“Excuse me.”

“Sorry?”

“Excuse me,” said the slightly balding middle-aged man with a look of distress on his face. “Do you work here? Can you help me?”

Though I’ve never worked at the 40 Watt in my life, my curiosity got the best of me. I asked him what I could do for him.

“There’s a young lady passed out in the men’s bathroom. Somebody should call her friends.”

Realizing that I was in slightly over my head, I directed the gentleman to the nearest staff member. It was 10 o’clock, and the night was just getting started. Already there had been casualties. The crowd was starting to stretch their drinking muscles, for the hometown heroes had returned. Drive-By Truckers was playing tonight.

The Drive-By Truckers represents everything that is still good, and has always been good, about the South. The songs slide easily into your mind the way homemade ice cream slides down your throat on a hot day.

This past weekend was no hot summer day. Despite one of the coldest streaks thus far this winter, all three shows were sold out, packed to capacity. Though the cold was merciless outside, with the 40 Watt’s wall-to-wall crowd, it was just warm enough to defrost the icicles that had been forming around the marrow in your bones all day.

Guitarist Mike Cooley radiated the cool energy of an old-Western gunslingin’ preacher: tragically wise, comfortable in his skin, and just as willing to save your soul or send you to hell, depending on how you act. He looked around the crowded club as he lit a cigarette on stage, almost daring somebody to stop him. His voice, hardened by years of drinking, smoking and living the dream, sounded like gravel covered in velvet, beautiful and rough at the same time.

Patterson Hood, who shares guitar and vocal duties with Cooley, isn’t so much a lyricist as a storyteller. It’s not that Hood doesn’t write fantastic songs; it’s just that once you see him in concert, his songs make more sense. On the band’s studio recordings, Cooley’s songs have a more traditional design, whereas Hood’s often give you nothing of their back stories. They’re more of a quick impression of a situation.

In concert, the rest of the band will do something of an introductory jam, improvising on the basic tune of the song. Meanwhile, Hood will tell the back story of the song he’s about to sing. He takes you back to exactly where he was when he wrote this song, the situational back story that oftentimes you would never have been able to deduce on your own.

Without Hood’s storytelling, these songs would seem almost simple in their snapshot emotional impression. Live, however, they take on a much deeper and personal meaning.

Just listening to “Road Cases” off 2001′s “Southern Rock Opera” won’t clue you in to the more subtle story of how MTV destroyed many popular bands. Hearing Hood describe the back story in person makes these songs much more precious.

Cooley and Hood, along with newest Trucker John Neff, work their guitars around each other, weaving a gritty musical tapestry of the South. The sound has Georgia red clay under its fingernails. It’s loud, it’s raw, and like a speeding locomotive, it dares you to get in its way.

Like any good Southern band, the Truckers are here to have fun. The band very rarely uses a set list; instead, they decide the first few songs before they get on stage and pick the rest as they go along. This makes every Drive-By Truckers show different and exciting. Playing to the home crowd this weekend, the shows focused heavily on their older catalog, primarily “Southern Rock Opera.” They kept the set list fairly diverse, balancing the songs that everybody expects to hear with deep album cuts.

On stage, there were multiple gallon jugs of Jack Daniels being passed around amongst the band members, as well as quite a few beers. The lower the level of the Jack Daniels bottle, the bigger the grin on Hood’s face and the bouncier bassist Shonna Tucker became. With his curly hair, rosy cheeks and devilish grin, Hood resembled a 7-year-old kid who just found his daddy’s rifle. Both Friday and Saturday night’s shows ended with a cover of Jim Carroll’s “People Who Died.” As the band played the song, Hood held the bottle of Jack Daniels in one hand as he nearly hit the roof of the club hoisting his microphone stand into the air.

On Saturday night, the culmination of the three-night stand, Hood thanked the crowd for “one of the best weekends of my life.” A wasteland of empty Pabst Blue Ribbon cans littered the floor of the 40 Watt at the end of every night.

But the band is so much more than an excuse to drink excessively and explore your Southern heritage. In a time when the culture industry has abandoned itself to pre-packaged sound bites of pseudo-art, Truckers puts forth some of the most honest and earnest music ever heard. The band reaches out to those that normally have no concern for social issues and tells a story. The group gives names and faces to the horrors our social model creates, the economic inequities that have both given rise to and, in many ways, held back Southern culture. Through the poetry of the band’s lyrics, issues such as incest, suicide, drugs, social injustice and economic disparity are more than just words; these terrible things are happening to our neighbors, our friends, our communities and our families. The first step to enacting change is facing the issues; Truckers takes the issues and spits them in your face, making it harder and harder to ignore with every listening.

Modern country music is arguably one of the most over-produced, manufactured and commodified music genres. While both rock and hip hop have intelligent, socially conscious artists that still get airplay (though often not as much as the booty-shakers), you don’t often hear intelligent music on country radio stations. The fact that Drive-By Truckers are still playing and recording, much less selling out multiple nights in a row during an economic downturn, shows that there are still progressive people throughout the South. Red state or blue state, Truckers fans know that, in one aspect or another, the old ways just aren’t working anymore. For our own sakes, be they issues of social or economic injustice, we need change. I’m just hoping that Truckers refuses to quit reminding us of our troubles until they’re remedied.