As the story goes, when asked how she could stand to live in Mississippi, Eudora Welty replied, simply, that it was her home. "Such is the duality of the Southern thing," Patterson Hood claimed on the Drive-By Truckers' ambitious, career-making double album, Southern Rock Opera. Since its inception, the band has been exploring the pride and shame of being native to a region known for both its richly subversive art and its ingrained racism. That mission crystallized on Southern Rock Opera, which plumbed the mythology of George Wallace and Ronnie Van Zant, and the Truckers developed it further on their two subsequent albums, Decoration Day and The Dirty South.
Before Hood and Mike Cooley (who formed the core of the Truckers until Jason Isbell expanded it) gave it a name, that duality informed their first two albums, Gangstabilly and Pizza Deliverance, both of which were originally released on Soul Dump but have long been out of print. New West Records has remastered and reissued them with new packaging and new liner notes by Hood (which are inexplicably dated February and October 2005, as if he's writing from the near future). Neither reissue contains any bonus tracks, which seems like a slight. However, both Gangstabilly and Pizza Deliverance retain their shape as albums, without any fans-only material to detract from climactic grandeur of "Sandwiches for the Road" and "The Night G.G. Allin Came to Town", respectively.
As their titles suggest, these two albums are filled with humor, but despite a tracklist that includes "The Living Bubba", "18 Wheels of Love", and "Too Much Sex (Too Little Jesus)", these aren't yuk-and-pluck songs that satirize their white-trash subject matter. Hood and Cooley write story-songs about hard-luck losers, people at the end of their ropes, and they take their characters very seriously. They both realize that when people are at their lowest, any action, no matter how dire or self-deceiving, can appear logical.
Cooley's "Panties in Your Purse" from Gangstabilly begins with a little backstage flirtation in the first verse before the second verse recounts the woman's sad situation: divorced, raising children, drinking excessively, living with her mother, working a dead-end job, going to shows for a precious bit of fun. On Hood's "Bulldozers and Dirt", which opens Pizza Deliverance, the narrator hits on his girlfriend's underage daughter, knowing all the while it's wrong but giving into his fixation all the same: "something comes over me when you come near/so won't you come over and sip on this beer." "Margo and Harold" contains enough grim humor and great lines for a Barry Hannah short story, as another Hood narrator confesses his fear of the couple of the title: "Margo and Harold, feeling no pain, fifty and crazy, big hair and cocaine."
None of their stories would have much resonance, however, if the Drive-By Truckers didn't sound so raw and immediate. Revealing a band still refining their sound, Gangstabilly and Pizza Deliverance precede the Truckers' fascination with and mastery of 70s rock. There are excursions into Black Oak Arkansas and Lynyrd Skynyrd territory on "One of These Days" and "Sandwiches for the Road" but songs like "Wife Beater" and "Box of Spiders" have the unrehearsed casualness of country and alt-country, while "The Tough Sell" and "Buttholeville" experiment with heavy-riffing blues rock.
Despite former Trucker Rob Malone's relatively quaint and characterless contributions and the obsolete joke of Hood's crass "The President's Penis Is Missing", these two albums are sturdy and solid. More than just blueprints for subsequent accomplishments, Gangstabilly and Pizza Deliverance are accomplishments themselves-- the beginning of the Truckers' long haul.
