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 Click here to check out our conversation with Wes Freed.
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.
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.
And as Paul Languedoc is to Phish and Doug Irwin was to the Grateful Dead, the Truckers have guitar builder Scott Baxendale.
Scott Baxendale
Scott Baxendale is a survivor of the highest order. As gifted a craftsman as he was a guitarist, Baxendale dropped out of college in 1974 to become an apprentice luthier at Mossman Guitars in Winfield, KS. 12 years later he owned the company; 6 years after that, he’d crashed and burned at the bottom of a flaming, dope-fueled nosedive that found him running with a very, very bad crowd. That could just as easily have been the end of Scott Baxendale’s career as a custom guitar builder, but the sentencing judge sensed that he was worthy of one – and only one – chance to clean up and get his life back on track.
And Scott Baxendale did exactly that.
Settling in the Denver, CO area, Baxendale opened the Colfax Guitar Shop in 1998, his reputation for no-compromise custom work drawing in business from all over the country. (As we shall see, it didn’t hurt that Denver was a hub for bands touring the US – including the Drive-By Truckers.) In March of this year, Baxendale moved to Athens, GA, looking to immerse himself in the area’s art and music scene. He opened Baxendale Guitars in Athens this past June.
Scott was kind enough to share some of his day with us recently to talk a bit about his role in the Drive-By Truckers’ extended family.
BR: Thank you for making the time to talk today, Scott.
SB: Oh, my pleasure.
BR: Now, listen: if you’re in the middle of gluing something together, don’t let me frig it up.
SB: (laughs) No, we’re good.
BR: What’s a typical Tuesday at Baxendale Guitar like? What’s on the bench today?
SB: Well, I’m finishing up a 12-string that I’m building for a guy in Iowa … and re-setting the neck on an old vintage Kay mandolin. My apprentice is working on an old Kay archtop that he rebuilt. And Damon Scott, who techs with the Truckers, is in here doing some repair work, as well.
My wife Pamela is here, also. She does a lot of the setup work – restrings, setups, and tune-ups – stuff like that.
BR: Oh, that’s cool that the two of you work together there.
SB: Yeah, she’s awesome.
BR: And what was the guitar that you e-mailed me the picture of?
SB: That’s a small-bodied one we’re building for Luther Dickinson. It’s not really a parlor guitar; it’s more of an orchestra-style model.
BR: Cool – it’s beautiful. Before we get into your relationship with the Truckers, let’s talk a little bit about your approach to guitar building and repair.
SB: As an artist myself, I’m creating a work of art that another artist uses to create even more art. I think that connection is what makes it all go, you know? I don’t build guitars in the traditional way that most makers build guitars: each individual guitar is one piece that I’m making and every single piece on the guitar is individually made by hand for that guitar.
Most guitar builders – even guys on this level – make 50 necks, make 50 fingerboards, make 50 of this and 50 of that … and then they try to reproduce the same basic guitar over and over again. They try to improve by improving their construction methods or becoming more efficient in the process and thereby increasing their profit or whatever.
I have the complete opposite approach: I’m taking it as if I’m making a sculpture that’s also a device to inspire the artist who plays it to create new art based on that inspiration. That comes back to my definition of what a great guitar is, whether it costs 50 bucks or 5 million bucks: a great guitar is one that when a person picks it up inspires that person to play something that they never would have played or they wouldn’t have thought of had they not picked up that instrument. If you walk into a guitar store and you pick up a vintage Gibson archtop, it compels you to play differently than if you were to pick up a Strat or Tele, you know?
BR: Absolutely.
SB: And that’s why great guitar players have a Strat and they have a Tele and they have a Les Paul and they have a 335 – they have one of everything because each one has its own unique quality and its own unique ability to inspire you to do something in a different way. I want to build a guitar that when someone picks it up, the tone, the sound, and the vibrations that come out of it are so overwhelming that it compels you to play it and to play things that you wouldn’t normally play if you picked up another guitar.
