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"FacebookPinterest\n\nPatterson Hood of the Drive-By Truckers is one of America's greatest living storytellers. And not just because of the countless gut-crumpling songs he's written. He's also a hell of a conversationalist, with a steel-trap memory for people, places, albums, songs, and chronology. When the Truckers were in New York recently, we sat down over noodles and talked about two recently departed Southern icons\u2014Vic Chesnutt and Alex Chilton\u2014his band's fantastic new record, The Big To-Do, and another as-yet-untitled album that's already (mostly) in the can.\n\nWhen Vic Chesnutt died on Christmas Day I found this incredible post on his blog that was like an abridged autobiography in the form of a list. One of the entries that knocked me over just said, \"art feeling.\" Vic dated \"art feeling\" to his teenage years somewhere. When were you first aware of your own \"art feeling\"?\n\n Kind of always, you know? Vic's parents weren't artists, or if they were they suppressed it and worked straight jobs. But with my dad being a musician [legendary Muscle Shoals bass player David Hood], I kind of always had it. I was aware of it from about age eight on. I started writing when I was eight. And Vic was from Zebulon, Georgia, which makes Florence, Alabama seem like a smoking metropolis.\n\n Do you remember the first time you met Vic?\n\n Oh yeah. I remember the first time I laid eyes on Vic. I was a fan before I ever met him. When I first moved to Athens in 1994, pretty early on I was told, \"Oh, you're a songwriter? You need to hear Vic Chesnutt. He's the greatest songwriter in town.\" That was my introduction to him. You hear that enough and it's like, \"Who is this Chesnutt guy that's so damn good?\" Eventually he came into [Athens rock club] the 40 Watt. He'd just finished recording Is the Actor Happy? It hadn't come out yet. And he came in straight from the studio with his \"scared little skiffle band\" and they pretty much played that album in its entirety.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nIs that when you were running sound at The 40 Watt?\n\n No, it was right before I got a sound gig. I stood there in the front row with tears running down my face. It was one of the most moving things I'd ever seen. I was hooked from then on and saw him every chance I got. I eventually met him when I was running sound a few times, and we had a lot of mutual friends, but we didn't become more than friendly acquaintances until the last few years. We did a show together up in St. Louis, a charity thing that Jay Farrar puts on every year. We flew up together, stayed together for the weekend, and hung out. I rented a car and drove us around. It was like instant bonding. I think we both always knew we'd be friends if we had the chance, and that was our opportunity. He came over for dinner a couple times; I had dinner with him about a year ago I guess. He seemed in a good place as far as that goes, you know? I think the people on the tour with him all thought he was in a pretty good place.\n\nFacebookPinterest3.gif\n\nDid y'all bond over music and writing?\n\n Everything. Everything and nothing. He was such a smart guy and had a zany mind, always going in different directions. He was really good with my daughter Ava. He was so good with kids, which is something people don't necessarily think of with Vic. He kept telling my daughter that he had a monkey that lived in his mouth. When he first met her she was probably two and a half, and honestly she probably hadn't been around anyone in a wheelchair yet. She was just fascinated by him, and he was really good with her. There's a little kid that lives down the street and his parents are all friends of ours. The last time I had dinner with Vic, we were all at their house. And their little kid is about Ava's age, between five and six, and he worshipped Vic. He's taken it pretty hard.\n\n Not to dwell on the recently departed, but I also wanted to talk about Alex Chilton. I know you're a huge Big Star fan.\n\n I didn't know him at all. Met him a couple times.\n\n Why do you think Big Star grabbed you the first time you heard the band?\n\n It was like nectar. Like, \"Where has this been all my life?\" It's so many of my favorite things in one bowl of steaming goop. It was like, \"If only the Beatles were a little more soulful and Southern. If only they were a little more guitar-driven. If only they had this R&amp;amp;B influence that they tried to hide\u2014but it couldn't help but pop out in the strangest of places.\" And then there's the trajectory of those three albums. The perfect power pop record:\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nThe disjointed, slightly deconstructed power pop record, which is my favorite:\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nAnd then, off the abyss:\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nYou know Big Star's Third, Tonight's The Night, and Plastic Ono Band are the three greatest crashed-and-burned, post-apocalyptic-mindset albums. So yeah: Sign me up.