For Patterson Hood, founding member of Southern rock band the Drive-By Truckers, Richmond tour stops have long been special, in large part because of friends who live here.
There’s Jay Leavitt, for example, owner of the Deep Groove record store. Leavitt often gets a shout-out from the stage, owing to a friendship with Hood that reaches back to their shared Alabaman roots, and to the fact that Hood sees the Robinson St. store as a “marvel” of musical curation. Longtime Truckers fans might have even caught a gig or two where bassist Matt Patton was wearing a Deep Groove t-shirt.
The band’s upcoming visit, however — for a Friday, April 28 headlining set on Brown’s Island — holds extra significance as a result of who won’t be there. It’s their first show in town since the death of good friend and noted cover art collaborator and Richmond resident Wes Freed. “Wes’ passing has been horrifically terrible,” Hood says. “We worked together for 25 years, and he was also one of my very, very closest friends and one of my favorite people in the world, so it’s been like losing a family member.”
Freed’s impact on the arc of the Drive-By Truckers was early and enduring. The band got an initial boost from Freed’s invitation to join his late-‘90s Capital City Barn Dance shows, which celebrated a bourgeoning alt-country scene. “That put us in front of a much bigger crowd than we could have drawn on our own when we were first starting out,” Hood says. Then there’s the deeply menacing, wholly distinct cover art Feed contributed, starting with 2001’s “Southern Rock Opera.” That album ushered in an evolved era for the band in which they’d explore Southern identity with unflinching detail and self-reflection. Across more than a dozen albums and collections, as well as concert posters and various merch items, Freed used rough-around-the-edges images of cats, angry skies and long-necked “Cooley birds” — lovingly named after the Truckers’ other principal singer and songwriter, Mike Cooley — to give form to the darkness vibrating on the underside of every quaint Southern interaction.
The Past in the Present
Hood is especially fond of Freed’s contributions to the Truckers’ latest album, 2022’s “Welcome 2 Club XIII.” On the cover, a ghostly driver grips a cigarette and the steering wheel with the same hand, the highway unfolding in the distance. It’s the perfect preparation for an opening track in which Patterson Hood sings about driving late at night and “trying to make sense of the pieces of my life.”
“I’m so proud of that album, but also that album cover,” Hood says. “In our 25 years of working together and being friends, that was a high point. We had a really good time putting that together, and obviously never wanted it to end. But if it had to end, I’m glad it ended on such a high note.”
The album’s title refers to a Muscle Shoals-area venue Hood and Cooley played near the start of their time-tested partnership — Adam’s House Cat was their band at the time — and the rollicking title track gives a warts-and-all account of good ole’ days that weren’t entirely good. “The door guy has an attitude / The disco light’s obscene / The crowd is sometimes rude / Welcome to Club XIII.”
Fans who pick up a vinyl copy will find Freed’s own interpretation of the scene on the gatefold sleeve’s inside spread, complete with the band in performance, patrons at the bar, lots of big hair and a cat looking on. “He really had fun with that, and you can tell,” Hood says. “The inside picture of my old band, Adam’s House Cat, playing at Club XIII — he never saw that place, he was never there, but he definitely nailed the spirit of it in that way that only he could do.”
The album is pointedly retrospective, less of a report-out on America’s current political quagmire than its three predecessors, and more of a look back from the other side of a harrowing row through stormy personal and professional waters. The Truckers’ current lineup has been intact for a decade now, but that stability was hard earned; addiction, grueling tours and divorces took their toll at the same time the band was making some of their best-loved music. A unique document of both the strife and success they found along the way was captured in Richmond during a 2006 benefit for the Harvey Foundation hosted by Plan 9 Records. The two-plus-hour concert, which Hood calls “a definitive recording of that era of the band,” was released on vinyl in late 2020 in conjunction with Record Store Day.
“We were fighting and we were drinking too hard and living too hard, and two of our members were in the process of getting divorced,” Hood remembers. Some of the struggle was rooted in their main gig at the time. Opening for the Black Crowes would be a boon for any ascendant band, but playing 30-minute sets on the front end of a three-band bill was stifling. “It was not a happy summer, and we had this day off that we did that show in Richmond, and it was one of the only times that summer that we actually played a full-length show.”
Keeping a Record
Jay Leavitt, then manager of Plan 9, was instrumental in staging the benefit. Record stores are a common thread throughout Hood and Leavitt’s friendship; Hood has written about the importance of the musical recommendations Leavitt provided while running a shop in Muscle Shoals, Alabama near the storied FAME Studios recording facility. Leavitt even hired Hood for the second job he ever had. “One of the last things he did before he moved to Richmond was hire me as he was leaving,” Hood recalls. “I worked at a video store that he managed. He was working out his notice and hired me to come work there. Right before he left town he took me to see R.E.M. for the first time. So we go way, way back.”
Reflecting on the past has always been key to the Truckers’ examination of America’s character, but the looking back Hood does on “Welcome 2 Club XIII” feels especially personal. The opening lines of “Forged in Hell and Heaven Sent,” which get a vocal assist from Americana standout Margo Price, are positively photorealistic when it comes to catching up on lapsed friendships: “It’s been so long since I’ve seen you and I’m not sure where to start / Was it yesterday or decades when we tore this town apart?” Closing track “Wilder Days” takes an even more incisive tack, illustrating how youthful invincibility erodes over time: “We had a drive that fell in stark relief to the impending pain / Young and full of big beliefs that life could not sustain.”
Whether it’s for that indestructible feeling, for a dearly departed friend, for an earlier era of his band or for the brutally murdered Harvey family, subject of the song “Two Daughters and a Beautiful Wife,” Hood has done more than his share of grieving, and his musical articulation of it is a gift he gives with uncommon generosity. He last saw Wes Freed during an August day-off stop in Richmond. While Freed had been battling cancer for some time, the prognosis was good. “We were really excited,” Hood remembers. “He had almost completed his treatment for the cancer he was dealing with and was pretty much on the verge of being declared cancer-free and starting another chapter, and his spirits were very high. It was a very wonderful day.”
Freed was talking about renting an RV, driving cross-country and maybe attending the HeAthens Homecoming event the Truckers stage each year in Athens, Georgia. Freed died suddenly and unexpectedly in early September. “I wouldn’t [trade] the world for having spent that day with him,” Hood says, “but I sure didn’t have any idea that it would be the last time I’d ever see him.”
True to form, Hood sees the upcoming show on Brown’s Island as an opportunity to turn grief into something meaningful. “It’ll be bittersweet,” Hood says. “There will definitely be some sadness, but there will be a lot of celebrating of Wes’ art and his memory and our ongoing love and connection with Richmond.”
The Drive-By Truckers will perform on Brown’s Island on Friday, April 28 with Lydia Loveless and No BS! Brass on the bill. Doors open at 6 p.m. Tickets range from $25-$35 and can be purchased at thebroadberry.com. To hear and purchase “Welcome 2 Club XIII,” visit drivebytruckers.com.
