ATO Records To Issue Pre-Drive-By Truckers Band Adam’s House Cat’s Debut Album

Mike Cooley and Patterson Hood met exactly 33 years ago today and soon after formed the band Adam’s House Cat in the Muscles Shoals area of Alabama. Adam’s House Cat recorded one album before dissolving in 1991. The album went unreleased and Hood and Cooley would go on to form Drive-By Truckers in Athens, Georgia in 1996.

ATO Records will finally issue Adam’s House Cat’s album Town Burned Down on September 21. The album was remixed by longtime DBT producer David Barbe and mastered by Greg Calbi and comes with archival photos and liner notes written by Hood.

Adam’s House Cat was initially made up of Hood, Cooley, late drummer John Cahoon and bassist Chuck Tremblay. They began recording Town Burned Down in late-1990 at Muscle Shoals Sound Recording Studio with producer/engineer Steve Melton. Tremblay left in early-1991 and was replaced by Chris Quillen who was later killed in a car accident weeks before he was to be a founding member of DBT. Without a record deal, the original Town Burned Down 24-track tapes were misplaced after Muscle Shoals Sound was sold and after being sent to a facility in Mississippi, Melton’s mixes were destroyed in a tornado in 2011.

Recently, three boxes of tapes labeled “ADAM’S HOUSE CAT” mysteriously showed up at Barbe’s studio vault in Athens containing the Town Burned Down unmixed 2-inch master tapes. An additional “EP’s worth of songs recorded the previous year” was also in the boxes. Hood became determined in part to release Town Burned Down after Tremblay suffered a nearly fatal heart attack in ealy-2017. In February 2018, Barbe was enlisted to prepare the record for its first official release and on April 16, 2018 Hood, Cooley and Tremblay came together for the first time in 27 years to help oversee the remixing.

“Finally releasing Town Burned Down brings a sort of closure to one of the saddest and most important chapters of mine and Cooley’s lives,” Hood wrote in the liner notes. “The years we spent pounding out these songs made us the people and artists that we have later become but we carried with us a darkness from never having been able to get the album out. The sound of these songs blasting out of the control room after all of these years while Cooley, Chuck and I grinned from ear to ear has truly been one of the most joyous events of my entire life. Songs from literally half of my life ago that somehow still seem vital to me all of these years later.”

Stream “Runaway Train” below:

Town Burned Down Tracklist

1. Lookout Mountain
2. Town Burned Down
3. Runaway Train
4. Down On Me
5. 6 O’ Clock Train
6. Buttholeville
7. Child Abuse
8. Love Really Sucks
9. Kiss My Baby
10. Shot Rang Out
11. Long Time Ago
12. Cemeteries