The Last Waltz
“They’ll throw the bums all out and drain the swamp for real
Perp-walk them down the Capitol steps and show them how it feels
Tramp the dirt down, Jesus, you can pray the rod they’ll spare
Stick it up your ass with your useless thoughts and prayers.”
-Drive-By Truckers, “Thoughts and Prayers”
I. Opener
In between songs, I corrected myself and told my Dad that this was actually the eleventh time I’ve seen Drive-By Truckers, not the tenth. I forgot to count when I saw them nobly hammer their way through most of Brighter than Creations Dark, their king-sized 2009 release on a hungover January 1, 2011. This was shortly before they would go on to release Go Go Boots, as close to a John Prine album (and know I mean that as the highest compliment possible) as they would ever release. Regardless of the amount of times I’d seen them, I assured my Dad that this particular show carried the bluster and power of some of the best concerts I’d ever seen (the best concert I have ever attended was the Festival Pier stop of The Replacements reunion in 2015; I saw J. Roddy Walston and Superchunk open and three months later to the day, my then-girlfriend would take my name and share a dance with me to “Can’t Hardly Wait.” I still can’t) and was certainly the very best performance I’d ever seen DBT play. I wasn’t lying then and I am not lying now.
I saw what is very likely the last live standing-room show I will see until 2021, in a best-case scenario, on February 29th of this year. The cruel irony of a live event being years-out and the last one I saw occurring on Leap Day is not lost on me.
Buffalo Nichols opened for my favorite band, the mighty Drive-By Truckers out of Muscle Shoals, Alabama. I saw them play an absolute monster of a set at the 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C. The Man and I filled up on sandwiches and sweet potato waffle fries and micro-brewed lagers at Roy Boys, a chicken restaurant that proudly displayed vegan options for yours truly. We were already feeling alright from stopping at Right Proper Brewing Company and downing one before the show. We had plenty of time together that night because my Dad, true to his nature, arrived at my house eager to see me about an hour early. He knew we’d have plenty of time, because he and I had seen DBT at the 9:30 Club together in 2012, 2014, and 2017 and he knew the route. Watching episodes of F**k, That’s Delicious! as he pulled up in his new pride and joy (which is, through circumstances unforeseen, now mine), my wife and I shared a loving eye roll at my Dad behaving like the best version of himself. I did not know then that they would be some of the last hours that we spent in each others’ company, but I cherish them all the same now.
II. Headliner
I believe, for a certain cross-cut strata of American men, that Drive-By Truckers serve as a bridging of gaps between fathers and sons. I believe this because at every DBT show I took my Dad to, we stood in front of and behind fathers and sons. Some had decades on us, some were younger than us, but the alchemy of you, your Dad, a belly full of Duffy’s, “Sink Hole,” and a couple of Anchor Steams was all the same. I joked about it in line this last time, telling him these shows were “Dad as fuck,” and I stand by it. “Dad,” as a modifier, has taken on a negative connotation in our culture, as Dad-rock is often ascribed to a certain kind of down-tempo, harmlessly introspective kind of song (think of every moment in the winning Hearts Beat Loud) or a Dad-bod, which is hurled at Leonardo DiCaprio every time he commits the embarrassing faux-pas of dating a Victoria’s Secret model. The word a lot of these Dad-labelers are searching for is “quiet strength,” and they often fail to grasp it.
My Dad and I were not similar adult men in a lot of ways but, in a lesson it has taken me 31 years, a pandemic and a horrific personal tragedy to learn, he never stopped trying to share what he loved and to understand what I loved. I played two years of pee-wee football to please him and to get as many funnel cakes as I wanted. You would think that Troy Aikman himself was demoted to second-string left tackle for the Bel Air Redskins (yup) for how loud my father got every time I would get to play a single down. He took me to comic book conventions and even though I insisted on standing in line to get Silent Bob to autograph my Mooby’s hat, my Dad stayed positive knowing he’d get to meet and greet Lou Ferrigno later in the day (Ferrigno was the nicest guy I’ve ever met at a con and I deeply regret not pushing my Dad to spend the $20 for a picture with him; I of course didn’t know at 12 that the $20 was my Dad’s budget for chicken fingers and fries with me at Bennigan’s on the way home).
