Family.
The word “family” is applied to many bands but oftentimes isn’t much deeper than lot swag or a drunk fratboy’s “I love you, man” hug.
But in the case of the Drive-By Truckers, the family is real. The Truckers themselves will tell you: beyond the core band (guitarists Patterson Hood, Mike Cooley, and John Neff; drummer Brad Morgan; bassist Shonna Tucker; and keyboardist Jay Gonzalez), it’s a family effort that keeps things rolling. Some are family by blood or marriage; others crossed paths with the Truckers and their music at some point and couldn’t turn away. In the end, it’s the efforts of all that define the band’s sound, vibe, and soul. We’ve chosen three key DBT family members and over the course of the next few weeks will be sharing our conversations with them.
As Paul Languedoc is to Phish and Doug Irwin was to the Grateful Dead, the Truckers have guitar builder Scott Baxendale.
Eddie Kramer was the man who knew how to capture Jimi Hendrix’ sound in the studio without taming it. Tom Dowd was key to the classic Allman Brothers’ recorded history. The Truckers have David Barbe.
And as distinctive and easily-recognizable as Stanley Mouse’s artwork for the Dead was – and in the same way that a Phish show is not a Phish show unless it has a Jim Pollock poster touting it – artist Wes Freed’s album covers and posters have become part of who the Truckers are.
Wes Freed
Artist, musician, hell – an actor, even. There’s nothing that Wes Freed has done or created that hasn’t been just exactly true to Wes Freed.
If you want to experience some of the music the Virginia native has made over the years, hunt up albums by Mudd Helmet, Dirt Ball, and The Shiners – or catch a gig by his current gig, the Mad Bats.
That acting thing? Look up The Thrillbillys or Degenerates Ink. The parts weren’t a big stretch for Freed.
And then there’s the art, which now graces everything from breadboxes and wine labels to violins and racing helmets. Freed paints scenes from his world; not your world or my world – his world.
The path to Freed’s world extends waaayyy back to the Shenandoah Valley of his childhood, detours through the halls of Richmond’s Virginia Commonwealth University, and runs deep into the shadows of Crow Holler, where whiskered, drunken, red-eyed skeletons beat the dog snot out of resonator guitars and buxom white-skinned zombie gals slip you one of those looks. That’s Wes Freed’s world – where the cars that sit alongside Willard’s Garage are old, big, and faster than hell; the music’s loud; and lonely’s even louder.
And that’s where the art that represents the Drive-By Truckers to the outside world comes from.
Freed and his wife Jyl live in Richmond, VA in a house chock full of his art which they share with their dogs, cats, a white squirrel named Skully, the occasional possum or two, and “a constant parade of foster babies” from the local SPCA.
We recently had the pleasure of talking with Wes about his and Jyl’s place at the Truckers’ family table.
BR: First of all, I wanted to mention your wife Jyl. She has quite a part in things, doesn’t she? I remember when I first discovered your art and your website, it was Jyl who answered any questions by e-mail.
WF: Oh, yeah. She’s the one who got us hooked up with the Truckers in the first place. The night we saw them play for the first time at Bubbapalooza in ‘98, Jyl’s the one that went back and talked to them and got the contact information. She got them up here to Richmond to play a Capital City Barn Dance. I was, like, waaaay too hungover to actually speak to anybody at that point. We’d played the night before and that was, uh, a rough day.
BR: And the “we” was your own band Dirtball?
WF: That’s right. We’d gotten hooked up with Bubbapalooza from a friend of ours who was one of the creators of the Barn Dance. He knew a lot of people at the Star Bar in Atlanta, GA where the Bubbapalooza was and got us a chance to play there.
BR: And you hadn’t heard the Truckers’ music before then?
WF: No, they were pretty new at that point. They’d just put out their first cassette.
Hey, excuse me if I’m breathing heavy. I’m outside painting and it’s 100 and … well … actually, it’s only 99 degrees out now. It’s gone down.
BR: Jeez – well, at least I know where you are. If the line goes dead, I know where to tell 911 to send the ambulance.
WF: (laughs) Thanks.
