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By Cassidy Gruber
Published: April 26, 2010
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 According to a fellow concertgoer, you can sum up the lyrics of the Drive-By Truckers as:
1. Songs about being Blue Collar
2. Songs about being a family man
3. Songs about being from Alabama
4. Songs about being sick at racing cars and playing music
5. Overall, songs about doing the right thing, even if it means shooting the sheriff.
All this seemed true at their April 13th concert at Mr. Small’s theater, a three-axe-attack-meets-steel-guitar rock out that left my ears ringing until early the next morning. Mr. Small’s, a renovated church in Millvale, was packed to the brim with Truckers fans, a group largely consisting of white guys, young and old, dressed in plaid and communally bobbing their slightly balding heads.
Between acts, a patient reverie filled the crowded room, marked by the readjusting of baseball hats, the refilling of pale draft beers, and the occasional shout of “Truckers!”
After the waiting had drawn the crowd into an anticipatory frenzy of hootin’ and hollerin’. the band appeared. The audience raised their PBRs in salute (isn’t it lovely when people drink PBR non-ironically?), and DBT launched into a long, loud set. 
The stage was a crowded one. Besides the hand-painted back drops and the extra-large bass drum printed with “Drive-by Truckers,” there were six musicians, including the long-time band members Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley (SPOILER ALERT: the bass drum will not be struck until the first song of the six song encore), who drank whiskey from the bottle and smoked onstage during the set (even though Mr. Small’s is a non-smoking theater).
Due to the basic loudness of the show, it was difficult to make out which songs were which, although the wisely ear-plugged older gentleman standing in front of me made it a helpful habit to lean back and alert me to the song titles. “Birthday Boy!” he said eagerly as the band started up their second song and the crowd erupted into an excited cheer. A mid-album track from their newest release, 'The Big To Do,' “Birthday Boy” embodied the entire ethos of not only the newest set of recordings, but of the tour itself: rollicking, heavy, melodic, and mature. The show concluded with a six song encore—finally the bass drum!—topped off by a cover of Neil Young’s “Keep on Rockin in the Free World.” The encore seemed to revive the audience, even as it capped off an almost two hour set.
All of the Truckers’ shows are typically done without a set list, which made it all the more impressive how seamlessly the show ran: no false starts, no indecision, and very little of the inter-band chatter that usually accompanies an ad-lib show. Drive-By Truckers has been a band for a long time, and they’ve been prolific in their releases. Many of their past albums are historic in subject and epic in scale, but their newest, 'The Big To Do,' which was released in mid-March and will be followed by 'Go Go Boots' later this year, is an admittedly non-conceptual album focused more on a classic rock sound than the Alabama country to which listeners may have become accustomed. Despite this new sound, which is a bit like a mix of Tom Petty and the Counting Crows (with an attitude problem), DBT maintains the polished veneer of established alt-country rock superstars and respected lyrical storytellers.
But at no point during the show did the band acknowledge the audience. At no point did the band members introduce themselves, or crack a joke, or praise the great city of Pittsburgh, as many visiting bands often do. And in this lack of engagement—which considerably diminished my personal concert experience and made me feel all the more alienated from a band I already wasn’t well acquainted with—and in the extra long hesitation between the main set and the encore, I couldn’t help but sense a weariness, perhaps due to the monotony of yet another tour, perhaps because it was Tuesday. Regardless, towards the end of the show I could not fight the impression that Drive-By Truckers would be content to step down from their rock god pedestals and watch the scene age from the crowd, sipping from their black label bottles and stealing drags from their illicit cigarettes.
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