“Drive-by Truckers Southern Rock Opera” is written in a breezy, travelogue-type style. Author Rien Fertel provides a competent background of the southern rock genre, ending up with a back-and-forth sharing of tales between Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Drive-by Truckers. Readers are provided with an entertaining selection of on-the-road stories and explanations of various song lyrics.

I didn’t appreciate the injections of the author’s political stance. Illuminating the political stance contained within the lyrics is one thing. Lacing the book with your own political opinions is another. I chose this book because I wanted to read about music and musicians. There are many other books – both liberal and conservative – that I would choose if that was my preferred reading preference of the moment.

A quick, easy read, one best enjoyed with music in the background or, at the very least, a computer ready to search through YouTube. Four stars.

My thanks to NetGalley and Bloomsbury Academic for an advance complimentary ebook.

A brief history of Southern Rock and how it is recreated in DBT's masterpiece. Not too much in the way of new insights but delivered in an interesting and creative style. Well worth a reader.

This is a fun short little history of southern rock. Starting with the birth of the Muscle Shoals sound and transitioning to the brief history of the Allman Brothers told primarily around Duane Allman. Then it moves on to those Allman Brother wannabes - Lynard Skynard. We get a long history and analysis of their whisky drinking, bar fighting, rock and rolling, airplane crashing mythology - and just how vapid it really was. Rien Fertel even goes so far as to take a trip to Jacksonville, FL (the birthplace of Skynard) and take a tour with their former bodyguard to all the various local places of Skynard legend. Fertel intersperses this some commentary on the power of southern heritage and pride, and particularly the complexity of the "southern thing". By the end of the book Fertel is at a Skynard show singing at the top of his lungs with tears streaming down his face to that albatross of a song, Freebird. There you have . . . wait . . . this was supposed to be about the Drive-by Truckers album? Well, you wouldn't know it when you read the book. Maybe Fertel deserves a do-over, because he is an engaging writer.

I love southern rock...so much so that I named my blog after the ABB. However, I did not like this book at all. It took me a few weeks to plow through it, and given that I typically finish a book in one to three days, that's saying something. It was just not my cup of tea at all. ....will still keep listening to all my favorite friends though! :)

Great introduction to the history of southern rock music, using the Drive-By Truckers album SOUTHERN ROCK OPERA as a foundation. Provides an interesting history of Lynard Skynard and the Allman Brothers, as well as the rise of the Muscle Shoals sound.

Drive-By Truckers are one of those bands I like, but not nearly as much as most people who like them do. So if you're one of the proper fans who's really invested in the whole mythos, I can't comment on how much here is new, or to what degree it does justice to their magnum opus. But as a casual enthusiast? This is a damn good read. It's a road trip along the mean old highways of the Southland, through the tangled pride and shame of Southern identity, the Confederate flags and the crossroads. It's alive to the many disenfranchisements that made this land, the double identities it breeds, the difficulties of loving Lynyrd Skynyrd songs while hating what they've come to represent (and arguably always did). Hell, apart from anything else it'd make a good point of analogy for all of us who grew up on Morrissey's music and mythology but have now realised that whatever he may once have been, the guy's now a cast-iron arsehole.

It helps, too, that there's a doozy of a story to be told. A lot of 33 1/3 books, good as they are, you're still working with a bunch of professional musicians writing and then recording some songs about some stuff like they've done plenty of times before. There can be stories in that, sure, but they need some digging. Whereas here, you've got a band who already broke up at least once before they were even the Drive-By Truckers, who then promptly lose a member to a car-crash about as soon as they get going under that name, self-financing a rock opera their label tell them is impossible and unfashionable, recording it thrice with different bassists...and then releasing it on September 12th, 2001. Which wouldn't be ideal even were it not heavily themed around plane crashes. By rights, nobody should ever have heard Southern Rock Opera. And yet, here it is all the same, refusing to go away. Which itself seems like a perfect illustration of that 'Southern thing' with which it's so fascinated. And one of the things which really comes through here is just how utterly Southern the South is, spotted with place names which seem like they're taking the piss - as when the story of the foundation of Muscle Shoals takes in Tick Hill, Bloody Springs and and Ricketts Hill, not to mention a kid boiled to death in a washpot, mom running away with a bootlegger, and a man with backwards feet. Muscle Shoals, of course, being relevant because DBT bandleader Patterson Hood was the son of one of their house band - and again, this is presumably common knowledge to the real fans, but I just like the songs so it was news to me. Still, the point is that this is the world he came from, and it's barely a whisker away from And the Ass saw the Angel. See also Ronnie van Zant - growing up in a shack with his brothers Donny and Johnny, plus sisters Marlene and Darlene. Because if I don't know the Truckers as well as some, I barely know their fellow subjects of Southern Rock Opera at all. Basically, I know the two Skynrd songs everyone knows, and I don't even know them that well, let alone like them (although Bubonique's East 17-style take on 'Freebird' is quite something). And more widely, my classic rock knowledge is also pretty minimal, so it was only reading this that I learned that the French horn and organ on 'You Can't Always Get What You Want' are the same guy who played the organ on 'Like A Rolling Stone', and even if you were only on two songs ever (which he very much wasn't), what a fucking pair!

I digress quite considerably. But then, this is a rambling, storytelling kind of book, which is quite impressive given the brevity of a 33 1/3, and how much material there is to cover. Still, it's a hell of a book about a hell of an album, and an album I'll definitely be listening to more now I've got this sense of its hinterland.
(Although, funny story: after the spoken word track about the duality of the Southern thing, just as we've been told the next track is from the point of view of the Devil getting ready to welcome George Wallace to Hell...I instead got the voice of Aleksandr the meerkat. Spotify ads, man)

Rather than leave it there, though, let's close on what Hood has said is the most important line on the album, and despite how much of this is about some stupid behaviour, it's a very wise sentiment: "Living in fear's just another way of dying before your time."

33 1/3 does it again--short analyses of iconic music recordings, setting them in context and with a large dose of the author's personal experience with the music, and doing the research. In this one, Fertel, who is well versed in the southern folkways and BBQ world, takes on Southern Rock Opera, an exploration which involves the founding of the Muscle Shoals music scene, the economic building of the south by the TVA and WWII, opioid cough syrup, air conditioning, Jimmy Carter and the Allman Brothers, the Dukes of Hazard, Neoconfederates, 9/11, Werner von Braun and Lynyrd Skynyrd (and the gym teacher crrewcut authoritarian from whom they got the name).