Drive-By Truckers released their third 'studio' album Southern Rock Opera on September 11th, 2001.
They self-released it on their own tiny Soul Dump label, pressing 5000 copies with a tiny budget they raised by crowdsourcing (as it’s come to be known), raising the money online from fans turned investors. They ended up selling 10,000 copies independently without any sort of distribution, mostly sold at shows during the massive tour that they booked themselves. A tour that began with 75 shows in 90 days and that stretched well into the following year.
The success of the Southern Rock Opera Tour and the album that inspired it led to the band getting proper management and being picked up by High Road Touring, who have been their agents ever since. The band signed their very first record deal with Lost Highway Records, who reissued the album in the summer of 2002 as the tour stretched to the end of the year. A trajectory that saw the band moving from small dive bars and sleeping on floors, to playing bigger rooms and theaters, and touring on a bus.
Southern Rock Opera became the first of a string of albums that has seen the critically acclaimed band morph and continue to thrive for nearly a quarter of a century. The band is well known for its high energy and cathartic shows, as well as for a prolific string of albums that combine astute politics, southern storytelling, and an eclectic approach to rock and roll that has been played at thousands of shows on three continents.
Always restless and never a band keen on repeating itself, people have asked the band for years about the possibility of another Southern Rock Opera Tour to no avail. Guitarist Mike Cooley, never one to mince words, has long responded that it should only be done when it could be performed “On Ice!” Meanwhile, the album has continued to sell, eventually recouping its original record deal, and often appearing on lists of the best albums of the 2000s.
To commemorate the reissue, DBT will embark on Southern Rock Opera Revisited 2024 Tour, playing almost all of the album in its entirety, alongside a few songs that feel like part of the work’s continued relevance to the band. Although the band still holds onto the dream of SRO On Ice one day happening, it’s no coincidence that 2024 is also an election year. Another year full of some of the same contentious issues that inspired much of the original album’s content, which was set in the post-civil rights deep South, in the era of George Wallace and the like. The band plans to play the album, not as a relic of another time and place, but as a continued conversation about where we came from, and where we are headed in this crazy time in history that we currently reside in. As the band says in one of its songs, “It ain’t about the past.”
