First I'd like to start off by saying how many great songs are still left I actually changed my mind a few times before picking this one so if you ever wanted to do one of these threads there is still plenty of awesome choices.
Album: Song:Tornadoes This song happens to be one of the oldest in the DBT catalog written back in 1988 and also one of the greatest. It's a song full of imagery that few can pull off and is easily one of my favorites. I can't find the whole story Hood posted about it online but I'm sure someone else here knows where it is.
This song is hands down one of the best they've done and I'm amazed it took us this far into these threads to hit this one.
Patterson Hood's "Tornadoes" was originally written in 1988 in reaction to the closing concert for the Adam’s House Cat Nightmare Tour. The Nightmare Tour set list was composed almost exclusively of songs containing metaphors or imagery of trains, but the lack of the tour’s success forced Hood and his band to abandon the concept and start afresh. Hood read an eyewitness account of the tornado in the local paper the next day and wrote "Tornadoes" after reading her statement that "it sounded like a train."
The clouds started forming at five o'clock pm The funnel clouds touched down five miles north of Russellville Sirens were blowing, clouds spat rain and as the things came threw, it sounded like a train
"It came without no warning" said Bobbi Jo McLean She and husband Nolen always loved to watch the rain It sucked him out the window, he ain't come home again All she can remember is "It sounded like a train"
Pieces of that truck stop, litter up the highway, I been told And I hear that missing trucker ended up in Kansas (or maybe it was Oz).
The Nightmare Tour ended for my band and me the night all the shit went down A homecoming concert, the night the tornadoes hit my hometown. The few who braved the weather were sucked out of the auditorium I can still remember the sound of their applause in the rain as it echoed through them storm clouds, I swear, It sounded like a train.
Sub wrote:This song happens to be one of the oldest in the DBT catalog written back in 1988 and also one of the greatest. It's a song full of imagery that few can pull off and is easily one of my favorites. I can't find the whole story Hood posted about it online but I'm sure someone else here knows where it is.
This is when the Wayback Machine comes in handy because, to my knowledge, that is the only way to find this story (other than trying to search for it on this board). For whatever reason, it hasn't been included on the most recent version of the official DBTs website.
Trains of Thought 1988 (or too many goddamn train songs)
Adam’s House Cat would frequently go months without a gig. Certainly not for a lack of wanting to play, hell, we loved to play more than most. We practiced all the time. Chuck had to drive 75 miles each way to practice through hellish traffic, and still we frequently (at least in those early days) practiced three times a week. We wrote prolifically and had well over 150 (somewhat) original songs.
Once we decided to write a concept album (remember, this was the mid eighties, just to show how out of touch with the trends and times we were). An album of train songs. I always loved train songs. My granddad was a hobo back in the 1930’s. He was twelve years old at the height of the depression and he split for two years. He lived in box cars and saw the whole country at appoint in time that will never exist again. At fourteen he came back home and no one ever asked him where he’d been or even acknowledged that he had ever left. Two of my earliest memories were of Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” and a lullaby that my grandmother (Sissy) used to sing to me as I went to sleep. “One night it was dark and was storming, when along came a tramp in the rain He was making his way to some station, to catch a long distance train.........”
We wrote eleven train songs, each using the (admittedly overused) train symbolism for something else. As a band we were eclectic as hell so each song was stylistically different from the others. We four-tracked the thing and for a short time sold cassettes of it at gigs.
Around this time, we had a song that appeared on a nationally distributed compilation. We got some national and regional press and went out and played more than we ever had. In the fall of 88 we played forty shows around the southeast and bad luck met us at every one. (In retrospect, considering what morons we were, we actually got off fairly easy, but at the time we were generally freaked out and pissed). Early on we called it The Nightmare Tour. During this period, Mike’s father died of cancer, one night we had over $1500.00 worth of equipment stolen out of the back of our truck. (We toured in a 66 Ford pickup). One night in Tuscaloosa I had my wallet lifted with our entire door + my day job payday (two weeks worth). We were to end the tour with a homecoming show in Florence AL. (Florence is one of the quad-cities that makes up the Muscle Shoals area in northwest Alabama. I lived there for twenty eight years). It was the early 80’s before it was legal to sell alcohol there. (When I was in high school we drove up to the Tennessee state line to by beer and over an hour to Savannah TN to buy liquor). Even today, the local laws and regulations make it a particularly tough town to run a bar, and the few who did were more inclined towards booking big-hair cover bands with truck loads of lights and equipment. Our closest home gigs were in Huntsville or Birmingham (an hour to an hour and a half away).