That’s kind of what my whole mission is. One of the reasons I moved to Athens is to try to focus more of my attention on that aspect of it and less on the day-to-day grind-it-out repairs. I feel like here I’m more directly connected to the pulse of the arts scene – and more accepted as an artist, for that matter. A lot of people over the years have looked at me as a guitar maker – a woodworker who basically recreates stuff you buy at Guitar Center and that couldn’t be further from the truth. I can’t even disconnect making a guitar from my performing or my recording or my filmmaking; to me they’re all facets of the same art projects or the overall big picture. They’re all connected.
BR: So, it’s unlikely that there’s going to be a “Western Auto” version of a Baxendale guitar … you just don’t have it in you.
SB: (laughs) Well, when I bought Mossman Guitars and moved from Kansas to Texas, I took that approach. For five years, I built Mossman guitars that didn’t even have my name on the headstock – I bought the name and I kept the name. In a sense, I created a line of guitars and my goal was to reproduce that line of guitars.
It’s not to say that method won’t produce a great guitar – some of those guitars were amazing – it’s just that my approach isn’t compelled by money. If it was, I’d find something else to do. It’s a lot of work for basically just enough money to get by, you know? If I really was just doing it for the money, I would take a completely different approach. I’m doing it entirely for the art aspect.
If I could be anybody in the world and have anything I wanted, I would play music for my income and on my off time, I’d just build guitars and give them to the people that I thought deserved them. That would be my ultimate dream position to be in. It hasn’t actually worked out that way. (laughs)
Every day starts with me coming in here and figuring out what to do next; keeping things moving forward, you know? And every evening ends up with me rehearsing or recording or playing a gig – it’s pretty much all self-contained that way. I don’t have to go to work in a music store and then go play in a band a hundred miles away on Fridays and try to juggle all these different things. I’ve consolidated it all into one little central location. That’s what’s wonderful about Athens: after moving here on a hope and a prayer and opening up the shop, it’s working out. If I’d known how it was going to go, I would have made the move a lot sooner.
BR: Yeah but you can never look back. Things happen the way they’re supposed to.
SB: That’s very true. (laughter)
BR: Let’s move on to the Truckers and your relationship with them. Did you cross paths with the people or their music first?
SB: I crossed paths with the people first. Actually, my daughter had told me about the Truckers before I even knew who they were. I was in Denver, working at the Colfax Guitar Shop. Right across the street was the Bluebird Theater – a 500-seater that all the bands on the way up and all the bands on the way down play. Touring national acts will play there four or five nights a week and then local acts maybe one or two nights a week.
The Truckers happened to be playing at the Bluebird. It was very common for bands that were playing there to park their tour bus right across the street from the shop, so they invariably will walk in. I developed a reputation for being somebody who would drop everything and take care of people on tour who stopped. Not only was the Bluebird there, but within about 10 blocks there was the Fillmore and the Ogden Theater, which were both even bigger venues. Often times I’d get a call that somebody needed an emergency guitar repair. I’d go down, pick it up, and go back to the shop to do the work.
The day that the Truckers were playing the Bluebird, their tour manager Matt DeFilippis came over with three or four of their guitars. We just dropped everything and fixed them. We didn’t charge them an arm and a leg – just normal, regular repair prices.
It all worked out and they gave me a CD of Decoration Day – that was the tour they were on. I had a gig or something else going on that night, so I didn’t get the chance to go see them, but as soon as I heard the album one time I flipped out on how good it was.
Back when I owned Mossman Guitars, I’d built a guitar for Carl Perkins and got to hang out with him – that was a feather in my cap early on. That was one of the greatest performances ever that night – Carl just laid it all out there; didn’t hold back one second. I was so amazed.
So the song “Carl Perkins’ Cadillac” on Decoration Day just hit me totally between the eyes. I loved that album. The next time they came through – and by that time, they were developing quite a following in Denver – was on The Dirty South tour. I thought The Dirty South was the best album I had heard since the Stones’ Sticky Fingers, you know? Their music hit a chord with me that really no modern current band had. The Dirty South was an album that I could play over and over and over again and never get tired of it – like Revolver or Sticky Fingers …that’s the way I see their albums. It has to do with the strength of the songs and what the songs say and how they connect to the listener.
