Southern voices
To anyone familiar with Hudson's work with the now defunct Mississippi-born roots outfit Blue Mountain, such nostalgia won't come as a surprise. Hudson, a true son of the South, has made a career out of celebrating the musical traditions of his region: Blue Mountain songs like "Myrna Lee" and newer tunes such as "Cool Breeze" sound like traditional numbers spiked with a rock 'n' roll momentum. (As if to drive the point home, "What the Old Man Told Me" name-checks "Amazing Grace" and "You Are My Sunshine.")
Such reverence is admirable and even healthy, but it anchors Cool Breeze a mite too firmly in musical history -- a potentially dangerous move for a performer widely credited as a founding father of alternative country. Cool Breeze displays occasional glimpses of the rocking spark that distinguished genre lights like Blue Mountain and Uncle Tupelo, notably the down-and-dirty "Jellyroll" and the rollicking, stomping "Ain't No Tellin.'" But lyrically and musically, it's filled with by-the-numbers genre exercises ("Bay Street Blues," "Things Ain't What They Used to Be") that position Hudson as a classicist: an alt-country Lenny Kravitz, endlessly recreating an idealized version of Southern roots music, without taking those down-home influences anywhere new or intriguing.
If Hudson's career can be seen as a celebration of the past, Patterson Hood's has been a long battle to come to terms with and/or overcome his own. Far from an alt-country outfit, Hood's Athens-by-way-of-Alabama band Drive-By Truckers has built a following on the back of an entirely different regional offshoot: brawny, three-guitar Southern rock. But Hood, who grew up a fan of hard rock, doesn't hold the genre as a sacred template. In the snarling, rebellious spirit of both Southern rock and punk, he's bent it into a musical and lyrical form capable of serving a fierce need for self-expression.
Killers and Stars, a 2001 home solo recording recently released by New West Records, doesn't quite echo Lynyrd Skynyrd, but it does showcase the same fiery creative spirit Hood used to rope Skynyrd's genre to his own purposes. Recorded in the midst of inter-band turmoil and a painful divorce, the disc shows Hood at his rawest and most personal. More significantly, it documents an important milestone in the evolution of his songwriting voice. The standard-issue breakup vent "Miss Me Gone" lays the groundwork for Truckers songs like "(Something's Got to) Give Pretty Soon," while elsewhere Hood spins his private drama into the engrossing allegories "Phil's Transplant" and "The Assassin," in which a contract killer bemoans having killed his true love.
Armed only with a guitar and his sandpaper drawl, Hood offers a dozen rootsy, folksy arguments for his emergence as the successor-apparent to the thorny crown of Steve Earle; he channels his pathos into snarling screeds ("Belinda Carlisle Diet"), detailed short stories ("Rising Son," "Old Timer's Disease") and even wry commentary ("Uncle Disney," which draws a connective thread between a lover's return and Walt Disney returning from cryogenic slumber to demand answers for "40 years of decisions made"). In Hood's universe, our traditional Southern sounds aren't ends in themselves, to be admired and parroted; they're tools with which we struggle to make sense of our emotions and our places in the world. That makes Killers and Stars art in its truest form. And in the pursuit of such a human goal, it honors roots music more than Hudson's sonic veneration ever could.