For our homecoming show, we rented the old Shoals Theatre. We rented a big enough sound system, hired an opening act, and bought ads in the local paper and radio. We expected to draw four to five hundred (and I’m sure that at that time we could have).
At around 5:30 that day, while we were having soundcheck, a tornado went through the area destroying a truck stop and a bunch of homes (mobile and otherwise). Seventeen people came to our show and the next Monday I had to take out a loan to cover the debts that we incurred. Because of our recent press attention, a couple of big record-company guys (from Nashville, two and a half hours to the north) came down to see us. One of them had seen us earlier that fall and had assured us that we were going to be the “next big thing”. He was bringing his business partner with him. Unfortunately, he missed his turn in Athens AL. and drove another hour south before he realized it. He headed north up the two-laned 157, right into the heart of the storm. By the time they got to Florence, they were both very tired and very cranky. Seeing us play our set in the cavernous empty theatre only added to their misery.
After our set, the big record company guys and I went across the street to Cobblestone’s Restaurant to have a drink and discuss the show. They were gnarly and I was downright depressed. The partner asked “So, what’s the deal with all the goddamn train songs?”
The next morning, I had to be at work at 8:00 am. When I walked into Ken Nix Pharmacy, the newspaper gave full coverage of the tornado and it’s damage. The headline quoted an eyewitness. “It Sounded Like A Train”.
The first time I saw DBT play live was on Decoration Day at the Abbey Pub in Chicago. As for most on the board, I thought that there was absolutely no fat to that album. I never skipped a single song. I was extremely impressed when The Dirty South came out and was almost as strong, except for the second song. I always found myself skipping Tornadoes on the cd and downright loathed it live. (It was always my beer and piss break song) And it seemed to be played at every show!!!
During A Blessing and Curse and BTCD it seemed to take a little bit of hiatus from the setlist, or at least shows that I had attended. And I didn't miss it at all. In that time I had learned the meaning behind the song and that gave a little credence to the song to me.
And then at The Vic Theatre on the Big To Do tour they played it and it was absolutely masterful!! It had grown on me so much during its absence and is now my favorite song on TDS. I would love to hear it this weekend at one of the Wisconsin shows.
Did anybody think that Jason tried to harmonize to loudly at times during this back in the day? I like the strength but frailty in Patterson's voice when he sings this one.
A bunch of discombobulated thoughts....sorry for wasting your time reading it.
1. Cubfan, about Jason going overboard on his backup vocals, definitely. Around 99.9% of the time.
2. Patterson's color on Tornadoes gets me every time. I can't imagine working for something with all of your heart, finally thinking you're getting there, throwing your whole lot into your big show, yet only to see it all fall apart right in front of your face. And for it to be totally out of your control. To understate things, it must've been so damn sad to live through (and of course, the damage from the tornado must have provided a ton of perspective, but I bet it still sucked). I give AHC/what turned into DBT a ton of credit for refusing to quit - I think of it as a motivational story.
I've seen the DBT's play it once, in Leamington this year just after the tornadoes Alabama. Still one of the two DBT songs that have made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.
"Guitars talk. If you really want to write a song, ask a guitar." Neil Young
This should probably be reserved for the blasphemy thread but I've always liked the story better than the song. Not that it's a bad song but I'd read that story on the DBTs site many times before I actually heard the tune. When I finally did, it turned out to be sort of a letdown.
This is one of those tracks that sold me on DBT in the early days. In 2004 I watched a twister rip through a grain elevator 5 miles north of Riceville, IA which if you draw out all the potential syllables sounds like Russleville. In 2008 in Des Moines, just months after two separate F5s ravaged Liitle Sioux and Parkersburg, IA and the Des Moines, Cedar, and Iowa rivers all way over flood stage, Patterson walks on stage and goes "I heard ya'll have had some shitty weather around here" and launches right into it. Epic.
As someone else said, all us midwesterners certainly can ID with this one.