They’re all great writers. Jason Isbell’s stuff that he did when he was with them and his solo stuff since is all great; same with Patterson. And Cooley just blows my mind on a continuing basis.
BR: Cooley tells such good stories – but he’s the master of the ready-for-a-tee-shirt slogan or bumper sticker one-liner.
SB: Oh, yeah, he can say in one sentence what people write books about – and make it clear as a bell. He’s a genius; the redneck Hemingway or something. And Patterson is the most prolific, just continuous writer of songs that I’ve ever met. He just cranks out song after song after song and he keeps topping himself over and over again. Patterson approaches songwriting like I dress frets on a guitar neck, you know? He has such a workmanlike approach to writing songs that it blows my mind.
And then you have John Neff, who is probably the greatest guitar player I’ve ever met in my life. Most understated – so subtly brilliant. John can play two notes and make the hair stand up on the back of your neck. He just never ceases to amaze me.
BR: If he never played the 6-string again, just his pedal steel work alone is something else.
SB: Oh, I know – and he hardly plays the pedal steel these days. John is one of the most talented musicians I’ve ever worked for or worked with … and at the same time, he’s just so humble. Same for Shonna, Jay, and Brad.
You know, Pamela and I are in a band with Brad and his wife Kimberly. It’s mostly Kimberly’s music; she’s a really amazing singer and great songwriter. We do a few of my songs, too.
BR: The band name?
SB: Morgandale – for Morgan and Baxendale. Two husbands and wives. It’s the first band my wife’s been in. We’ve played two shows now and hopefully we’ll get it together and make an album.
BR: Oh, man – when you do, I’d love to hear what you’re doing.
SB: Awesome; I’ll let you know what’s happening with it. But, yeah – anybody who has anything to do with that band or crew is definitely the best.
BR: So getting back to when the Truckers returned to Denver on The Dirty South tour …
SB: Right. We had a chance to talk and connected on many different levels. I finally said, “Cooley, I’d love to build you a guitar.” He was in the shop at the time and I was building a guitar for Johnny Depp, which Cooley liked the looks of. We made some variations on that and came up with the solidbody that he plays. I’m making, like, six of that style right now for other people.
BR: I remember the quote from Cooley when we talked about that guitar: “It’s custom in every sense of the word and it’s just right for me – but if I’d told him what to build, I would have fucked it up.” (laughter) Then he went on to say, “Scott just built it and sent it to me. I couldn’t have dreamed up anything more perfect.” So tell me – what kind of homework did you do to get it right?
SB: Well, that’s another part of the process that we talked about earlier. When I build a guitar for somebody, I try to find out a lot of things about that person – things that aren’t really what you’d think have to do with building a guitar for them: like what their musical tastes were, what the first guitar was that they ever wanted when they were a kid.
BR: Which for you was what?
SB: A white Stratocaster like Jimi Hendrix. That was it. (laughter) Back then, that would be like me now lusting after a ’64 Corvette split-window coupe. (laughs) I just wanted a white Stratocaster. For years, I played nothing but Strats because of that.
So, I’m looking for information like that. I also want to see how they play the guitar; how they attack the guitar and what kind of technique they use. That determines a lot in terms of how you set it up, how you make the neck, how you shape the neck, or what kind of fret wire you use – stuff like that.
I try to see them play as much as I can before I build it – that doesn’t always work out, though. I also try to get them to show me or let me borrow their personal guitar that they think has the best neck; I’ll try to design one like that in terms of feel; everybody likes something a little different. I also try to think – in a little bit of a self-centered way – “How can I make my thing be part of this guy?”
These are the kind of things that I try to pay attention to.
BR: But with Cooley, you didn’t have a guitar to go by, did you?
SB: No, but I watched him play and I worked on his Flying V a couple of times. He also came into my shop and liked that other guitar I was building … although the two finished guitars are really quite a lot different.
BR: Cooley’s got a pretty good set of hands on him.
SB: Yeah – he’s a skinny little guy, but he’s got big hands.
BR: Spider Man fingers.
