With a guitar punch like the Replacements and Drivin' n' Cryin', a bit of R.E.M.'s melodic sense, and a smart punk rocker's unvarnished view of the world, Adam's House Cat was a band that should have made a splash in the alternative rock scene of the late '80s and early '90s. That didn't happen, but the group's two founders, Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley, would take the lessons they learned from the band and put them to good use in the Drive-By Truckers, the group they formed five years after Adam's House Cat broke up. A clever, hard-rocking band that was in the wrong place (Muscle Shoals, Alabama) at the right time, Adam's House Cat earned critical acclaim and a small but loyal cult following during their years together, but fans would have to wait nearly 30 years after their breakup before the group's sole album finally surfaced. The story of Adam's House Cat begins in 1985, when 21-year-old Patterson Hood agreed to split the rent on an apartment in North Florence, Alabama with 22-year-old Mike Cooley. Hood and Cooley didn't know each other well at the time, but they quickly bonded over their love of music and guitars. They began passing songs back and forth, one of which was a Hood original that included the quizzical Southern expression "I wouldn't know him from Adam's house cat." When Hood and Cooley decided to form a band, the phrase gave them their name. Recruiting drummer Chuck Tremblay, a veteran on the local bar scene, and working with a number of short-term bassists before they settled on John Cahoon, Adam's House Cat began playing out regularly, but they found few opportunities to play in nearby Muscle Shoals, once a major music center in the South but by the mid-'80s reduced to a few clubs that only booked cover bands. Undaunted, they often hit the road, frequently playing Birmingham and Huntsville and making their way into Tennessee and Mississippi. In 1988, Musician magazine sponsored a contest to find America's Best Unsigned Band, and Adam's House Cat entered, submitting a demo of their tune "Smiling at Girls." The judges (who included T-Bone Burnett, Elvis Costello, Mitchell Froom, and Mark Knopfler) picked Adam's House Cat as one of the Top Ten entries, and the track appeared on a compilation CD that brought the group nationwide attention. Adam's House Cat were courted by a number of potential managers and record-label A&R executives, yet a firm deal failed to appear. AHC took matters into their own hands, first releasing a four-song cassette, Trains of Thought, and then beginning work on a full-length album. In November 1990, producer and engineer Steve Melton caught the band on tape at the Muscle Shoals Sound Recording Studio, laying down 15 songs live to 24-track tape in a single day. In January 1991, Hood returned to the studio to cut his lead vocals on the same day George H.W. Bush launched Operation Desert Storm, beginning the War on Iraq. Progress on completing the album was slow, in part because the band was short on money, and midway through the year John Cahoon dropped out of the lineup. Chris Quillen soon took over on bass, and contributed vocals to the track "Long Time Ago." Melton completed a mix of the album, but Adam's House Cat lost momentum when Hood and Cooley relocated to Memphis, Tennessee, and in September 1991 they quietly disbanded. In the wake of Adam's House Cat's breakup, the album was shelved, and the tapes went missing after the Muscle Shoals studio closed, with Melton's final mixes landing in the tape library at Malaco Studios in Jackson, Mississippi. Those recordings were lost when the studio was destroyed by a tornado. After a falling out, Hood and Cooley renewed their friendship and musical partnership when both relocated to Athens, Georgia, and they began blocking out plans for a new band. They invited Chris Quillen to play bass in the new group, but Quillen lost his life in an auto accident a few weeks before the Drive-By Truckers played their first gig in 1996. The DBT were supporting their second album, 1999's Pizza Deliverance, when John Cahoon died. Many years later, the original 2" multi-track tapes from the Adam's House Cat sessions were located and returned to Chase Park Transduction Studios, where producer and engineer David Barbe had recorded the majority of the Drive-By Truckers albums. Hood and Cooley were pondering what to do with the tapes when Chuck Tremblay nearly lost his life in a heart attack in mid-2017. Hood then pledged to complete the album and see it released in 2018, and he was good to his word. Hood recut his vocals for the songs, he remixed the album with Cooley and Barbe, and Town Burned Down, the long-lost Adam's House Cat album, was released in September 2018. To celebrate the album's release, Hood and Cooley teamed up with Tremblay to play a handful of Adam's House Cat shows as the opening act on the Drive-By Truckers' fall 2018 tour. ~ Mark Deming