Note: This is the first in a weekly series entitled Rock & Roll Means Well, which was also the name of a 2008 tour embarked upon by The Hold Steady and Drive-By Truckers. I’m going to try and focus on current American music done that, I dunno, belongs together.

This is also the first in an attempt to post an MP3 a week. I hope this works.

First, I should get something out of the way:

MIKE COOLEY IS A FUCKING GENIUS.

There, I’ve said it. I’ve thought about that line a million times, anytime one of his songs comes on my iPod shuffle as I’m riding up Broadway in Oakland, anytime he took the microphone on the two shows I saw last November at the Fillmore in San Francisco, and anytime I put on his playlist I’ve made of all the Cooley Drive-By Truckers songs…it just, fucking, works.

I’ve always kind of liked the Drive-By Truckers. I first heard them sometime around 2001 when a guy I’d met through his blog put a song of theirs, the ultra-fine “One Of These Days” (from DBT’s 1999 album Pizza Deliverance) on a mix CD that I ended up with as part of some weblog community thing. I honestly forget how we met, but me and Armando hung out a couple time around North Carolina as a I traveled around.

Anyways. I ended up putting the song on a mix CD I made called The Russian River: Songs For Rural Driving around the same time. I used to have a delivery route that I took up to Sonoma County in California every Wednesday, and the music matched the backroads landscape that I saw every week.

I had started to get into country music, American rock & roll, and, well, stuff that was old. Before that I had been rooted in current indie pop and indie rock releases, and before that I liked the punkier offerings the 1990’s had to offer. This was different, and “One Of These Days” fit right in.

I kept after Drive-By Truckers, putting each additional release on my iPod, loving some songs, being ho-hum about others, and then they booked a tour with my new favorite band, The Hold Steady, and they called that tour Rock & Roll Means Well.

I went to both shows in San Francisco, but the first one had DBT headlining, and then I realized why I LOVED some songs and thought others were OK: Mike Cooley. I guess I knew there were different singers and songwriters in the band, but it wasn’t until I saw the live show that I knew who sang all, and I mean all, of my very favorite songs. “Carl Perkin’s Caddilac,” (a favorite of mine on my monthly Honky-Tonk DJ set), “Lisa’s Birthday,” the kind of funny but super real “Bob,” “Gravity’s Gone, “Zip City,” “Women Without Whiskey,” “72 (This Highway’s Mean),” and “Shut Up And Get On The Plane” from Southern Rock Opera, “Marry Me,” “Three Dimes Down,” and “Self-Destructive Zones” all from Brighter Than Creation’s Dark. It was all Cooley. All his storytelling songwriting genius and I instantly realized that I liked, loved, Drive-By Truckers even more than I thought.

So, how to pick a song, one song to feature. Last night, riding up Broadway on my 1976 Schwinn, coming back from a good air hockey tournament and even better Belgian ales, “A Ghost To Most” from 2008’s excellent Brighter Than Creation’s Dark came on my little green iPod shuffle and I started singing along. It felt good. It felt GREAT, I slowed up a bit to let the song finish before I got home, riding past Kaye’s, the Kragen, the Burger King, singing aloud:

Drive-By Truckers: A Ghost To Most:

Fucking tops. It’s a powerful song, it’s a song that I get, and it’s a song, like most of Cooley’ songs, that tells a story. I encourage you to seek out all of the songs mention above, and hopefully you’ll get some of the magic that I do.

This post was longer than I’d wanted it to be, but fuck it. Check in next Monday for another MP3.