SB: (laughs) Yeah, and a unique playing style – he doesn’t play like anyone else. I’ve watched him play the riff for “Three Dimes Down” a thousand times and I still can’t play it. (laughter) He does a weird right-hand thing that contributes to that; I think he picked it up from playing a banjo when he was a kid. It’s like a banjo roll, but it isn’t in a typical “Earl Scruggs banjo roll” sense … it’s his own kind of weird variation on it. Sometimes he sounds like he’s falling down a flight of stairs and then he lands on his feet at the bottom in the perfect spot. (laughs)
BR: The Buster Keaton of rock ‘n’ roll guitar.
SB: (Laughs) Exactly – you think he’s fallen off the rails and then he dangles on by a finger and comes right back on. He’s really cool about that.
BR: How much does the fact that the Truckers tune their guitars down a step affect construction elements – or does it? [Note: whereas standard guitar tuning is EBGDAE high to low, DBT typically plays tuned down to DAFCGD.]
SB: I think it does and it doesn’t. I mean, my acoustic guitars tend to sound pretty good low-tuned where some guitars don’t. I have more dynamic range so they work better in lower tunings; they don’t seem to lose their tone like other guitars do. Also, scale length has a lot to do with that: if you have a longer scale length, it’s easier to tune down. Usually what we do is increase the string gauge accordingly – if you put .011 gauge strings on and tune down, it feels like about like .010 gauge does in terms of the tension on the strings.
For a long time, everything was done in that D tuning, but lately – like on Go-Go Boots – they’re doing more stuff with capos and Patterson’s got one guitar that’s in standard tuning.
BR: So, besides Cooley’s solidbody electric, what are some of the guitars that you’ve built for them so far?
SB: I’ve built a rosewood small-body jumbo acoustic for John Neff; I’ve built the acoustic that Patterson uses; two acoustics for Cooley – a thin-body cutaway that he’s been playing for a while and then the Wes Freed-inspired guitar. I’ve rebuilt an old Craftsman for Patterson and rebuilt a Harmony Sovereign for John.
BR: I know you rebuilt a Harmony for Jason Isbell that I first saw when he backed Justin Townes Earl on Letterman back in the spring. That was a great, great sounding guitar.
SB: Thank you. We take the old Harmonys and Kays and take them all apart. Replace all the bracing – totally rebuild them. The guitar Justin was playing that night was one of our acoustics, too. He’s got so many guitars; it was nice of him to play that one on Letterman.
BR: What’s the backstory on the “Cooley bird” acoustic? Did you know Wes Freed was going to be involved with that right from the beginning?
SB: I had an idea for a music video way back when I was building guitars in Texas – originally, my idea was to build a guitar for Willie Nelson. The artist would call up and say, “I’m coming to get my guitar.” And I’d act like everything was cool – and then slam down the phone and build it really fast while they’re driving to the shop. (laughter)
I was just chatting with Cooley and Patterson on the bus during The Dirt Underneath tour and I mentioned the video idea. And Cooley says, “I got the ideal song for it: it’s called ‘Perfect Timing’” – which I’d never heard before then.
I was with them when they played in Richmond, VA on that tour – that’s when I got to meet Wes and Jyl Freed. We talked about the video and about collaborating on a Wes Freed-inspired guitar – and everybody agreed it would be a cool thing to do.
There was a Wes poster from that tour that had a guitar with a snake on it and a Cooley bird around the soundhole. We were looking at it and Wes said, “Yeah … maybe we could do something like that.” We refined it a few times and then when I got back home, I did a full-size drawing of the guitar I was going to build – just a flat drawing of the top of it. I sent that to Wes; he did the artwork on that same drawing and sent it back to me; and then I just reproduced it as you see in the “Perfect Timing” video. The drawing that you see rolled out at the beginning of the video is that same drawing that Wes sent back. I’m going to frame that up here one of these days. (laughs)
BR: Oh, man – you’ve got to.
SB: So I don’t think the video would’ve been the same if I had built one of my standard guitars. For the video to have the right effect, the guitar had to be something unique and special.