\n\n Did you obsessively research Chilton after you heard Big Star or was it more of a \"dig the records\" thing?\n\n I hadn't heard of him or the records when I first heard the band. I was lucky. I had a couple of older friends from my record store days back home, and from an early age, they mentored me about the good stuff.\n\n What record store?\n\n I worked at the Record Bar in Florence back when it was all owned by one guy\u2014a small, home-owned chain out of North Carolina. Before they sold out to Blockbuster and went to hell. Now of course they're long gone. But my boss there was the guy who turned me on to the Clash and the Replacements. And my friend Jay Leavitt, who owns a great record store in Richmond now, turned me on to the Stones and Springsteen. Then I had a third friend that I met through my boss at Record Bar who turned me on to Big Star. I was a teenager. I was over at his house one night, and he was playing me Kinks records I'd never heard because I'd just heard the hits. I just knew \"Lola.\" So he's playing all these cool Kinks records, then he goes, \"Actually, I got something you're gonna fuckin' trip on!\" And he put on \"O My Soul.\"\n\n I was hooked. So I heard Radio City first. I spent years looking for those records because they were out of print, and I stumbled on Third. I'm thinking it's gonna sound like what I've been looking for, so it took me a while to get over the disappointment of it not being Radio City, but then I came back around to it and realized it was really a masterpiece. I'm a ridiculous fan.\n\nLet's talk about The Big To-Do. What makes an album hang together for you now that you're not doing sprawling, single-narrative, two-disc concept albums like Southern Rock Opera?\n\n It's just a gut feeling for how it flows, how the themes intersect. We essentially made two records this time. The other record is very, very different from The Big To-Do, especially musically. Thematically there's a lot of common ground and intersection, but musically it's the other end of the spectrum of what we do.\n\n There's already another finished record?\n\n More or less, yes. I got two new songs I want to record when we get a chance, and if anybody else writes anything between now and then, that's great. And if anything new changes the shape of the record that's fine too. I'm not married to what it is now, but I really like it.\n\n The two songs on The Big To-Do I'm playing over and over right now are \"Santa Fe\" and \"Fourth Night of My Drinking.\" Can you give some context on each? \n\n \"Santa Fe\" is an easy one. I wrote it in Santa Fe. In a parking lot.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nOutside a venue?\n\n Yeah. Nothin' to do. I'd been on the road for probably seven weeks, and I was in that mode and hearing 'em in my head. So I was working on the song and got interrupted by a friendly acquaintance that dropped in on us. I visited with him for a minute\u2014probably initially in a surly mood because I was in the zone and working on my song. But it was good to see him and then, out of the blue, right before he left, he told me this story. I'm not even sure what brought it up. But something made him tell me this story concerning another Vietnam vet friend of his and a gun that they had passed back and forth to each other. The story was so chilling, and disturbing, and hit such a nerve with me, that the second he left, I wrote a song about it called \"Ray's Automatic Weapon.\" It's one of my very favorite songs of the whole year's sessions and one of my favorite songs on the next record. And then I finished writing \"Santa Fe.\"\n\n Quite a day!\n\n Yeah, it was. Unfortunately it doesn't happen very often. I wrote three for Southern Rock Opera in one day. I wrote \"Wallace,\" \"Angels and Fuselage,\" and \"Let There Be Rock\" the same night. But that never happens.\n\n What were you drinking that night?\n\n I wish I had more of it. That was very early in the writing of the record, and probably why we stuck to it. I'd already written \"Days of Graduation\" at that point. So I knew I had my beginning, middle, and end. It was just a matter of filling in the blanks and making it right.\n\n Even what little you've just said about \"Ray's Automatic Weapon\" is chilling: Two Vietnam vets passing a gun back and forth.\n\n Right. Well, the guy's friend bought the gun. And the guy knew his friend well enough to know that he really didn't need to have a gun like that. So the guy talked the friend into letting him keep it for him. But then something happened that made him realize he didn't need to have a gun like that, either. So he ended up calling the friend in the middle of the night to drive out there and come get the gun. It was the most chilling, Lord of the Rings story. I wrote the song in five minutes. I wrote it in less time than it takes to play it."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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