Hey folks!

Today’s Best Album of 2001 match is:

#23 Drive-By Truckers, SOUTHERN ROCK OPERA

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vs.

#106 Tricky, BLOWBACK

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To vote, follow this link to the Google Form. You will need a Google login to vote. If you can’t or won’t have one, let me know ASAP (either through this newsletter, my email [kentmbeeson@hey.com] or on the Best Album Brackets Bluesky account) and I’ll see what I can do.

We have one Designated Cheerleader today, it’s for SOUTHERN ROCK OPERA, and it’s from @janos.bsky.social. Take it away, János!

Unstoppable force meets immovable object. They form a band.

You never have to ask where Patterson Hood stands on an issue. He will tell you. You will know how he feels about Neil Young. About college football and politics. About growing up in the South and about leaving the South. About people who are more complicated than their public image. And yes, he'll tell you about Lynyrd Skynyrd. He will tell you this in many words, taking up roughly 70 of SOUTHERN ROCK OPERA's 90 minute runtime. He'll take a five minute spoken word song to lay out exactly where he stands. And if that isn't enough, he annotates every song of the album on the Drive-By Truckers website. Patterson Hood is an open book. There are rarely hidden meanings to be found in a Hood song. What you see is what you get.

He's also a force of nature. Watch any of their performances or just listen to the damn album. The energy is irresistible. When I listen to SRO, it's this infectious energy that carries me through its movie-length runtime, from the opening one-two punch of DAYS OF GRADUATION and RONNIE AND NEIL through THE SOUTHERN THING, the disc two opener LET THERE BE ROCK until the bitter end, the plane crash that took Ronnie Van Zant, Cassie and Steve Gaines' lives. Even the story behind SRO feels like Hood made it happen through sheer force of will. See, the album is based on an idea for a screenplay he had about a fictional band named Betamax Guillotine even before DBT were founded. The band then wrote songs for their "rock opera" for four years, until after two albums and a live album they had enough material to record it, as Hood tells the story, "in Birmingham, upstairs in a uniform shop during an early September heat wave, with no air-conditioning". Then they had to raise money from fans to be able to self-release the album. Somehow, it worked: thanks to word of mouth and rave reviews, it sold out and the next year they signed with a label to re-release the album in a wider printing.

And then there's Cooley. Mike Cooley is, well, he's simply the coolest. Just look at him. His lanky stature, his calm stage presence, that deep singing voice, everything about him radiates coolness. It helps that he writes the best songs too. Hood and Cooley are opposites in temperament and songwriting style (though they stand on the same side politically). But it is this tension that makes DBT so special. Where Hood typically floods an album with his high output (he has a lot to say ok?), Cooley contributes like three to five songs but they're ALWAYS classics. A Cooley song feels like opening a Christmas present. Immaculately crafted, highly literary and timeless. Of course, he refuses to ever explain any of his songs. Let them speak for themselves. In the case of SRO, the clear highlight is ZIP CITY, a song that feels like it's been around since the invention of the electric guitar.

The Truckers' third guitarist at the time, Rob Malone, contributes two songs too and tbh they're not my favorites. But I'll give Malone kudos for creating DBT's powerful three-guitar sound that places them firmly in Skynyrd's musical tradition. When Malone leaves the band following SRO's release, the Truckers shop around for a replacement guitarist and come across some 22-year-old kid named Jason Isbell. But that's a story for another bracket.

Don't get it twisted: SRO isn't a concept album about Lynyrd Skynyrd, though the spirit of Skynyrd haunts every song. I'm not even sure it's a proper "rock opera" with a cohesive plot (does any "rock opera" have a cohesive plot?), but it is an album that flows remarkably well. It is, however, a grandiose statement about making art in the American South as a leftist, and about being unashamed of where you come from without brushing aside the darkest parts of its history. It's an album about setting the record straight. It's about the Duality of the Southern Thing. And yes, it also rocks. It rocks so hard.

The Truckers will go on to make several more classic albums. You can argue the followup DECORATION DAY or their next sprawling concept album THE DIRTY SOUTH or the post-Isbell BRIGHTER THAN CREATION'S DARK are every bit SRO's equal. But SOUTHERN ROCK OPERA will always be my favorite. Because it is a scrappy band from Alabama using every dollar they saved up to create one magnum opus. They had no certain future. This is a band that's hungry, a band that has everything to prove, and they will prove it in the grandest way possible. And goddamnit, they did it. They fucking pulled it off.

Thank you, János!

Click here to see the current results for the entire tournament, and click here to see the current results for the prediction bracket contest.

Yesterday, #74 Super Furry Animals, RINGS AROUND THE WORLD defeated #55 R.E.M., REVEAL, 120-89-2.

Thanks,

Kent