About 20 minutes into The Secret to a Happy Ending, the new and excellent career-spanning Truckers documentary, filmmaker Barr Weissman applies the Ken Burns effect to photos of Adam’s House Cat, the outfit that eventually birthed the Truckers. Weissman zooms in and out on old black-and-white stills, focusing on Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley, the pair of songwriters who started the Truckers about a decade after Adam’s House Cat called it quits. The technique is meant to be romantic and nostalgic, but maybe Burns’ method is best left to nameless Civil War veterans and forgotten jazz cats: Cooley and Hood, turns out, were two pretty ugly dudes.
Hood, the hulky son of a former Muscle Shoals bassist, had remarkably pronounced jowls for a man so young; a chin best described as undefined and a mouth that hung wide, as though still waiting for the words to say something his young brain couldn’t quiet articulate, didn’t do those cheeks any favors. Cooley, on the other hand, was a beanstalk from the poor side of the river. His sharp features—sunken and sad eyes, razor lips, an Adam’s apple that could open a soda pop—came capped by a drape of brown hair that suggested the awkward indecision of someone uncertain if he wanted to be a hippie, a punk or a hick. Cooley and Hood looked like misfit indie rockers.
“As long as I remember, he’s had a pen and a paper, and he’s been writing,” says Jan Adams, Hood’s mother, of her son about 10 minutes before the snaps of Adam’s House Cat appear. “It made him very odd. I don’t think a lot of kids at that time probably knew what to think of him.”
“I never really even thought I had a choice about doing this or not doing it. It’s literally, truly all I can do. I’m not good for anything else,” Hood affirms. “I’m a lousy line cook. I’m a lousy waiter. I was a lousy student, so I never made it through college. But I’ve written songs a real, real long time, and I know I know how to do that.”
All of this affirms a familiar narrative: Hood and Cooley were outcasts who found retreat and expression in writing and singing songs about their lives. In their small Southern towns, they were the only people writing their own music, which, as Hood explains in Happy Ending, naturally made them even stranger. They wrote a song about home called “Buttholeville,” where every line rhymed with the town that tortured them: “Tired of living in Buttholeville … The food here tastes the way I feel.” Consider Dinosaur Jr.’s “Freak Scene” and Superchunk’s “Slack Motherfucker”; doesn’t “Buttholeville,” an Adam’s House Cat number rerecorded for the first Drive-By Truckers album, sound exactly like early indie rock?
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