Bottle Gang Media Taster

TAKE A LOOK TO THE RIGHT. You see that tall, narrow flashing thing that rather looks like an MP3 player? Well, it rather behaves like an MP3 player as well -- it's the Bottle Gang media taster, brought to you by the folks at Intelligent Media Platform. They have created similar players for Bust, City Pages, and the Austin Chronicle, and one would think they would have better sense to associate with a disreputable lot of drunks, but apparently they don't. And we thank them for it.

With great regularity, we at The Bottle Gang will be updating our Media Player with the latest and greatest drinking songs, some from IMPs already vast collection of music, some from the distant past, and some brand new and unique to the The Bottle Gang. By the way, if you have a drinking song to contribute to our Media Player, send us an email at max [at] thebottlegang.com; we're always looking to add a new soundtrack to our revelries.

The Drinking Song: "The Pub With No Beer"

THERE IS A RECURRING JOKE in James Garner’s amiable 1969 western Support Your Local Sheriff! In the film, Garner plays Jason McCullough, a laconic if irritable gunslinger who ends up in Colorado in the midst of the Gold Rush. Even as he gets roped into acting as the town’s lawman, he has his sights set on the real frontier, where things are really wild. “I’m only here to get a stake,” he’ll tell anyone who will listen. “For Australia.”

We can thank a country singer named Slim Dusty for some of this sense of Australia’s wildness. Dusty, born David Gordon Kirkpatrick in New South Wales in 1927, was the first Australian performer to enjoy success on the American pop charts — with a drinking song, no less! In 1957, Dusty released a song titled “The Pub With No Beer” as the b-side to a song titled “Saddle Boy.” But it was “Pub With No Beer” that caught on, because the first Australian song to chart in American and earning Dusty the first Gold Record issued to an Australian.

The song was originally written by outback poet Dan Sheahan in 1943, telling of American soldiers that had emptied the Day Dawn Hotel of suds after one evening of carousing. A songwriter named Gordon Parsons eventually added a melody to the song, a rollicking folk melody borrowed from Stephen Foster’s“Beautiful Dreamer.”

The song tells, with a combination of wry humor and impenetrable Australian dialect, of the disappointment of a bar’s locals when they discover their watering hole has run dry. “Then the swaggy comes in smothered in dust and flies,” Dusty sings cheerfully above a plainly strummed guitar, and he’s talking about a swagman, approximately the Australian equivalent of the American hobo, who is nonplussed to discover that he cannot get a drink. “I’ve trudged 50 flamin’ miles to a town with no beer,” he complains.

The song is an inventory of outback characters, none of whom are prepared for a beerless night, There’s a blacksmith who greets his wife sober for the first time and burst into tears before her, as well as stockmen, publicans, maids, and a dog expecting a beating from his frustrated master, all of them in a foul mood thanks to an empty pub. The song’s descriptions of each of these characters are arch and brief, a cartoon of melancholy drinkers.

Since the song’s release, the Cosmopolitan Hotel in the small New South wales’ township of Taylor’s Arms has claimed itself as the original Pub With No Beer, and, in fairness, it has some rights to that claim — it was, after all, frequented by songwriter Gordon Parsons, and did frequently run out of beer. The Cosmopolitan has since renamed itself The Pub With No Beer and positioned itself as a tourist destination, with a microbrewery, a fine restaurant, live musical performances, and walls lines with memorabilia from the Australian outback, as well as a Pub With No Beer Festival every Easter.

And, if you’re a weary jackaroo looking for a cold refreshment, you’re going to have to go to the former Cosmopolitan. Were you to attempt to get a drink at the original Pub With No Beer at the Day Dawn Hotel, you’d walk away as frustrated as any of the characters in Slim Dusty’s song. The Day Dawn Hotel, it turns out, was demolished in 1960. One could, presumably, purchase a can of Fosters, stand on the site of the old hotel, and toast its memory; one might as well celebrate its disappearance by enjoying a beer with no pub. (SPARBER)

A South-By-Southwest Special Report: Death Drinks of Rock Stars

ANYBODY ELSE get the eerie sense, when watching a show like MTV’s Cribs, that every time the camera focuses on a rock star’s swimming pool we are seeing the site of a future drowning? It might be, oh, let’s say Tricky’s swimming pool instead of Brian Jones’s, but it doesn’t matter. Within a year or two, there will be a bloated corpse floating at the pool’s surface; a fact worth remembering as tomorrow's rock stars demonstrate their chops at this week's annual South by Southwest Festival in Austin, TX, where Bottle Gang cocreator Steve McPherson is spending his week, and from which he will be filing reports.

Rock and Roll just seems to have a natural affinity for self-destruction, and, often enough, a rock star’s decline will be spectacular. When they’re not dying in plane crashes, a la Buddy Holly and Lynyrd Skynyrd, they’re crashing cars (Marc Bolan), getting crushed under a bus (Metallica’s Cliff Burton — twice in one night!), or just offing themselves (Johnny Ace, Roy Buchanan, Kurt Cobain, et al). Sometimes they simply drink themselves to death.

We’re not talking about the rock stars who drank and died young, such as that of the hard-boozing Jim Morrison, whose bathtub heart attack at age 27 has longed fueled speculations that his appetite for alcohol and drugs eventually simply stopped his heart. As much as Janis Joplin loved her Southern Comfort, it was heroin that killed her, also at age 27. Certainly booze played a factor in Jimi Hendrix’s death in 1970 — but mostly because he had used it to wash down nine sleeping pills.

