When Rich Ivey felt the creative jolt that would develop into Woke County Speedway, he’d been revisiting old work.
“I went down the rabbit hole of myself,” Ivey told the INDY, speaking on a video call from his Durham apartment, “which is embarrassing to admit.”
What he uncovered, down in that rabbit hole, were songs he’d written years ago for a punk duo called ISS; the lyrics, “tongue-in-cheek and serious at the same time,” struck him anew. “These are basically country songs,” he recalled thinking, and Woke County Speedway—an alt-country band with a bristly punk heart—was born.
Demos followed, which Ivey sent to longtime Triangle-area collaborators Devon Tuttle (drums) and Josh Lawson (guitar). Nathan Price, former director of the Hopscotch Music Festival, joined on bass, and Matt Wentz, Eastern NC-based guitar ace, rounded out the band’s lineup: “killers through and through,” Ivey called them, who bring “real deal sophistication to my basic-ass caveman chords.”
Lawson, who joined the video call from the Outer Banks, singled out Wentz for the distinction of “first chair” among the guitarists in the rollicking five-man orchestra that is Woke County Speedway, and Ivey concurred: “Like Josh said, he’s gnarly. He can play anything.”
About a year and a half after their first practice together, the band is gearing up for a busy couple of days. Their self-titled debut album is slated for release on October 9, and they join MJ Lenderman the following day for a free matinee show at the American Tobacco Campus as part of Psychic Hotline and Sylvan Esso’s Good Moon Festival in Durham, now in its third iteration since 2022.
Lenderman and Woke County Speedway descend, in part, from the same family of slacker-country forebears: Drive-By Truckers, Uncle Tupelo, Silver Jews. (William Tyler, erstwhile member of the Silver Jews, will premiere his film “Time Indefinite” as part of the same Good Moon matinee.)
“I’ve spent a lot of time with the whole David Berman lineage,” Ivey said, a fact that’s evident in both the maudlin gutter poetry of his lyrics—“You can’t cry into a beer you can’t afford,” he sings on “No Happy Hours”—and his lazily beleaguered delivery over twangy, crunchy guitars.
“We can talk Dave Berman all day long,” Ivey said, “but to me, lyrically, the punk stuff is just as good.” The English band Crass is a favorite, and most songs on the album share its terse, confrontational spirit. “Reverse GB,” the album’s raucous opener, for instance, ends with Ivey grumbling, “Just shut up and let me be a drag.”
“There’s a lot of humor and a lot of seriousness going on at the same time,” Ivey explained, taking intermittent gulps from a large glass of beer. “I think that’s probably what a lot of my favorite writers do: approach serious matters with some levity, because if you’re only serious all the time, it could just eat you alive.”
(As the last two tracks on the album, “Sisyphean Ass” and “Existential Whip,” indicate, Ivey has spent plenty of time with Camus and Sartre, whom he finds “hilarious,” but Mark Twain is his real muse.)
The band’s name itself, a pun on a NASCAR track in Raleigh, is just “more idiocy,” said Lawson, though Ivey really does enjoy the race track: “I like loud noises. And it’s BYOB.” At least two friends tried to veto the name, according to Ivey, fearing that it would be taken the wrong way, but what kind of punk airs on the side of caution? And besides, it’s clear enough where Woke County Speedway’s commitments lie: one of their early shows, in February of this year, was a benefit for Somos Durham, an organization that works to empower the Latiné community and defend immigrant rights.
Indeed, Woke County Speedway is “as earnest as I get,” Ivey said.
The evidence is clearest on the almost-title track, “Woke County Speed,” a grimly funny song about living on the verge of collapse, which doles out tragedy and absurdity in quick succession. “I’ve been stuck with a her-sized hole in my chest,” Ivey groans, before narrating his fleet-footed escape from a bar fight he’d picked with a much taller man. (“She’d not be too proud of the things I’ve been doing,” Ivey sings.)
At the end of the track, having laid bare his pain and humiliation, and having told a couple of funny stories along the way, Ivey expresses his gratitude, quite affectingly, to the people who looked out for him: “Thanks to all those in my life who’ve been taking my boots off at night,” he growls, never entirely letting down his guard. “I know what I’m doing ain’t right, but I’ll try to do better tomorrow.”
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