BR; So Jyl goes to talk with the Truckers after their set to see about getting them to come to the Barn Dance …
WF: Yeah, and she was a little bit intimidated. You know how most musicians are: you see them on stage and they all look like a bunch of hardasses. But those guys were as sweet as pie – really humble and nice. It really was love at first sight for all of us.
They ended up coming up and staying at our house – it was a hell of a good time. I wish I could remember more of what went on back in those days, but I guess some of the fun of it is the forgetting … (laughter)
BR: I hear you. So, I’m guessing their exposure to your art was when they stayed with you folks.
WF: Yeah – I think it made an impression. The whole house kinda did. (laughs) I just saw one of the Go-Go Boots video episodes that Jason Thrasher did for the first time the other day. It’s the one where the band talks about when they came to the house for the first time. I got a kick out of that.
But yeah, looking back on it, the house … oh, Lord – I’m surprised it wasn’t condemned. We’ve done a lot of work to it over the years, but back then, we were on the road so much that it was just a place to keep the dogs and for us to flop when we came home. Most of the art I was doing back then was stuff for Dirtball. Occasionally, though – between my day job and playing with the band – I’d have time enough to do some paintings and stuff. And all of it was around the house.
BR: It must have been impressive.
WF: Yeah … we scared a plumber away once.
BR: What? A plumber?
WF: Yeah, we’d always had an electric stove and had just bought a new gas one, so we needed someone to come run a line for it. This plumber comes in and he seems like a normal enough guy …
BR: Nothing weird about him.
WF: Naw. He goes down in the basement, drills a hole in the floor, and then goes back out to his truck. And drives off.
About 45 minutes later, he calls up Jyl and says he’s not coming back. I guess he was freaked out by all the weird signs and the skulls and artwork and stuff down in the basement. I mean, plumbers usually have to deal with rats and possums and stuff when they’re trying to work in a crawlspace, but our cellar was full of my artwork and I guess it freaked him out.
Jyl was kind of laughing, and asked him, “Really, though – you’re coming back, aren’t you?”
And he said, “No.” (laughter)
And she said, “Well, we really need to get this stove hooked up … can you at least recommend somebody?”
And he said, “No.” (laughter)
We ended up getting a friend of ours that does gas work to do it – which we should’ve done in the first place, but he’s just afraid of doing gas work for friends in case their house blows up. He doesn’t want to be responsible for something like that.
BR: Yeah – you can really screw up a friendship by blowing up someone’s house.
WF: It’s the little things. (laughter)
BR: But getting back to the Truckers – you obviously didn’t scare them off.
WF: No, they liked what they saw. At the time, Patterson was writing the songs for Southern Rock Opera and he told me, “When we finally get this together, we want you to do a cover for it.”
It sounded kind of ambitious at the time, but they managed to do it. Once they were able to go in and record, they didn’t waste a lot of time; they’ve always been really quick once they get in the studio. They got enough money together to put it out on their own label in 2001 with an unfortunate release date of September 11 …
BR: Oh, man.
WF: Yeah. But then Lost Highway picked it up the following year and it caught on.
BR: And Southern Rock Opera was the first project you did for the Truckers.
WF: That’s right.
BR: So how do you approach doing the art for an album – the cover, the booklet, the posters when they tour behind it? How does that process work for you – and has it changed over the years?
WF: Well, I always listen to it before I start working on it. In the beginning, they’d drop off tapes – sometimes just rough mixes – when they were in town. Over the years, that evolved into sending downloads on the computer. I mean, when we first started doing all this shit, we’d just gotten a computer and barely knew how to use it – and the Truckers didn’t have one. Now everybody’s got all this great stuff to work with.
But yeah, I’ll listen to what they have going on. I’ll sit down, listen to it, and take notes – different things that pop into my head that seem like they’d make good illustrations, even though sometimes it might not really have anything to do with the song. It’s just something that looks good with the music … at least in my head.
Sometimes, like with the Big To-Do, they already had the circus theme, so that gave me something to work with.
BR: Do you have the lyrics in front of you, too, or do you kind of ignore them so to keep your mind more open?
