2175. “Cassie’s Brother” by The Drive-By Truckers
Listen to it at Last.fm.
“Cassie’s Brother tells the happy side of Steve and Cassie Gaines. Cassie was a member of The Honkettes. She asked the band to let her virtuoso musician brother, Steve, sit in on some Skynyrd sessions and they were all blown away by his work.
You know, I’ll admit it now. This album really doesn’t work as an actual stage opera - or, rather, not one with a conventional story. I’m going to keep plugging away at the story, because that’s what I do, but I think it would probably have been better to approach this whole project like a Lynyrd Skynyrd version of Beatlemania - with Drive-By Trucker songs.
Anyhow, our hero finds one particular bundle of plastic flowers and it gets him to thinking about his own mortality. Naturally, being a southern rock musician, the strongest image of his mortality isn’t a car crash, but Skynyrd’s plane crash. He imagines the moment where Steve Gaines joins the band, and how proud his sister must have been, and how excited Ronnie Van Zandt and the rest of the band was.