Drive-By Truckers Perform Live on the Interface

Posted on Sep 16th 2010 10:50AM by Mike Ayers
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Rachel Been

The Drive-By Truckers have had a rather interesting last few years. Not only have they continued their round-the-clock touring schedule, playing upwards of 200 shows a year, they also cut records as the backing band for soul legends Bettye LaVette on 2007's 'Scene of the Crime' as well as Booker T. Jones on his 2009 album, 'Potato Hole.' You could do much worse in your spare time.

"Doing the Bettye record really had huge influence on our last record, 'Brighter Than Creation's Dark,'" frontman Patterson Hood told Spinner during a recent Interface taping in New York. "We brought in Spooner Oldham to do the Betty's record with us and had so much fun with him we decided to keep him on for the next record. So we recorded with him and just a lot of the things that we kind of learned, the way we kind of had to teach ourselves to play in order to back up Bettye, was sort of what we utilized in making that record. Then likewise, in a very different way, the same thing kind of happened with Booker and this new record ['The Big To-Do'].

For the band's Interface taping, they surely gave us a taste of their varying influences, both musical and beyond: an ode to strippers on 'Birthday Boy,' lamenting the death of rock scenes on 'After the Scene Dies' and a song probably everyone can relate to at some point in their life, a rollicking 'This F---ing Job.'

"I worked some bad food jobs, and the fact that I wasn't very good at it just made it worse too," Hood recalls. "I was a mediocre waiter and a terrible line cook. There were years and years where I really thought that was all there would ever be. I was playing in bands, but there was never a lot of optimism that that was ever gonna pay the bills. I'd already come to that point and seen that that wasn't for me and that I was gonna play anyway, even if it meant working crappy jobs for the rest of my life."

"It sounds romantic when you're in your 20s, but isn't at all when you're in your 30s," he adds.

Watch the Drive-By Truckers on the Interface