Strung Out On Some
Face
(The All-Booze
Limerence Mix)
by Bill Tuomala
There
is this girl. Or there was this girl. I don't know if she's in my past yet or
not. You encounter these girls and you know that they are destined to be part
of your past at some point. This certain girl works or worked at the dive bar
down the street. Her
name is Sheri but I call her Cherry. It's something I said cute-drunk once
after beers and a shot; later I halfway convinced myself I did it an attempt
that my life be like The Outsiders. Cute-drunk things like that would happen to us, if you could say
that there was an "us." It was a time when the flirtations were
still in their early phases, those heady nights where it's all fun and games
and we were still circling each other. Nobody was making a move to get close,
to move it anywhere beyond the client/bartender relationship. When strangers
sitting next to me and say: "Is there something going on between you
two? There's something about the way she looks at you." I
had fallen for her months earlier, but a night of mixed-up confusion set the
tone for the future. Friday night loud and she stared me down with those big
brown eyes. With her elbows on the bar and head low, me lowering my head to
match hers, us both talking soft so that others couldn't hear, she asked
conspiratorially: "Do you want to ask me out?" Sure, I said,
realizing that every dream I have ever had about being with a Service Girl
Crush was soon to come true. She told me to meet her at the back table by the
pay phone. We met there and she arrived with two shot glasses full of this
stuff called Liquid Viagra (Jagermeister and Red Bull.) We shot 'em up and
later that night we even did another one that I bought. See, she hadn't
talked secretly about love at all back at the bar - she had asked: "Do
you want to do a shot?" So shots became our ritual. I was hooked. And
somewhere in the midst of the flirting and the shared smiles and the silly
stories like the above, there had been a Valentine's Day. And for that I had
made her a mix CD of songs all about drinking and being in bars. Because, you
know, deep down I am a fucking romantic. Hence,
the following mix: The Jeff Beck Group, "I've Been
Drinking" - Frank Sinatra
recorded this under its proper title, "Drinking Again," and
according to questionable online sources, his is the most-known version. I
downloaded the Sinatra - it's pretty cool, makes me want to wander the
streets of New York City some slow night and hit bars. But I've never been
there and have no plans to go anytime soon, so this rock 'n' roll version
will have to do. (And yep, when it's yours truly we're talking about ... rock
'n' roll versions do just fine.) Rod Stewart on vocals and Beck (rock's real one) on guitars, showing off as only he can do. Hank Thompson, "A Six Pack To Go" - The only place I have heard this is on 800
AM, that little classic country station out of St. Cloud. The narrator has
spent Saturday blowing his paycheck "honky tonkin' around" the
town. Now it's closing time and he's hitting up the bartender for one last
beer and a sixer to take home because on Sunday he'll be feeling low. You
have to admire a man who thinks ahead - no Hudson-like Sunday run for this
guy! The song swings hard too, meaning that Hank T. knew his way around both kinds of music. Roger Miller, "Chug-A-Lug" - If the Violent Femmes had been as good with
their novelty songs as their cult believes, they still wouldn't have been
able to touch Miller in his prime. And anybody who writes a song about the
joys of getting drunk, trashed, wasted, with references to the 4-H and the FFA is one decadent mofo. Van Halen, "Bottoms Up!" - Eddie plucks away at blooze riffs and runs
here so you gotta believe his otherwise incredulous claim to a Clapton
fixation. (Eddie played with such joy, while ol' EC has always seemed so old
and lifeless.) This song is likely a leading case for VH detractors, as it's
just a noisy anthem (though with great harmony vocals courtesy of that bass
player everybody seems to write off) about the need to tip 'em back. After
'fessing up to "sitting here half the night," Diamond Dave offers
the most honest reason ever stated in song why we make those regular treks to
the bar: "I came here to waste some time." Merle Haggard, "Swingin' Doors" - A statement of purpose. The dude's marriage
is over, so he decides to become a regular (nay, a fixture!) at the local
bar. Merle was thirty or thirty-one years old when this was recorded, but
he's one of those singers who always seems to be a set age no what the year
is. In his case, I have him at 57, always. This song has a classic
I'm-such-a-victim: "Thanks to you IÕm always here to closing time."
