Too punk for Muscle Shoals. Too country for most other places. Too drunk, too often. DRIVE-BY TRUCKERS have forged on through lifestyle meltdowns, line-up turmoil and (at least) three divorces to deliver their uniquely lyrical blend of Southern Americana. Their fuel? Tough love for their homeland and cast-iron belief in their songs. "We had to be all in", they tell ANDY FYFE.

Last train home: Drive-By Truckers, Joshua Tree, California, February 2022 (from left) Jay Gonzalez, Mike Cooley, Patterson Hood, Brad Morgan, Matt Patton.

Photography by BRANTLEY GUTIERREZ.

THERE COMES A MOMENT IN EVERY HARDliving, hard-touring band’s career when the bus hits a wall. For Drive-By Tr uckers’ Mike Cooley, that reckoning came in Germany just before Christmas 2010.

“I collapsed on this moving sidewalk up from the airport to a hotel,” he recalls in a slow Alabama drawl. “I came to while it was still moving, went up to my room with a fuzzy head, thought I’d forgotten my room key and was walking across the lobby when I blacked out again.”

In a downtown dive bar in Athens, Georgia on a sunny Sunday afternoon, DBT’s co-singer, writer and guitarist stops and sips his pale ale.

“You know, when you hear someone saying, in that accent, ‘Sir, don’t get up, you’re bleeding from your head. Sir, do not get up,’ you kind of decide, I’ll stay where I am.”

The rest of the tour was cancelled, the Tr uckers came home and Cooley under went scans and tests that revealed nothing untoward. But after a decade of over 200 shows a year, in a culture of hard living that had already seen off third songwriter and guitarist Jason Isbell, it was clear something had to change.

“We were doing this in our late thirties,” Cooley says. “We all had kids. The road was kind of an escape from that, but both those carousels were exhausting on their own.”

After nearly 40 years of bust-ups, sackings, hard partying and grand ideas over three different bands, and a fourteenth studio album as Drive-By Tr uckers in the offing, Cooley and his co-driver Patterson Hood could be forgiven for delusions of indestr uctability. But their band is a stor y of how myths – of rock’n’roll, of their homeland in the South – and reality conflict, and how sometimes reality has to win.

“We’re in our fifties now, and we’ve finally learned how to balance it all out,” says Cooley, “but there were some hard lessons along the way.”

Brantley Gutierrez

Hood and Cooley at the Paradiso, Amsterdam, November 17, 2010.

Iñigo Garayo

MIKE COOLEY GREW UP IN RURAL Alabama, on the edge of a small town that in turn was on the edge of Muscle Shoals.

“I didn’t have any siblings, and I was so disconnected from anything it may as well have been a million miles from anywhere,” he says. “But my childhood wasn’t traumatic, nothing like that. I was lonely more than anything.”

His father owned a small convenience store and won his son’s first guitar through a supplier when Mike was eight. The boy duly began learning the instr ument, influenced by the TV variety shows of ’70s countr y stars Johnny Cash and Mac Davis.