{"id":2448408,"date":"2019-09-06T06:34:04","date_gmt":"2019-09-06T12:34:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/?p=873957"},"modified":"2019-09-06T06:34:04","modified_gmt":"2019-09-06T12:34:04","slug":"this-is-normal-the-enduring-knotty-relevance-of-randy-newman-and-drive-by-truckers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/music-news\/this-is-normal-the-enduring-knotty-relevance-of-randy-newman-and-drive-by-truckers\/","title":{"rendered":"This Is Normal: The Enduring, Knotty Relevance of Randy Newman and Drive-By Truckers"},"content":{"rendered":"
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On August 26th, 2005, as Hurricane Katrina stewed above the Gulf of Mexico, the Drive-By Truckers<\/a> played a show at Tipitina\u2019s in New Orleans. It was a two-and-a-half hour set<\/a>, 27 songs, most of them from the band\u2019s previous three records, Southern Rock Opera<\/em>, Decoration Day<\/em> and, their most recent at the time, The Dirty South.<\/em> Released a year prior, almost to the day, just a few months before George W. Bush won re-election, The Dirty South<\/em> <\/em>is an album about people pushed by outside and outsized forces that flatten the political and the personal while still leaving room for a bit of benign, indifferent providence and plenty of ripping guitars. On the album\u2019s first song, \u201cWhere the Devil Don\u2019t Stay,\u201d<\/a> Mike Cooley tells the story of a bootlegger on his deathbed and his desperate son pleading for advice: \u201cTell me why the ones who have so much make the ones who don\u2019t go mad\/With the same skin stretched over their white bones and the same jug in their hand?\u201d<\/p>\n

Hurricane Katrina made landfall two nights later. The levees broke the day after that. Soon, nearly 80 percent of New Orleans was underwater. Thousands were trapped and stranded in their homes, the Superdome, the convention center or highway overpasses in extreme heat. Thousands more were dead.<\/p>\n

By the time President George W. Bush finally arrived in New Orleans, the Drive-By Truckers were in Spain for a festival. The day the Superdome was evacuated, September 4th, the Alabama band was in England, playing Birmingham, and on stage, Patterson Hood was saying, \u201cIt took them fuckers in D.C. about five days to turn on the TV long enough to realize that there was a problem down there that needed to be addressed. It\u2019s unfortunately gonna be too late for some people, but New Orleans will come back anyway, whether them fuckers like it or not.\u201d When he finished, the Drive-By Truckers launched into a song that would be covered a lot in the coming weeks and years, an obvious choice, but an apt one: Randy Newman<\/a>\u2019s \u201cLouisiana 1927.\u201d<\/p>\n