Drive-By Truckers nearly crash but live to rock another day
A new documentary on the Drive-By Truckers, “The Secret to a Happy Ending” (ATO), shows just how close the great Southern rock band came to breaking up a few years ago. A couple in the band, songwriter-guitarist Jason Isbell and bassist Shonna Tucker, were breaking up, with Isbell eventually quitting the band. And the relationship between the band’s cofounders, singer-guitarists Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley, was revealed as anything but placid.
“We’re true polar opposites,” Hood says in an interview from the road. “We have to put up with each other to a large extent, because we are very different people.”
But the crisis within the band led the two unlikely collaborators to re-evaluate their ambitions for the Truckers’ music.
“It came down to a late-night pretty drunken conversation where Cooley and I both spontaneously ended up on the tour bus,” Hood says. “I couldn’t sleep so I went out to the bus from the hotel to see if I could find something to drink to knock me out. And Cooley had just come down for the same reason. We started talking: ‘We finally had achieved what we spent our whole lives trying to do and yet this sucks, I hate it. Is this it?’ We decided it wasn’t. We decided to go through it and figure out everything that was wrong and fix it, and take back control of our lives. Make this a little bit more of what we want it to be instead of playing a part in a sad movie. It was still a two-, three-year process righting everything, but we turned it around.
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