photos by the newt
By Steve Newton
The Drive-By Truckers didn’t play all of my fave DBT tunes at the Vogue last night. For example, there was no “A Ghost to Most”, singer-guitarist Mike Cooley‘s jangley indictment of George Bush’s macho posturing from the sprawling 2008 Brighter than Creation’s Dark album.
And neither did I get to hear my other fave Creation’s gem, the Patterson Hood-penned slice-of-life epic, “The Righteous Path”.
But it was still the best damn rock concert I’ve seen in Vancouver since the Darkness tore things up a few doors down at the Commodore a coupla years back.
A lot of the show’s brilliance had to do with the fact that the Alabama/Georgia-based band is touring behind one of its finest recordings ever, this year’s English Oceans. That disc saw the reemergence of Cooley as a prolific songwriter, and the Vogue gig showcased a number of his new compositions, including the explosive album-opener “Shit Shot Counts”, which was riotously featured on Conan recently.
I like the line in that tune where Cooley tells of “trophy tail wives taking boner-pill rides for the price of a Happy Meal.”
Other stone-cold Cooley classics that kept the crowd enthralled were the rollicking “Birthday Boy”, the bittersweet “Zip City”, and the gorgeous new “Primer Coat”, with its magnificently phrased guitar solo by Jay Gonzalez.
Hood put the finishing touch on things with a raunched up version of English Oceans‘ closing track, “Grand Canyon”, a song he wrote in memory of the band’s former merch man Greg Lieske, who died suddenly of a heart attack last year after a show in Athens, Georgia.
Speaking of merch, while on a beer run for Pilsner tallboys my wife scored me a sweet Truckers t-shirt–sporting the cool Wes Freed cover image from English Oceans–for the amazing low price of twenty bucks!