But instead of feeling sorry for him or mocking him, by the time the tune's
two-and-three-quarters-minutes are up you may instead go find a dive bar of
your own to wallow in. John Lee Hooker, "One Bourbon One Scotch
One Beer" - I'm not
entirely anti-Thorogood. Every whiteboy American teen generation has its
boogie heroes before they (hopefully) discover the real stuff; and for those
of us coming of age in the first half of the eighties, George Thorogood was
one of them. Imagine then my surprise in the late eighties to find Hooker on
some show on cable TV performing this. I knew it was his song, but figured it
could only be heard by him on scratchy old vinyl from decades past. On TV,
Hooker projected this eerie aura of C-O-O-L. Thorogood has sounded mild to me
since. And apologies to Hooker - while a kid in my twenties I figured that I
would have had ordered one bourbon, one scotch, and one beer all at once at
some point in my life. But I have hit middle age and don't see it happening
as I have never acquired a taste for scotch. Jerry Lee Lewis, "What's Made Milwaukee
Famous (Has Made A Loser Out Of Me)" - Best captured in Rock Dreams. The Killer is fat, his hair is long and no
longer rockabilly. Neither is he, he made a deal to go country to win fans back
after the scandal of marrying his second-cousin-twice-removed. (Pull that off
in Europe and they'll call you "King.") He drinks too much, takes
piles of pills (recommended reading: Hellfire by Nick Tosches) and plays the rocker in live
performances. In Rock Dreams,
he wanders the empty streets of some American city drunk and greasy, a bottle
in his hands. He has nowhere to go but to tomorrow night's show. This will go
on for weeks until Jerry Kennedy calls him back. Kiss, "Cold Gin" - The coolest thing about this song is that
cymbals sound that Peter Criss does during the intro. The riff is good but
not great. Gene Simmons on vocals is rarely a harbinger of anything
spectacular. The numbing repetition of the song feels relaxing after awhile,
and relaxes me more than gin ever could - that stuff tastes like Christmas
trees smell. Vodka first, bourbon second. If you're asking. Jim Ed Brown, "Pop A Top" - One of those slickly-produced country songs
that tends to sound like what some record exec or producer thought that honky tonk was supposed to sound like.
Great harmonies though, and the beat and steel guitar are insistent. Plus
there's the actual sound of a beer can opening and the song is about hanging
out in a bar. And any bar that serves cans of beer is likely worth checking
out at least once. ZZ Top, "Beer Drinkers And Hell
Raisers" - Boogie
children, indeed. Redeemed only by: 1) Its title. 2) The duet that two of the
ZZ dudes pull off - each guy takes a turn singing a line - is actually kind
of sweet. 3) The sound of the lead guitar. Ultimately though, this song was
created so that Motorhead could cover it. The Replacements, "Here Comes A
Regular" - Allegedly
written about the Norm Peterson character from Cheers. In fact, a friend of mine once pointed out that
the Cheers theme song and
this tune would make a great two-sides-solid 45. Basically a Paul Westerberg
solo song (not uncommon on 'Mats recordings), he slurs through his singing
and offers a great line about spending so many hours in the same bar:
"Sometimes I just stay in the mood." The song's ability to collect
a regular's quiet desperation and sadness via both lyrics and sound justifies
every positive word ever written about Westerberg. Damn,
I can pick 'em. But because any story that involves me and a girl I'm chasing
must end anticlimactically, this attempt at a romantic gesture went over as
well as that time I wrote a paean to a girl in which I compared her to Def
Leppard's Hysteria album.
(Though it didn't connect with its intended audience, it was fucking genius.) (By the way.) A couple of
months later, Cherry said she had left the CD in her glove compartment. I had
the distinct impression that she hadn't listened to it at all. That same
night, her boyfriend flipped me off from across the bar. |
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