The Hellbound Drifters • A Brilliant Synthesis of Southern & Prog Rock Sensibilities

When you name your band The Hellbound Drifters, you are giving off hints of where you think your general journey is headed, as well as the pace and intentionality of your trek.

In the case of this sort of self-depreciation, words matter and the devil is in the details - mainly because you don’t know what you don’t know when you first start out.  For one, Hell might not be only be a “destination,” but something you may be forced to confront while you are still living.

And, as far as “drifting,” for every moment of unencumbered flow, there is likely another where you are momentarily stuck, needing energy and inertia to break you free and put you back on path.. 

The Hellbound Drifters, consisting of guitarist / singer Josh Corrion, bassist “Jypsy” James Marcet, drummer Terry Poirer and keyboardist Jaron Jock, grew up out of the original music scene that developed around Bemo’s Bar after Rob and Luann Ervin acquired it.  All four of these members can qualify to be called “old souls,” as they also cut their teeth by jamming and performing with previous generations of musicians who have worked the area. 

Though they originated as an outlaw country band, the need to fill longer live sets caused their songs and improvisations to stretch out, in the vein of Southern Rock icons like the Allman Brothers or prog rockers like Pink Floyd.

The band found a kindred spirit in Charlie Williams, the legendary Bemo’s sound engineer.  They clicked musically and in terms of lifestyle, often extending the night into morning at Williams’ nearby residence - where he happened to have recording gear.

It was in these informal sessions in 2016 - 2018 that the band’s recorded sound began to take shape.  Drawing on material written over a lifetime, the group began to record for fun; acoustic tracks and demos of songs that had been hanging around for a while.

As Marcet describes the band’s songwriting process: “For instance, when Josh brings us a song, it is pretty much complete.  And then I will listen to it and add ‘blue.’  Then Terry will come in and add something he feels.  All of this adds up to the final version.”

Corrion added, “Sometimes we are just trying some things.  Like when we recorded ‘Down To The Mississippi,’  I had been playing with Kyle Spear around 2012 and we did some cool Delta Blues songs and I thought that I wanted to write a song like that.  Or when we did the basic tracks to ‘Redemption,’ Charlie and I had been up all night and he asked if I had anything I wanted to work on.  I told him I had a song I had been writing for 10 years.  Under the circumstances, it had no business sounding as good as it does.”

But like I mentioned in the opening.  Sometimes Hell shows up and your journey screeches to a stop as you are snagged in unplanned events.  In this case, the unexpected passing of Williams in 2021 was a gut punch nobody in the local music community was ready to assimilate.  It was particularly a hit to the core members of the Drifters, as this was not only one of their closest friends, but as Marcet put it, “Charlie had the mind of a Jedi.  He was like the fifth Highwaymen to us.”

One of the core features of the outlaw spirit is the ability to pick up the pieces, assess your losses,  and move on accordingly.  Stoicism is the best refuge in the face of what seems like an unfair fate.  It’s how vagrants from cowboys to the Joads in Grapes of Wrath handled stuff.

The band continued to pour it into their music, eventually returning to the studio to work on their recordings, honing the output they had started working on with Williams seemed like the best way to honor his memory.

Well, given the multi-win night for their eponymous release at the 39th Annual Review Music Awards, they have managed to pull it off and then some.  This award-winning album that The Hellbound Drifters have put together is unlike anything I can think of from this area in the time I have been covering original music. 

If you want to imagine for a second that Ronnie Van Zandt era Lynyrd Skynyrd heard The Wall by Pink Floyd and decided to take a stab at a country prog concept album, you’d be close. The song cycle, consisting of seven original songs by Corrion and two by Marcet, covers a classic story of loss, rediscovery and redemption.

It is especially interesting that the work holds together so well since it consists of a group of songs developed over a long period of time and not as a unified writing project.  Given this fact it is unique that it makes such a concise statement.

In classic traditions of both Prog and Southern Rock, the songs tend to be longer, with moody instrumental intros firmly establishing a mood before weighing in with words or energetic improvised sections reinforcing the emotion of the last lyrical turn. 

The band used many of the original recordings with Williams for the basis of the finished tracks.  He lives on through acoustic guitars and the occasional deep baritone backing vocal in the final mixes.

In a time when many musical hybrids have been stripped of their humanity, tuned and quantized to the point of un-listenability, The Hellbound Drifters have made a totally human album.  Human sounds documenting the human experience.

The band has summer performances planned.  It is best to watch the Bemo’s Bar schedule to figure out when.  They are also working on “new” material, which often means songs older than those on the first album.  “I’ve got a whole lot of songs taking up space,” said Corrion.

It was Marcet that finally added, “I hope we keep this going.  I come out of practice smiling, like I just came out of church.”

Someone’s going to need to break it to Jypsy James that’s not the way to get to Hell …