WF: Sometimes I’ll have lyrics; sometimes not. Usually they come along with the downloads.
Actually, I like to have the lyrics, although I can usually hear what they’re saying, anyway. Sometimes I’ll get it wrong though. Like, it took me forever to get a couple lines right on the song “Outfit”. The name of the neighborhood where the Old Man didn’t want to see his boy with a bucket of wealthy man’s paint? I was like, “Kindale? Kingdale? What …?” It didn’t really have anything to do with the image, but I’d actually written the line on the illustration.
Sometimes they’ll have an idea for an illustration, too. Like, it was Patterson’s idea for “A World of Hurt” to have the Cooley birds flying off into the sunset like an air force “missing man” formation: “It’s great to be alive …”
BR: Ha! Perfect! How about tour posters – how do you approach those?
WF: Of course, when they’re touring, it’s in support of a record – they always have a new record and they always have a tour going on – so there’ll be a theme there. Right now it’s Go-Go Boots, so all the tour posters have something or somebody wearing go-go boots. One time it was Patterson as a Sasquatch wearing go-go boots – just different things like that.
And then I’ll try to do a tie-in with the city or the date or the time of year. The poster I did for Canada this year had the girl that was on the cover of the Sometimes Late At Night live EP – she’s like a devil girl with the tail and the cloven-hoof go-go boots and the horns and everything. She was wearing a Canadian Mountie hat and playing a guitar shaped like a maple leaf – the neck looked like a hockey stick. You hope that the people from the place the band’s playing will like it.
BR: Oh, man – that’s so much more work than the average generic band poster you see with a big white space at the bottom to drop in the date, place, and time.
WF: Yeah, well, I’ve done some of those for them, too. But these are more like collector’s items – we do them on really high-quality paper. It’s not something you slap up on a telephone pole.
BR: What would an average run of posters be?
WF: Generally, like, 75 – if we’re doing them for a town where the band’s doing a few nights’ stand it’ll be 150. They usually sell most of them right at the shows.
BR: What happens when the date comes up on the fly while they’re already out on tour? When you get the call and it’s like, “Can you …”
WF: That happens sometimes … like recently when they added on the Brooklyn Bowl show, they were here the week before and asked me, “Can you do a poster for that?” And I said, “Sure – what the hell?” So I did.
So sometimes it’s short notice, but they usually give me a week or two. Even when they give me a few months, I usually put it off until I have to send them directly to the club where they’re going to be playing (laughs). If I don’t get them done before they leave town, then I can’t just send a bunch to Athens – I need to send one to Chicago, one to Toronto, or whatever.
BR: Have you ever butted heads with the Truckers over a feeling or vision that you got from one of the songs that wasn’t what they wanted?
WF: The only thing that even came close to that was one drawing that I did as an idea for Go-Go Boots that had a clown in it. Patterson said, “I don’t want any clowns.” And I said, “Whatever – that’s fine.”
I thought it was kind of strange, but I figured he was scared of clowns – a lot of people are. I think I wrote him: “Sounds like somebody might be scared of clowns.” He never wrote back, so I assume that was the case. (laughs)
BR: Yeah, well … I get kind of weirded out by them, myself.
WF: I don’t like being around them, personally … although we do have a John Wayne Gacy clown face clock that my friend Angry Johnny made, though.
BR: (laughs) That’s not right, man.
WF: Angry Johnny was one of the Barn Dance regulars – he’s from Massachusetts. He used to play down this way quite a lot. Angry’s brilliant; he did this painting on a piece of plywood of John Wayne Gacy in his clown outfit that he made into a clock for us.
A friend of ours from Georgia was staying with us and when he got up in the morning, he sat down with his breakfast bowl and was like, “Hey – is that a John Wayne Gacy clock? I love that!” (laughter)
BR: I would’ve kept my eye on him. (laughter) This is probably a lame-ass question to ask you, but is there any one single project you’ve done for the Truckers that you really like?
WF: I’m really proud of the way the posters have been coming out lately. But there’s one in particular from a while ago that I like.
