in LTBR is the same melody line as the bass line in A&F's outro

Repeated musical themes?

Sounds pretty "opera" to me.

Operas also have characters and a plot

[Zip City]

"Zip City" is about the nerdy kid who can only find a date with a girl two years younger and two towns away.

I never saw it that way. I always felt the narrator was purposely dating a girl two towns away to give himself an excuse to get out of his own town

I see it halfway. The 2 years younger was pretty damn common, as it seems that in small towns girls almost always date older guys.

The going two towns away part means that he can't get a girl 2 years younger from his own town due to his preceding reputation.

I don't think a guy too nerdy to get a girl in his hometown would say something like "I don't know why I put up with your shit when you don't put out"

[Tequila Cowboy]

The three-guitar solo (with cheering) in LTBR is the same melody line as the bass line in A&F's outro

Repeated musical themes?

Sounds pretty "opera" to me.

Operas also have characters and a plot

Often a loose one and Rock Operas have generally taken that path. Tommy is fairly literal but the other three we've been discussing are not. Of course an opera afficianado wouldn't allow any status to be given to Rock, opera or no so I'm not sure where any dissent may be.

[Kudzu Guillotine]

Often a loose one and Rock Operas have generally taken that path. Tommy is fairly literal but the other three we've been discussing are not. Of course an opera afficianado wouldn't allow any status to be given to Rock, opera or no so I'm not sure where any dissent may be.

I just hope we never see this shit on Broadway ala the Who or Green Day...

[Smitty]

there's subtle allusions to "Sweet Home Alabama" a few times in the album, I hear it most blatantly in the intro to "Birmingham" - you can also hear a little "Freebird" in the outro of "Greenville to Baton Rouge". Subtle shit like that is what separates this from most other albums.
I also think it's notable that the album starts with the car going "airborne" in "Days of Graduation". Just a brilliant fucking record - I usually don't rank it in my top 3 fav DBT albums, but it's really in a class of it's own in some ways. It was my intro to DBT, but I really didn't fully "get it" until I fell in love with Decoration Day.

[Kudzu Guillotine]

there's subtle allusions to "Sweet Home Alabama" a few times in the album, I hear it most blatantly in the intro to "Birmingham" - you can also hear a little "Freebird" in the outro of "Greenville to Baton Rouge". Subtle shit like that is what separates this from most other albums.
I also think it's notable that the album starts with the car going "airborne" in "Days of Graduation". Just a brilliant fucking record - I usually don't rank it in my top 3 fav DBT albums, but it's really in a class of it's own in some ways. It was my intro to DBT, but I really didn't fully "get it" until I fell in love with Decoration Day.

I always thought it was a bit of life imitating art (or perhaps the other way around) that the Truckers added a third guitarist not long after SRO came out. I know it was planned to expand the line up to include three guitarists in conjunction with the release and performance of the album but you can't plan shit like bringing Isbell in like that on a moment's notice. In the event that it isn't clear, it reminded me of Skynyrd bringing in Steve Gaines in the months prior to the Street Survivors tour.

[Zip City]

Often a loose one and Rock Operas have generally taken that path. Tommy is fairly literal but the other three we've been discussing are not. Of course an opera afficianado wouldn't allow any status to be given to Rock, opera or no so I'm not sure where any dissent may be.

I just hope we never see this shit on Broadway ala the Who or Green Day...

I actually really like the Broadway cast album of Tommy

/ducks

[Iowan]

I see it halfway. The 2 years younger was pretty damn common, as it seems that in small towns girls almost always date older guys.

The going two towns away part means that he can't get a girl 2 years younger from his own town due to his preceding reputation.

I don't think a guy too nerdy to get a girl in his hometown would say something like "I don't know why I put up with your shit when you don't put out"

Nerdy guys are just trying to get some like everyone else. Whats the point of dating a girl who won't put out, to the typical 17 year old boy?

[Zip City]

As a former teen nerd, I can tell you that I was happy to just have a girlfriend in high school. I wasn't brash enough to bitch about the amount of ass I was getting

[beantownbubba]

At the risk of sounding like an effete intellectual northeastern snob, SRO is art, or close enough to art so it doesn't make a difference. Both by definition and result, you don't have to have had personal experiences that closely follow the narrative to relate to the album, to get it, for it to have great personal meaning to you and for it to blow you away.

