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On February 7th, 2017 m’lady and I drove to Montreal to see the Drive-By Truckers. Before the show we had a drink in our hotel lobby bar and decided to walk to the show. It was fairly mild for a February night and the walk was relatively short and quite pleasant.
I think this was my first time at the Corona Theatre and I found it to be a pretty great venue, especially for such a hard-drinkin’ angst-driven country tinged rock and roll band like the Truckers. We found a handful of drinks and parked ourselves right up front and enjoyed the show immensely. I remember in particular them playing one I had played a hundred times with my buddy Doug, Ronnie and Neil and a new one with a title (and chorus) that packs a pile of meaning into a line rolls off of the tongue slicker than sweat off a Nashville drummer, Once They Banned Imagine.
The show ended with an endless run through a song called People Who Died that turned Patterson Hood into a screaming, wailing maniac. Not being familiar with the song I looked it up and discovered that it was written by the dude from The Basketball Diaries, Jim Carroll. Further research told me that shortly after publishing his autobiography in 1978 Carroll moved to California and became a punk musician. I’ve never heard the original version of the song (though wikipedia claims the song was included in the movie E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial so I suppose I must have heard it, doubtlessly through tears) but I remember the Truckers version being quite heavy, and an obvious show-closer.
Inspired by our relatively easy walk to the show m’lady and I decided to walk back to the hotel after the show, despite the fact that freezing rain had been earnestly accumulating for the last few hours. We slowly sludged and sloshed through a surprising accumulation of watery slush with a driving icy precipitation slamming our faces all the way back to our hotel. And not only was it an uphill slog, it was unquestionably a much farther journey on the way back, a fact that I swear is as true as it is impossible.
When we finally arrived back at our room our jackets were drenched through and we both had double-soakers but we were in remarkably high spirits. After such a great show the rain had bounced off of our souls like drunk donkeys off a diving board, and twice as happy.
Live music is best.
Todd Man Out 