Dirty Boots: Irregular Attempts at Critical Thinking and Border Crossing offers a Deep Southern, Generation X perspective on the culture, politics, and general milieu of the 21st century.

Drivin’ N Cryin’ was a staple of our high school and college experience in the 1980s and ’90s. Based in Atlanta, Georgia, the band had formed in the mid-1980s around singer-songwriter Kevn Kinney. The almost-punk song “Scarred but Smarter” became their first hit: “I said nobody said it would be fair / They warned you before you went out there / There’s always a chance to get restarted / to a new world, new life—  scarred but smarter.” We could relate. Later in the ’80s, Mystery Road gave our generation the anthems “Honeysuckle Blue” and “Straight to Hell.” Going to see them live – in adjacent Alabama, there were ample opportunities – offered a mix of hard-hitting rock and singalong favorites.

The show I remember best was in 1991, when they played on a double bill with ’80s new-wavers The Fix and a short-lived hair metal band called King of the Hill opening. It was at an outdoor venue called Sandy Creek, which was really just a big open field with a covered stage and a power supply. Going out there for any show was a borderline-dangerous experience, since there was only a one-lane dirt road leading in and out, any security was there to protect the bands, and people brought their own coolers pretty freely. One reason that I remember that ’91 show was because I got hassled and threatened by a group of three or four drunk meatheads whose matching haircuts told me they were on a weekend pass from the military. They appeared out of the crowd, suddenly and for no apparent reason, and declaring that they wanted to kick my ass— mine, in particular. Knowing I was outnumbered and outmatched, and seeing that my friends were pretending not to know me at that moment, I resorted to some quick-thinking and just wanted to know why, specifically, they had a problem with me, out of all the people there . . . Drunk enough to be befuddled by my questions, which they couldn’t answer, they wandered away and didn’t come back. I had saved my own ass, those guys would have stomped me.

This time, thirty-three years later, seeing Drivin’ N Cryin’ wasn’t like that at all. I had been browsing Instagram on my phone one night about a month ago and saw a post that the band was playing two nights at Saturn Birmingham. When I told my wife, she said, Buy four tickets! We’d get some friends to go with us. Back in the day, a handful of us would have piled in a car, given five bucks each to some scummy ticket dude, and ended up at a rented hall or in a big field. This time, another couple came up from Pensacola to join us, and we were off to the Avenues North section of Birmingham, stopping first at Avondale Brewing for beers then at Black Market Bar & Grill for dinner. And this time, we were the old folks at the rock show. Thankfully, the old folks in this crowd were not the minority. 

Despite our ages, being what they are, the band put on a good show. The opening act played from 8:00 until nearly 9:00, then Drivin’ N Cryin’ came out pretty quickly. (Another major difference between now and then— back in the day, we never knew what time a band would actually play.) In his latter years, Kevin Kinney has foregone the oversized button-downs of the 1990s for a baseball cap and what looked like a track suit. He was also more jovial than I remembered him from the GenX days. Throughout the show, he joked with the audience and took requests, all with a smile. The early numbers they played were mostly ones I didn’t recognize, until “Scarred but Smarter” came about midway through. Kinney joked that he’d play our favorites later, he was playing his favorites first. Of course, by the end there was a barrage that included “To Build a Fire,” “Fly Me Courageous,” and “Straight to Hell.” The crowd had been pretty tame through most of the two-hour set, then perked up near the end and came to something-like-life when Kinney hit the opening licks of “Honeysuckle Blue.” We were as riled up as a bunch of fifty-somethings could get, though a sprinkling of younger folks did a little jumping around among us. (One misguided pair of twenty-somethings started slow-dancing to “Straight to Hell,” and I knew that the lyrics had escaped them. Not exactly a song to dance with your girl to.)

Leaving just after the encore and a kind word of farewell, we skipped the merch table and headed for the car. No squabbles with drunk meatheads this time. The block was pretty quiet by then, which disappointed me since a place like that would have kept us going well into the small hours back in the ’90s. A brewery, some bars, a pizza place, a music venue— almost all dimming the lights and cleaning up before the stroke of midnight on a Saturday? I guess the young people had to call it a night so they didn’t miss out on any threads and reels and shit. Out in the street, I popped open a couple of Good People OktoberFests that I’d packed in my cooler for the ride home. As we rolled through the quiet night toward the interstate, our friend in the back seat played Randy Newman’s “Birmingham,” an appropriate end to a right nice evening.

Some people these days seem miffed by my negative attitude about current music. Sure, there are some good artists now, and there were certainly plenty of bad ones in my day. But I grew up ignoring the bad ones and listening to bands like Drivin’ N Cryin’, alongside classic rock, etc. We were spoiled by the quality of it, and it’s that sensibility that leads me – and plenty of other GenXers – to call bad music what it is. I once heard an interview with Louis Armstrong where he said, in response to a question about genre, that there are only two kinds of songs: good ones and bad ones. Let just end this by saying that Drivin’ N Cryin’ has produced quite a few of the good ones.