Drive-By Truckers will celebrate their landmark third studio album, Southern Rock Opera, with a wide-ranging North American tour. Presented by Live Nation and recently announced in an exclusive Q&A with Garden & Gun Magazine, the Southern Rock Opera Revisited 2024 Tour – which will see Drive-By Truckers performing the acclaimed 2001 album along with fan favorites and other songs from across their classic canon – gets underway June 7 at Indianapolis, IN’s Egyptian Room at Old National Centre and then continues into early July. The headline run will resume October 16 at Washington, DC’s Warner Theatre and then travel through a very special tour finale set for November 24 at Nashville, TN’s historic Ryman Auditorium. Highlights include two-night stands at San Francisco, CA’s The Fillmore (June 28-29), Minneapolis, MN’s Uptown Theater (October 25-26), Chicago, IL’s House of Blues (November 1-2), and Asheville, NC’s The Orange Peel (November 7-8).
DBT is thrilled to announce The Southern Rock Opera Revisited 2024 Tour. It’s been 23 years since the release of the album that drastically changed our lives and 22 years since we performed it (more or less) straight through in near entirety. We’ll be hitting the road, Three Guitars blazing, and telling y’all a story. It’s an album we spent years writing and learning to play and then recording (in the upstairs of a uniform shop in downtown Birmingham AL). It was initially released on 9/11/2001 (and later reissued by Lost Highway in the summer of 2002).
A lot has happened in the decades since it came out, both to the band and to the world we live in. We feel that the record, while somewhat timeless, also has a current timeliness to it considering the social and political issues of today. Instead of performing it as if it’s still 2000AD, we want to make it our own, reflecting who we all are now in 2024. It’s going to be intense, but also a hell of a lot of fun and this time we’re offering a very special Southern Rock Opera Revisited VIP Experience that includes a soundcheck party and some special SRO Revisited limited edition items. VIP tickets are on sale starting today!
We’ll be playing songs from the original release, plus a small handful of songs that pertain to its themes and points of view, plus a short encore set that will be different each night. It’ll be a different and very special show, and very likely the last time we’ll ever do it so DON’T MISS IT! DBT-Southern Rock Opera Revisited 2024 Tour.
“It ain’t about the past.” – Patterson Hood (DBT)
On September 11, 2001, Drive-By Truckers self-released Southern Rock Opera on their own tiny Soul Dump label, pressing 5000 copies of their third studio album with a tiny budget they raised by crowdsourcing (as it’s come to be known), raising the money online from fans turned investors. They ended up selling 10,000 copies independently without any sort of distribution, mostly sold at shows during the massive tour that they booked themselves. A tour that began with 75 shows in 90 days and that stretched well into the following year.
The success of the Southern Rock Opera Tour and the album that inspired it led to Drive-By Truckers getting proper management and being picked up by High Road Touring, who have been their agents ever since. The band signed their very first record deal with Lost Highway Records, who reissued the album in the summer of 2002 as the tour stretched to the end of the year. A trajectory that saw the band moving from small dive bars and sleeping on floors, to playing bigger rooms and theaters, and touring on a bus.
Southern Rock Opera became the first of a string of albums that has seen Drive-By Truckers morph and continue to thrive for nearly a quarter of a century. The critically acclaimed band is well known for its high energy and cathartic shows, as well as for a prolific string of albums that combine astute politics, Southern storytelling, and an eclectic approach to rock ‘n’ roll that has been played at thousands of shows on three continents.
Always restless and never a band keen on repeating itself, people have asked Drive-By Truckers for years about the possibility of another Southern Rock Opera Tour to no avail. DBT co-founder Mike Cooley, never one to mince words, has long responded that it should only be done when it could be performed “on ice!” Meanwhile, Southern Rock Opera has continued to sell, eventually recouping its original record deal, and often appearing on lists of the best albums of the 2000s.
Although the band still holds onto the dream of Southern Rock Opera On Ice, it’s no coincidence that 2024 is also an election year. Another year full of some of the same contentious issues that inspired much of the original album’s content. The Southern Rock Opera Revisited 2024 Tour will see Drive-By Truckers celebrating their milestone album, not as a relic of another time and place, but as a continued conversation about where we came from, and where we are headed in this crazy time in history that we currently reside in. As Drive-By Truckers say in the album’s pivotal “The Southern Thing” – “It ain’t about the past.”
DRIVE-BY TRUCKERS SOUTHERN ROCK OPERA REVISITED 2024 TOUR
JUNE
7 – Indianapolis, IN – Egyptian Room at Old National Centre
8 – St. Louis, MO – The Pageant
9 – Louisville, KY – Mercury Ballroom
10 – Henrico, VA – Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens
13 – Raleigh, NC – The Ritz
14 – Charlotte, NC – The Fillmore Charlotte
15 – Birmingham, AL – Iron City
16 – New Orleans, LA – The Civic Theatre
19 – Houston, TX – House of Blues
20 – Austin, TX – ACL Live at the Moody Theater
21 – Dallas, TX – House of Blues
23 – Phoenix, AZ – The Van Buren
26 – El Cajon, CA – The Magnolia
27 – Los Angeles, CA – The Belasco
28 – San Francisco, CA – The Fillmore
29 – San Francisco, CA – The Fillmore
JULY
1 – Portland, OR – Crystal Ballroom
2 – Seattle, WA – Neptune Theatre
5 – Salt Lake City, UT – The Complex
6 – Denver, CO – Fillmore Auditorium
OCTOBER
16 – Washington, DC – Warner Theatre
17 – New York, NY – Irving Plaza
18 – Boston, MA – House of Blues
19 – Philadelphia, PA – Theatre of Living Arts
22 – Toronto, ON – Danforth Music Hall
23 – Cleveland, OH – House of Blues
25 – Minneapolis, MN – Uptown Theater
26 – Minneapolis, MN – Uptown Theater
27 – Madison, WI – The Sylvee
29 – Des Moines, IA – Val Air Ballroom
30 – Milwaukee, WI – Pabst Theater
NOVEMBER
1 – Chicago, IL – House of Blues
2 – Chicago, IL – House of Blues
3 – Cincinnati, OH – Bogart’s
5 – Detroit, MI – St. Andrew’s Hall
7 – Asheville, NC – The Orange Peel
8 – Asheville, NC – The Orange Peel
9 – Atlanta, GA – Tabernacle
24 – Nashville, TN – Ryman Auditorium
