Patterson Hood backs up the truck
By: Chris Klimek
Special to The Examiner
June 25, 2009
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| Patterson Hood (Courtesy Photo) |
Info Headline
Patterson Hood & The Screwtopians, with special guest Will Johnson
Where: Black Cat, 1811 14 St. NW
When: 8 p.m. Thursday
Info: $15; tickets are available through Ticketmaster at ticket master.com or at the Black Cat box office beginning at 8 p.m.
Singer/songwriter Patterson Hood moved to Athens, Ga., the same week in April 1994 that Kurt Cobain shot himself. Hood's marriage and his band, Adam's House Cat, had both collapsed. He knew no one in town except his roommate. But he was writing songs at a furious pace and recording them on a Jambox in his bedroom. He put the best ones on a cassette he titled "Murdering Oscar (and Other Love Songs)."
"That was like my card. When I'd meet someone, I would give them my tape," Hood says 15 years later. He's speaking from his home in Athens, the day after returning from the Bonnaroo Music and Art Festival in Tennessee. "I had a little handmade cover for it and everything."
By Hood's reckoning, about half the tracks on "Murdering Oscar" -- not the homemade cassette, but rather the eponymous commercial release that came out Tuesday -- appeared in "skeletal versions, me playing them on acoustic guitar" on that old tape.
He'll play those songs, along with the album's more recent half and tunes from his prior solo disc, "Killers and Stars," tonight at the Black Cat. Backing him will be The Screwtopians, a mix of longtime Hood associates and half the current lineup of the Drive-By Truckers -- the critically adored, increasingly popular Southern rock outfit Hood has fronted since 1996.
But despite the presence of fellow Truckers Brad Morgan and John Neff, Hood says tonight's show will be different from his day job, and not just because the Truckers have long since graduated to playing the larger 9:30 Club.
"It's a little more power-pop, I guess, than what the Truckers do," he says. "And having Will [Johnson] and Scott [Danborn] along, there should be some pretty amazing harmonies."
The tour, and the album, almost didn't happen. Once the Truckers began to build a national audience, Hood forgot about his calling-card cassette for years. He found it again during a house cleaning late in 2004.
"I played it, and I still liked those songs," he remembers. "They held up, but my life was so different, they [felt] like someone else's. So I wrote some new songs that kind of corresponded and answered them, and that reflected the changes that had occurred." Besides finding success with his band, Hood had remarried by this point. He and his wife, Rebecca, are expecting their second child later this summer.
Hood recorded the album's old and then-new halves in early 2005. Record label politics and the Truckers' punishing road schedule conspired to keep the album from surfacing until now. "In some cases, the new songs were almost polar opposites of the old ones," Hood says. "Like 'Screwtopia' and 'Granddaddy,' which could not have more different points of view about having kids and a family. So I put them right next to each other, and I just liked the way it flowed."
Hood took advantage of the unexpected release delays by adding what is arguably the record's best number, "Pride of the Yankees." He recently re-sang many of his parts, believing he'd developed into a stronger vocalist since the 2005 sessions.
"Murdering Oscar" closes with a song for his wife, "Back of a Bible," that has been a mainstay of Hood's solo gigs since he wrote it in an Atlanta hotel room five years ago. Domestic bliss can a dangerous place for a 45-year-old rock 'n' roller who has long found inspiration in pain to find himself.
But he's aware of, and untroubled by, the risk: "I'm not gonna be one of those people who's gonna vandalize my family life for the sake of a song."
