Released in May of 1999, Pizza Deliverance marks the end of an era for Drive-By Truckers. Songs about presidential phalluses and punk rock heroes shoving objects up their asses would soon give way to less scatological (though no less successful) attempts at humor, while the blowsier sonics of this lo-fi era would henceforth be replaced by larger ambitions and an almost single-minded professionalism. This is not to the band’s detriment, as Drive-By Truckers would make many better records than Pizza Deliverance, though it could reasonably be argued that the album features the band’s highest concentration of great and enduring songs. Though many of the tunes on Pizza Deliverance pre-date the recording of Gangstabilly (earlier recordings of the former’s “Bulldozers And Dirt” and “Nine Bullets” actually comprised the band’s debut 7″), the album holds the distinction of being the first great Drive-By Truckers album; it practically bulges under the weight of songs most budding tunesmiths would give their fretting hand to have written. There is a great scene in the 2009 Drive-By Truckers documentary The Secret To A Happy Ending in which Temple University Professor of American Studies Bryant Simon praises Cooley’s “Uncle Frank,” featured here, for better articulating the collateral damage caused by the TVA than any thesis he’s read. “Bulldozers and Dirt,” appearing here in a less folksy version than appears on the band’s prohibitively rare first single, is like a fully developed film treatment disguised as a sleazy sing-along, while the confessional and equally anthemic “The Company I Keep” might be the finest loser anthem not penned by someone named Westerberg. Best of all is the late-album pairing of Patterson’s poignant and perfect “Tales Facing Up” with Cooley’s “Love Like This,” one of the most honest and emotionally bracing portrayals of alcoholic coupledom ever written. The album was recorded in the old farmhouse Hood’s family was renting, and sounds it: instruments bleed into vocal mics, chairs creak, mistakes are made. The charm of Pizza Deliverance is in its deceptive simplicity; it’s the kind of record that sounds easy to make until you actually try. Old school fans occasionally bemoan the band’s shift away from the gloriously raw approach of these early days, but Hood and Cooley left this style behind with good cause: on Pizza Deliverance, they’d already perfected it.