The bad boys of trucking music are back with their fourth studio album in seven years, “The Death-Defying Adventures of The Franklin County Trucking Company.”
With heavy rotation now on Sirius XM’s Outlaw Country channel and an Outlaw Country Cruise under their belts, not to mention 26,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, it’s been a wild ride for the subgenre's super band. The Franklin County Trucking Company find themselves among contemporary balladeers of the big rig firmly in the top tier.
The band began as a side project of three front men from three different bands, all prolific songwriters with a shared love of truck-driving songs, especially those that fall under the Rig Rock category, a type of hard-driving, take-no-prisoners trucking music championed by the late Jeremy Tepper, program director of Sirius XM Outlaw Country. Add a drummer with chops like Taylor Sphere and call it The Franklin County Trucking Company, the name an homage to the hardscrabble county where singer-guitarist Sean Hopkins and guitarist "Skinny Jim" Rotramel met as teenagers working in a butcher shop. The history of Franklin County in Southern Illinois includes generations-long dependence on coal mining and an inordinate frequency of mine explosions.
There was the Zeigler Number 1 explosion, which killed around 50 miners, the Old Ben Number 11 claiming 17. "The Orient Number 2 was the big explosion,” according to Jim Rotramel. “119 miners died.”
The event was memorialized in a Sean Hopkins composition, December 21st, 1951, with his previous band Dallas Alice, and it’s an outrage the song isn’t more widely known. “Growing up, there wasn’t anyone in [West Frankfort, Illinois] who didn’t have a relative that was killed or hurt in a mine,” Hopkins said.
Somehow all of that bleeds into Franklin County's sound. You’re not going to hear some sappy, pedal steel-slathered tearjerking recitation here. What you will hear in "The Death Defying Adventures of The Franklin County Trucking Company" is an unapologetically blasphemous and triumphant blast of sound, as in "Raise Hell, Praise Dale!" on the new record.
There’s a well-known scene in the 1997 movie “As Good as It Gets,” directed by James L. Brooks and starring Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt. Nicholson’s character, author Melvin Udall, is asked by an adoring female fan how he writes women characters so well.
“I think of a man,” the certainly misanthropic Udall says, “and I take away reason and accountability.”
“He never had time for vacations, so the kids rode along up with him.They didn’t have money for Disney or Dolly, just a sleeper cab Holiday Inn.”
--Sean Hopkins, from the song 'Work Hard, Be Humble'
I had to know just how this band could write truckers so well. Songwriting duties are shouldered by both Hopkins and Rotramel, as well as bassist Eddie Spaghetti of Supersuckers renown. None of these men have ever driven a tractor-trailer. Yet so many of their songs could easily be retitled “The Life and Times of Long Haul Paul.”
Yes, my own children spent many a summer night in a "sleeper cab Holiday Inn."
I had a chance to sit down with Hopkins and Rotramel. Excerpts from our conversation follow.
[Related: Faces of the Road: Canadian songwriter/owner-operator Mike Murchison]
Long Haul Paul: Congratulations on this album! You guys just keep cranking out these great songs. You’ve got a deep bench in the songwriting department.
Jim Rotramel: We’re proud of this one. We feel like we kind of hit the mark with it a little better than the other ones. Maybe we've just got it down pat after four albums.
LHP: There’s something more cohesive about this album. I mean there are some great, great songs on your earlier albums, but it's almost like you've pivoted away from the anti-hero trucker guy. ... [Case in point] this second to last track, "Work Hard, Be Humble," I keep going back to that.
Sean Hopkins: Yeah that one was mine. Both Jim and I, and Eddie, all write separately, and then we sort of share them, but they don't really come together until we get to the studio. “Work Hard, Be Humble” was like a three-quarter country waltz when I wrote it and then it turned into sort of a ... heartland rocker, Mellencamp-type stuff, you know.
LHP: What I love about that song is I see myself so much in it. I think we put together enough money to take our kids on one vacation. Everything else, I had bought a brand-new Western Star with two bunks and they all saw the country in a Western Star.
Sean Hopkins: There’s a lyric right there! "They all saw the country in a Western Star."
LHP: …And [as your song says], "they’re all good hard workers and they all show up on-time," so that song really hit home for me. But I’ve got to ask -- how do you guys keep hitting the nail on the head? None of you have driven over-the-road. How do you write truckers so well?
Hopkins (pictured) and Rotramel hail from the hardscrabble coal country of Southern Illinois.Preston Joshu
I also noticed that with the truck drivers a lot of that seems generational, like you do it, your kids do it. With coal mining, and I mean especially where we're from, I've got friends that are coal miners whose dads were miners, whose grandpas were killed in the mine explosion 70 years ago. It’s so generational that you can easily take that to any blue-collar job. ... In these small Midwestern towns you do what your kids do.
But with that much talent in one room as Franklin County Trucking Company have, you’d think there would also be a lot of ego. I wondered how they managed that. Rotramel, who for his part has toured Europe 27 times as the front man for the The Number 9 Black Tops, described how they work this way:
Jim Rotramel: You have to humble yourself for the sake of the song and do what's best for the song. Eddie might have a suggestion or I might have a suggestion. Maybe it doesn't need this but [we’re] going to be willing to try and see what comes of it. [With] three different songwriters we've all kind of got three or four songs [for the album] and we kind of know what they're going to do and to not be bossy to each other.
Skinny Jim Rotramel (left) and Eddie Spaghetti at workPreston Joshu
Now, with the perhaps most actualized iteration of their sound in this new record, its release is somehow bittersweet as Skinny Jim laments the loss of two of the band's greatest champions.
Jim Rotramel: Mojo Nixon was the first one that gave us our big break on Outlaw Country when we put out “The Further Adventures of The Franklin County Trucking Company,” our second album. I sent emails with a nice little letter to all the deejays, and Mojo was the first one that replied back. He was like, "I like this. I like Eddie, I like the Supersuckers. Here’s my address. Mail me a copy." So I mailed him the copy, and I kind of knew a little bit about him, and I knew that he was a big barbecue fan, so I sent him some barbecue sauces from a couple local joints that are some of my favorites. One morning I woke up and there were all these orders for the album on the website. Friends on Facebook were telling me they heard us on Mojo.
They would later get to meet Nixon in person when the band performed on the 2023 Outlaw Country Cruise.
Jim Rotramel: I remember our first show. [Mojo] was dead center and singing along to the first three songs, singing right along to it! Man, that was something! And he finds Sean and I later on that evening kind of walking through one of the bar sections. He says "Boys, boys! It was loud! It was crazy! It was rock and roll! And I [expletive] loved it! Keep doing it! Mojo loves it!" That’s all we wanted to hear, you know.”
Nixon would pass away nearly one year to the day after that meeting. And by some diabolical confirmation of the old bromide of troubles coming in twos, the aforementioned programming director for Outlaw Country, Jeremy Tepper, died four months after Nixon.
Jim Rotramel: “We’re bummed [Tepper] couldn't hear this because after he kind of turned his head towards us a little bit. It makes you want to make a better product. It means a whole lot too when you get somebody that you respect and [you’ve known] a lot longer than they've known about you. I remember listening to Tepper on the Road Dog channel [with] my old band in the early 2000s. We were out West and we’d keep that Road Dog channel on all night, and he was the guy before he was on Outlaw Country. I put a lot of miles in with Tepper before I even knew him. He pulled for us."
On behalf of everyone who has ever heard their life story in a Franklin County Trucking Company song, we’re still pulling for you, boys.
The album can be ordered online via the band's website.
More installments in Long Haul Paul's "Faces of the Road" series of oral histories/profiles and interviews.