BR: I know this is one of those “who’s your favorite child” questions, but do you have a fave Truckers tune?
SB: Well, the first thing I think of when you ask me that is “Tornadoes” – only because when I first heard The Dirty South, it made me think back to a time when I was in Kansas and I was around tornadoes a lot. I could totally relate to that song in some kind of weird way – it was like the Southern Gothic version of “Into The Mystic”, you know? That song gives me that same kind of feeling.
But having said that, at any one given time, I can start listening to something by them and say, “_That’s_ my favorite song.” When I first heard Cooley do “Checkout Time In Vegas”, it just gave me the chills. It brought me to tears the first six or seven times I heard it.
“Gravity’s Gone” is one of my favorite songs; “Used To Be A Cop” just blows my mind; all the murder stories – I just love all that stuff as a musician. Two of the songs we play in our band are “She’s In The Prison For What She’s Done To A Man” (laughs) and “Sell ‘Em When I’m Dead”, which is a song about Wes and Jyl. (laughter)
BR: You’ve got me pumped up to hear some of the Morgandale stuff now. (laughter)
SB: I’ll send you some stuff – at this point it’s all demos.
BR: Cool – thank you. You know, one of the things that I’ve thought about this year is although Patterson and Cooley have this big catalog of songs between them that they’ve written, they’ve been as passionate about playing their cover of Eddie Hinton’s “Everybody Needs Love” as anything they’ve ever done.
SB: Oh hell, yeah. The whole band and crew live, eat, and breathe Eddie Hinton’s catalog.
BR: So here they are, with a certain amount of success under their belts which they’re using to carry the torch for Eddie – but it’s still no easy road; they’ve got to keep on slugging to pay the bills.
SB: Yeah, it’s not like the old days when you could write one song and then start buying Ferraris a week later.
BR: Right, right – reading Bobby Whitlock’s autobiography earlier this year: he was broke and then he bought a Ferrari; then he’d be broke: and then he’d buy a Ferrari; and then he was broke again … and then he’d buy a Ferrari. (laughter) That doesn’t happen like that now.
SB: Just the broke part. (laughter)
BR: And I guess my point is, this band is going out of their way to promote the work of someone who’s long gone and never got the attention they deserved. No royalties or anything involved – that’s just their mission. If that’s not playing with your heart, what is?
SB: Oh, yeah. They have a unique sense of family loyalty that other bands don’t usually have – it’s more than just a business. I hope you get a chance to see [Patterson’s father] David Hood hanging out with the Drive-By Truckers. You’ve never seen a prouder papa in all your life – a gleaming, glowing grin that’s on David’s face from the minute Patterson walks out on stage to the end of the show. It’s just so cool to see a father so proud of his son. And David’s so humble himself … here’s a guy who’s played on everything – every record that’s ever been made, practically. (laughs) And he looks just like a proud father whose son just hit the homer that won the World Series whenever he’s at one of those shows.
BR: That’s definitely something I should do sometime – talk with David. But where would you start and where would you stop?
SB: Oh, yeah – just to capture that whole “inside Muscle Shoals” scene – the whole energy there. To me, that’s what Athens is like these days – a collection of really, really talented people with such great attitudes.
Nuci’s Space is a non-profit organization here in Athens that does some wonderful things for the well-being of musicians and their families. The Camp Amped program for middle-school-aged kids is great – it’s like a rock ‘n’ roll boot camp, where local musicians work with them for two weeks, leading up to a public performance. For the finale of the last session, the kids performed “Another Brick in The Wall” and it was the most unbelievable thing I’ve ever seen.
It’s cool, because this little complex where we all are here has turned into this office park of art energy, you know? (laughs) I’m on one side of Dave Barbe’s studio and the Truckers’ space is on the other side. And the guy who does all the art for the Widespread Panic merch is in this same complex.
It’s definitely a family thing.
BR: Scott, I really do appreciate you taking the time to do this. A lot gets done in an hour of your time – thank you for putting it into talking with me.
SB: Thanks, Brian. I hope you can make it down here sometime – come and see the shop.
