Drive-By Truckers at the San Diego House of Blues: 5/6/2010

I could tell you about the physical impossibly of navigating downtown San Diego in a car (one-way streets anyone?) or about the semi-painful nostalgia of navigating a downtown anywhere after my suburban exile, or about the still-unsolved mystery of how my ticket managed to evaporate from my pocket as I drove, requiring I buy a whole other one at the door....

But you don't want to hear about any of that. What do you want to hear?

Well, the show was great. Like, capital letters GREAT.

The crowd was kind of what I expected. There were aging grungies, a few hipsters with their plastic glasses, at least one punk-rock girl (past her first blush of youth), Country fans with their cowboy shirts, hats, and boots. There were even combinations of the above. I ended up getting kind of adopted by a pair of soldiers in the front row who knew even more DBT lyrics then I did.

Opening act was The Henry Clay People, who looked like someone'd put hipster glasses on a bunch of grunge musicians, with their flannel shirts and their veils of unkempt hair. Their blond singer was set up stage left, while their guitarist, who's stoned-looking face never moved once the entire show, jumped on amplifiers, stood on one leg, and on numerous occasions, wandered over to the singer to lean against him, share his mike, or generally invade his personal space. It figures that those two are brothers. This group had to face a nice wall of malaise from the stoney crowd, as the apathy that greeted their entrance and first numbers was pretty impressive, but they broke through it, and by their fifth song, everyone was bouncing. They come from So-Cal (frontman shared stories of working at San Diego's maritime museum back in the day) but they sound like punk-rock from Missisippi, if that makes sense. One of the longest too: they played for over an hour but made the time pass quickly. They rocked the room, and were easily one of the most impressive opening acts I've seen.

But everyone was there for the Drive-By Truckers. They would play for about 3.5 hours, a testament to the depth of their catalog, and someone like me would only recognize maybe two out of three of the songs they played. They were heavy on the new material, which I love. They're the kind of group that just turns the stage into a long, happy roadtrip, and we're all going together. Patterson Hood doesn't so much sing his songs as act live them, delivering a performance of "Sink Hole" that'll haunt you for days. The core of this group is the contrast between band-leader Hood and his foil Mike Cooley. Mike Cooley is aloof and cool where Patterson is engaged and passionate, and tends to more mellow renditions of his songs live then you get on his recordings, but he can sound like the Devil Went Down to Georgia when he decides the occasion warrents it. His deeply empathic "Birthday Boy" was a highlight of both the newest album and the show. The third lead singer of the night, bassist Shonna Tucker, has a voice like thick sweet honey, enfusing "Someday it's gonna be I told you so" with some dance-floor bounce and striking heroic poses with a bass roughly as big as she was. The drummer looked like he moonlighted as a member of ZZ Top, or Sasquatch, but played with almost delicate precision. The third guitarist, wild card John Neff, was the band's non-entity. He seemed to have no destinguishing features at all except his playing, but his playing was enough.

I loved this show. I love this band. Even if the super-long run time in a club with no Verizon service meant my sister would be frantic to reach me by the time the show was done, that was the best show I've been to in ages.