When we listened to Drive-By Truckers, those differences faded into the background of the three-guitar attack on display in so many of their songs. The best way I can put it is that DBT creates music that sounds like music that he would listen to when he was younger, but speaks and radiates with the righteous anger of my generation. “Hell No, I Ain’t Happy” is a fist-pumper designed to get you riled up at the beginning or the raucous end of a set. “Sink Hole,” in its live form, is often updated to reflect the bastards currently manipulating us at the time, as Hood wails about being sick of waiting for wealth to trickle down. “Carl Perkins’ Cadillac” laments a better time but acknowledges that life is nothing but “a blending up of all the ups and downs.” I think my Dad had one lyric memorized, a razor-sharp Cooley (worth noting here that I believe that “Zip City” is the greatest American Rock song ever recorded) line from “Shut Up and Get On the Plane,” in which the Stroker Ace instructs the fearful listener to “shut your mouth and get your ass on the plane.” My Dad once won a crisp $100 bill from a Super Bowl lottery at his work and he held onto that bill with pride to spend it on drinks and merch at the show.
On the short drive from my family’s house to Upper Chesapeake Medical Center to see him for what was the last time I ever did, I listened to “Outfit” (a Jason Isbell-penned tearjerker, but it still appears on “Decoration Day”) in order to grasp to some semblance of a familiar feeling in a world falling apart.
A few weeks ago I watched Patterson Hood perform through NoonChorus and a screen, and the room got dusty on his end and mine when he lamented that the February 29th show was not just the last one I’d seen, but the last stop on the tour for the incredible, confrontational 2020 release The Unraveling. True to the words in the unreleased title track, the unraveling is happening.
III. Encore
When a band finishes their set, you know there’s more coming. Part of the thrill of that final track and the walk-off is the partial acknowledgment from some of the looser members of the band (Matt Patton, current bassist of DBT, usually walks off stage with a smile and a nod to the audience that you’ll get a few more). It was an inlaid promise from artist to audience, every time.
It is now our responsibility as citizens to promise an encore to the acts that have inspired us so. We are in a country in which a tyrannical bastard cannot even muster thoughts and prayers for those dying of COVID-19, nor those falling at the hands of an overpowered and fundamentally unjust police force, and in which the rabid followers of this lack of ideology refuse to wear a cloth face covering out of a misguided notion of freedom. I look at countries that have enforced social distancing guidelines strictly and with clear communication and feel nothing but envy for live audiences in New Zealand and the UK. I feel sorrow not only for the artists who have worked so hard to maintain their voices and careers in a tumultuous music industry (remember when Napster seemed like the biggest problem?) but also the bartenders at the 9:30 Club, the merch guys who would let me feel which fabrics I liked best out of t-shirts, and the coffee ladies from whom I would buy, in His words, “the good root beer” every time.
Every single facet of the memories I described above are now impossible for me to access, save for the Bandcamp recordings I have purchased and listened to on a ritualistic level since lockdown. Losing a loved one during this time gives you a unique set of traumas; I would love nothing more than to see almost any band at the 9:30 Club (or any venue) and connect with the spirit I so dearly miss. And likewise, like many of you reading this, I am troubled and anxious daily about the onslaught of bad news and lack of clarity on a forward-path for COVID-19; in times of tumult like this I would often turn to a man who symbolized quiet strength to me for 31 years, and I cannot. Yet, I know in my heart that one day we will still get our stages and songs back.
I beg of you, if you’ve read this far and any of my memories of Gregory Scott Conner resonate with you, please wear the mask at all times in social situations and consider your impact on the health of others. If you are the kind of person who agonizes over your favorite band, I strongly suggest picking up their music on Bandcamp on Bandcamp Fridays, in which all proceeds go directly to artists. And finally, please consider calling your representatives to ask them to sign for the Save Our Stages Act, a bipartisan piece of legislation introduced to provide $10 billion in funding for independent music venues to continue to operate during this crisis. A poll conducted by the NIVA suggests that “if action isn’t taken soon, nearly 90 percent of independent concert venues will be forced to close down permanently.” You can also donate to NIVA directly, and I have done my best to provide links to these resources below.
We will come through this together, not alone. We will face the new world’s challenges, and make no mistake it will be new, and there will be challenges. We cannot fear them, simply because, as The Man often hoarsely screamed after a couple of Bohs, “living in fear’s just another way of dying before your time.”
https://www.saveourstages.com/support-niva
https://daily.bandcamp.com/features/update-on-bandcamp-fridays