When I was 17, I was a nerdy college freshman w/out a car trying to date 19 & 20 yr old college girls. Yeah, good luck w/ that. The closest I had ever come to the South was either Washington DC, or Miami Beach, both of which are a lot closer to NYC than they are to the south. Most of my friends didn't drive and while we drank our share, drugs were the high of choice, supply and dollars willing. I never thought about getting out of my town because the only place i ever wanted to be was my town (if you want to call NYC a town). For part of those years I thought that Lynyrd Skynyrd was a pretty good take off on the Allman Brothers, tho i eventually did come to my senses. If u think any of that matters, you're missing the point. No doubt that if the personal details in SRO resonate w/ you, that is a particular kind of special listening experience. But it's not the only one and it's way too limiting to see the album only through that lens. The reason the album is the masterpiece that it is, is that it speaks to the big themes, the big issues, the universally important stuff. You don't have to go to prep school to get Catcher in the Rye and you don't have to live in a small southern town w/ your widowed lawyer daddy to get To Kill a Mockingbird. Yes, I am making those comparisons deliberately. I'm not saying SRO is better or even as good as those books, but it can certainly be talked about in that company as an aesthetic experience.

Zip, of course it's an opera. It says so right in the title.

[beantownbubba]

[
I see it halfway. The 2 years younger was pretty damn common, as it seems that in small towns girls almost always date older guys.

I'm pretty sure this is pretty common everywhere. Guys go for looks, girls go for status, or so the song goes. If i wanted to be cynical, I'd say that first older guys have access to booze, then to cars, then to money, then to a house in the Hamptons.

[RolanK]

I get chills up my spine everytime I hear PH sing "is in heeeeeell now".

Me too.

This thread kicks all kinds of ass. Not only dime's excellent presentation, but Kudzu's essential gap-filling goodies. Great stuff all around.

Yes. Thanks to Kudzu for those links. Answers questions I've always wanted to ask. There's also a lot of (geeky) stuff I would like to know about the actual recording process, as well as how the transition from a more accoustic based sound on GB and PD to the all electric sound on SRO. The album sounds so good, not only the guitars but also vocals, drums and bass. How much trial and error was involved in getting the sound etc. I guess the three guitar line-up sort of came with the territory once the Skynyrd idea was born, but to make that work for almost all of the songs on the album without overdoing it or becoming a cliché of one self I assume takes some planning and carefull considerations. I guess this is where Barbe comes in.

[Zip City]

Zip, of course it's an opera. It says so right in the title.

I bet you were VERY disappointed by Naked Lunch

[beantownbubba]

Zip, of course it's an opera. It says so right in the title.

I bet you were VERY disappointed by Naked Lunch

Hell, I'm still disappointed every time I go to the library and find out again that "graphic novels" are comic books and that "adult books" are simply those that aren't kids books.

[LBRod]

Great stuff all around, people. I don't think a week is enough. This should be the album of the month.

[dime in the gutter]

act 2.

present day. our boys have made it out alive....for now. free from the closed minded south. the world is their oyster. rocking balls for adoring fans....kick out the jams mother fucker. at what price? betamax guillotine careens down a tried and true ride of excess, disillusionment and anguish.



let there be rock: playing for the masses. rock and roll salvation and name checking some rock and roll elite as well as some never were's or has beens.....foreshadowing. and the rest as they say is history. same (eu)gene from a blessing a and a curse?



road cases: betamax guillotine have officially made it. bad ass road cases to show for it. drive by truckers on every one...or maybe just dbt. perils of life on the road appearing. lay off that big craaaack deal. inspired by atlanta rhythm section.



women without whiskey: panty dropper for the ladies.....but now it's no longer just a party...it's a way of life. once, when asked about advice for up and coming bands, cooley quipped that they needed to look in mirror and ask themselves if there was anybody in their lives that they hated enough to put them thru the bullshit that invariably accompanies loving someone in a rock and roll band. whiskey is hard to beat.



plastic flowers on the highway: remembering the dearly departed. losing family and friends. other shoe was beginning to drop. dreamlike and ethereal. amazing solos. hit the brakes and slided sideways...he never had a chance.



cassie's brother: another tale of hitting the big time only to have it snatched away in horrible fashion. ooooh, that boy is funky! love ezb on this one. innocence lost. talent wasted. snuffed out.



life in the factory: love song to the bad ass, smart, full of chops, boogie woogie, slap your mamma that's fanfuckingtastically great rock and roll band named lynyrd skynyrd. not the perceived or projected lynyrd skynyrd of rebel flags and racist connotations. makes you(me) proud to be a fan. three guitars or a life of crime. i've always thought that the heat radiating off the tin at the hell house was a direct link to the un air conditioned environs at the uniform warehouse where dbt was recording sro.



shut up and get on the plane: cooley lays it on thick. so many great lines. dirty needles and cheap cocaine. fuck it, auger in hard.



greenville to br: freakshow great song. fucking war zone the last 1min 40 secs. 1st cousin to hell no i ain't happy. one more night, one more show, four down, eighty-four to go this ain't no time for moving slow.


angels and fuselage: total fucking dreamscape. harmonicai in your ear. friends in the swamp, friends on the ground. patterson nails it. all of it. sums up the entire album in 8 glorious mins.




to be continued......