I have a template that I use now – a piece of cardboard that’s a certain size, like 6-1/2” x 9-1/2” – but this was back before I was making a lot of posters and I made one that was a lot bigger: 2-1/2’ x 3-1/2’, or something like that. It was acrylic on wood, with a girl wearing a Confederate-style hat and a Cooley bird with its wings draped around her – you can see it on the website.
I guess that’s one of my favorite Truckers pieces.
BR: Cool! (laughs) And how about their stuff – any songs in particular that you really like?
WF: I was listening to “The Living Bubba” today and thinking I was glad that it’s coming out on the new greatest hits package so it gets some airplay. That song’s always choked me up. I really wished I’d gotten to meet Gregory Dean Smalley before he died. I did meet his Mom at the Bubbapalooza.
[Some background on “The Living Bubba” from a recent Jambands.com review of the Truckers’ new Ugly Buildings, Whores & Politicians : “The album kicks off with ‘The Living Bubba’ from the band’s 1998 debut, Gangstabilly. With the yin/yang of John Neff’s lovely pedal steel against the slow thrash of over-driven 6-strings in the background, Patterson Hood belts out his tribute to Gregory Dean Smalley, a hero of Athens, GA’s ‘Redneck Underground’ scene back in the ‘90s. Smalley was one of those who lived to play, for whom a gig was a gig, whether it was for a fully-packed house or a dozen drunks. There’s not a lot of recorded evidence of the man’s existence, but those who witnessed Smalley on stage speak of him in head-shaking reverence. Patterson Hood was one of them; unfortunately, by the time Hood crossed paths with Smalley in 1995, the local legend was dying of AIDS. ‘The Living Bubba’ poignantly captures Smalley’s homestretch attitude (in the final year before his death, he pounded out over 100 gigs): ‘I can’t die now ‘cause I got another show to do.’”]
BR: It’s a great song on its own, but to know the whole story about Gregory Dean … Patterson nailed it.
WF: Yeah, he did. Another one is “Space City”. When I got the rough mix of that, I listened to it once and then I couldn’t listen to it again for a while. After four or five times of listening to it and trying to keep from crying, I finally said, “Okay – I got the lyrics … I don’t have to do that anymore.” I mean, I loved the song but it just … it’s just so sad.
BR: Oh, Wes – the first time I listened to it by myself, I called my wife and told her, “We need to listen to this together tonight.” Which we did – and we couldn’t have held each other any tighter. Christ … (sniffs; laughs) It’s hard to even talk about it now without half-bawling.
WF: That’s the key, man. I don’t know how Cooley gets through the song when he sings it. In the movie [the Truckers documentary The Secret To A Happy Ending, released earlier this year] when he gets to the end of it …
BR: Yeah, that’s a powerful moment. That last chord fades and he’s just a million miles away and holding on for Chrissakes. I guess sometimes you get inside the song and sometimes it gets inside of you. And that was his grandparents Cooley was writing about – his grandfather dealing with the death of his grandmother.
WF: I guess for him there’s got to be a certain amount of detachment. But when I was listening to it for the first time – trying to sponge and suck in the images – that one just hit me and “Holy shit …”
BR: Anything in particular you want to say about the band’s “family”?
WF: Well, it’s kind of weird – almost like going back to the hippie community thing or something: like-minded people getting together and doing what they do best for the family, you know?
Sometimes it almost feels like organized crime without the crime.
BR: As hard as the band has worked – and as hard as all of you have worked to make it be what it is – where do you see it all going?
WF: It’s hard to say. You look at the 60s and 70s – you don’t really see rock ‘n’ roll bands getting to places like the Stones or The Beatles or Zeppelin. The world’s changed- the industry’s changed.
I can see the Truckers slowing down, but I can also see them getting bigger and, you know, keeping on. Obviously, you’re always going to have more Patterson Hood solo stuff than Cooley, because Cooley’s like an old oyster: he’s got to chew on a piece of sand for a few years before he can crank out a pearl … but when he does, they’re all pearls.
I’ve said it before: Cooley and Hood deserve to be another Jagger and Richards … but when it comes right down to it, they’re just genuinely nice people who’ll go out of their way to accommodate anybody.
