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XL on ACL: Rise and Shine for Southern Rock

As the genre regains the spotlight, its players draw influences from beyond just Skynyrd & Co.

By Joe Gross
Austin American-Statesman
Sept. 18, 2003

Time was, all rock was Southern rock.

The blues and country were common coin when Elvis Presley, a Mississippi boy, decided his mom might like a record of him singing and proceeded to change the world. When the Beatles got rhythm, it was Lubbock's Buddy Holly and Norfolk, Va.'s Gene Vincent they dug. The Rolling Stones memorized Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson (all sons of the South). The '60s session musicians in Memphis and Muscle Shoals became legendary for their skill and verve, inventing immortal riffs for soul, rock and R&B out of thin air.

But sometime during the '60s -- around the time, significantly, when the "roll" dropped out of rock 'n' roll -- the center of rock's gravity moved from the South to points as far flung as New York City, San Francisco and even Liverpool.

But the South was to rise again. And again.

In the '70s, "Southern rock" became a genre unto itself, when bands such as the Allman Brothers, .38 Special and, especially, Lynyrd Skynyrd fused regional pride with tough-sounding R&B to create a music that was alternately epic or punchy.

But hipsters always found something ... suspect about Southern rock. Punks found the guitar duels a little pointless. Skynyrd sang about George Wallace in a manner that some found a mite ambiguous. And as Texas' own Molly Ivins once put it, "the extent to which a Southern accent is associated with low IQ in American popular culture is hard to exaggerate." No matter that much of Southern rock appealed to the same audience as San Francisco's Grateful Dead or those old Bostonians Aerosmith. The necks on Southern rockers were just a little too red.

These days, Southern rock is getting a re-examination. Hipsters are realizing those Skynyrd albums have some mighty deep grooves in 'em, and there's a new generation of bands hailing from the South -- ACL acts the Drive-By Truckers, North Mississippi Allstars and Kings of Leon among them -- unafraid to embrace the term "Southern rock."

Well, more or less unafraid.

"Yeah, it's true," says Patterson Hood, leader and songwriter of the Truckers. "We write about the South a lot."

And yet Hood has a complex relationship with Southern rock. The son of Muscle Shoals session musician David Hood, Patterson, 40, grew up rebelling against both Southern rock and the way his father thought about music.

"I love a lot of what my dad did, but Dad was a session guy so he played on whoever came to town and wrote a check," Hood says from Nashville, where he's spending time editing a video for "Hell No I Ain't Happy," a song from the Truckers' new album, "Decoration Day."

"How much money a song made was his way of measuring the success of a given session. I spent a lot of my first 20 years or so playing in bands that rebelled against that attitude. Not against him personally, he and I always got on fine, but I fell in love with punk rock and he didn't get it." For a guy growing up in the '80s, .38 Special or Molly Hatchet just weren't as cool as the Replacements.

Then there's R.E.M. Hood thinks its hard to overemphasize how much the little band from Athens, Ga., changed the idea of music from the South. "They absolutely opened up a whole new direction," Hood says of the band's '80s output. "Their sound went against the grain of what people -- misguided people, who thought it was all Skynyrd -- thought Southern rock was."

Suddenly, bands such as the dBs, and Pylon, by turns poppy and impressionistic, were rebooting the music scene below the Mason-Dixon Line. (Ever the fan, Hood carefully cites the relatively obscure Let's Active's 1986 album "Big Plans for Everybody" as "one of the great unsung Southern rock records.")

Hood eventually reconsidered his relationship with the music of his youth. Using Lynyrd Skynyrd's tragic career as a through-line, the Truckers' remarkable 2000 album "Southern Rock Opera" is an epic look at Southern music, Southern culture and what it means to grow up alternately proud and embarrassed by your surroundings. It touches on everything from the aforementioned George Wallace (whom Hood places in hell) and .38 Special to what Skynyrd were thinking getting on that plane. It's a tour de force, played in a distinctly Southern rock style and released at a moment when '70s hard rock was coming back into vogue.

"You know, I don't call us (Southern rock)," Hood says. "We kind of get lumped into that, but it's not really for me to decide. I've always had an affection for bands with a strong sense of place. A lot of music from the South has that, but so does Springsteen or Tom Waits."

'Not just a Southern rock thing'

Some bands aren't too into the idea of being "lumped in" with a newly minted idea of Southern rock. The Kings of Leon, whose debut album "Youth and Young Manhood" is one of the this year's most well-regarded debuts, hail from all over the South, but they are loath to be called Southern rockers.

Kings guitarist Nathan Followill, 24, seems to be of two minds on the subject. On the one hand, "We think our music would sound the same if we were from Canada," he says from a tour bus somewhere up north. "It's just our style, it's nothing Southern."

On the other, he and his siblings (brother Caleb and Jared are also in the band, along with cousin Matthew) grew up rolling around the South with their dad, an itinerant Pentecostal preacher who played lots of rock in the car. Followill freely admits that the church's "fiery, up-tempo music " was crucial to the band's development.

"But we get influences from Johnny Cash and the Stones and the Velvet Underground," Followill says. "(Kings of Leon) is not just a Southern rock thing." Nor, Followill says, were they ever into R.E.M.: "Maybe some stuff on the radio, but that was it."

Then again, they're pretty young. The Kings have only been a band since around 2000, when Caleb and Nathan went to Nashville, wrote some songs, got signed and added their brother. Their sound has as much to do with the Strokes, who couldn't be less Southern, as anything anyone named Van Zant ever wrote.

In the end, Followill says the Kings music is about family more than anything else. "It's definitely something in the upbringing," he says. "Me, Caleb and Jared grew up in the car together, so when one person would hear something, we'd all get into it together. (Our band's sound) is what we came up with out of that."

'It's all Southern'

The North Mississippi Allstars are a family affair as well, but they couldn't be more proud to be from the South. Like Hood, Cody and Luther Dickinson are second-generation Southern rockers, the sons of legendary Memphis musician and producer Jim Dickinson, who sat behind the boards for albums by Big Star and, yes, the Replacements, and played with everyone from Dylan to the Stones.

" 'Southern' is the one thing our music definitely is," Luther, 30, says in an impossibly mellow drawl. He's calling from a tour bus somewhere near Boston, where the group opened for the Dave Matthews Band. "It's the environment we grew up in."

Unlike Hood, the Dickinsons embraced their father's music ("we watched the Replacements make records") but they also dug punk and rock, everything from Van Halen to Black Flag to, yes, R.E.M. In the '90s it was modern country blues that really wowed them.

"The Fat Possum scene blew my mind," Dickinson says, referring to the Mississippi label that documents blues musicians such as R.L Burnside and the late Junior Kimbrough. (Burnside's son Duwayne plays guitar in the Allstars.)

When the Allstars got together in '98, they drew on everything from blues to indie rock. They've toured with everyone from the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion to, well, Dave Matthews. Judging from the wide range of audiences the Truckers, Kings and Allstars attract, it sounds like the key to the survival of Southern rock is the key to the survival of almost anything else: diversity.

"We're a multiracial operation, and there are all these cultural clashes going on, from garage bands to blues clubs to punk, but it's all Southern," Luther says.

"I think the idea (of a Southern rock revival) is great. I don't mind being put together with bands like Kings of Leon and My Morning Jacket. The cool thing is all these bands sound completely different."

For these bands, sometimes the weight of history doesn't feel like a burden at all. "I feel proud to be part of a tradition," Dickinson says "A lot of bands' roots don't go any further than the mid-'90s." He pauses. "I don't listen to any of those."

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