We won’t concern ourselves with these famous casualties of the rock and roll lifestyle. Not when there are rockers whose ends came exclusively as a result of hootch. These are the men — and they are all men on this list — for who alcohol was their poison, and had the steely resolve to keep pouring the stuff down their throats until it did them in. Rock and Roll is famous for those who live its hard-drinking lifestyle, and some of them went ahead and died from it.

We give you the men and their drinks, and those of you plucking a scratched up old guitar while sipping Jack and Cokes and dreaming of fame might pause to reflect on them.

John Bonham: The man behind the ferocious drums on Led Zeppelin’s albums was a former construction worker from Worcestershire, England, with a taste for breaking drumheads. He had an intense dislike of the itinerant life of a rock star, though, and took to drinking shots of vodka. On September 20 of 1980, Bonham, en route to rehearsal for an upcoming tour of America, began binge drinking, downing four quadruple vodkas. He continued drinking throughout the evening, consuming an estimated three-dozen shots of vodka before bedding down at Jimmy Page’s house. By morning, he was dead. The coroner determined that Bonham had died in a manner that seems especially popular among rock stars: He had choked on his own vomit.

Rory Gallagher: “I wanna try some one hundred percent,” Irish rocker Rory Gallagher sang in a song presciently titled “Too Much Alcohol,” ending the song with the words “Then I won’t feel a thing at all.” Gallagher developed an exceptional reputation as a guitarist and bluesman in the Seventies: He was invited to become a permanent guitarist for the Rolling Stones and took the title of Melody Maker’s Musician of the Year from Eric Clapton in 1972. Gallaghar toured relentlessly, appearing in grueling, marathon performances, one of which was preserved in a film titled Irish Tour ’74. Unfortunately, Gallagher was also a drinker, although he seems to have been unusually discreet about the fact. His consumption was significant enough to destroy his liver: Rolling Stone lists the cause of his 1995 death as being cirrhosis, but most of his other biographers demur from being so explicit, simply stating that Gallagher died from complications brought about by liver transplant surgery. True though that might be, it's an unsatisfactory explanation. After all, Gallagher’s original liver didn’t just go bad all on its own. But if Gallagher’s fans wish to be delicate about the subject of alcoholism, so be it. We do not lack for rockers whose drinking is a public spectacle.

Ron “Pigpen” McKernan: For some reason, it just doesn’t seem like a member of the Grateful Dead should have died from alcohol abuse. After all, this is a band who will forever be associated with the two great countercultural drugs of the Sixties: LSD and marijuana. These drugs were supposed to liberate the spirit; if someone were to die of either (a rare scenario, except for the occasional acid casualty who, convinced he can fly, leaps from a roof), the death should be suitably trippy. After all, wasn’t it at a Dead concert that a fan reportedly simply evaporated in an ecstatic trance? Ron McKernan, known since high school as “Pigpen,” wouldn’t enjoy such a metaphysical end. No, the singer, harmonica player, and organist for the Dead had fashioned an image for himself that drew equally from old timey bluesmen and contemporary bikers, and McKernan’s steered clear of hippie drugs in favor of Thunderbird wine and Southern Comfort. McKernan drank so much that it only took a few years for his liver to begin to fail; he quit alcohol in 1971, but two years later was dead of a hemorrhage in his booze-weakened gastrointestinal tract.

John Panozzo: If pressed, the casual fan of Styx might be able to name its singer and keyboardist, Dennis DeYoung. But this Chicago-based prog rock band from the Sixties and Seventies would not have enjoyed its four consecutive triple platinum albums were it not for the band’s distinctive rhythm section, made up of twin brothers, Chuck and John Panozzo. The band named themselves after the river the dead pass across on their way to Hades, but, for John Panozzo, his passage into the afterworld would be across a river of booze. He died in 1996 of the same cause as Ron McKernan: a hemorrhaged gastrointestinal tract, in this case brought on by a decade of alcoholism that had made it impossible for Panozzo to participate in any of his band’s recordings or tours in the mid-90s. Bandmember Tommy Shaw penned a saccharine ode to Panozzo for the 1997 live album Return to Paradise titled “Dear John,” which included the following lyrics: “Dear John, how are you; God knows its heaven where you are.” Wherever he wound up, one thing is certain: Thanks to his taste for drink, John Panozzo managed to be the first member of his band to actually get to the river Styx.

Bon Scott: Prior to taken the reigns as lead singer of the Australian rock band AC/DC, the Scottish-born Ronald Belford Scott had quite a diverse career, including playing in a pipe band, spending several months in a coma after a motorcycle accident, and being rejected by the Australian Army, who claimed he was “socially maladjusted.” The singer, better known as Bon Scott, howled his way through most of AC/DC’s best known albums, singing lascivious ditties that barely qualified as single-entendres, fronting a band best known for noisy, stripped down power chords. As a performer, Scott seemed every inch the wild man, and so, on February 20, 1980, it came as a surprise to nobody when he was found dead in his car after a night of binge drinking. Scott, famously, once sang that “it’s a long way to the top if you want to rock and roll.” Unfortunately, he discovered that, with the help of too much alcohol, it can be a very fast plummet downward.

Gene Vincent: Gene Vincent nearly died in 1955. The Virginia-born rockabilly singer responsible for “Be-Bop-a-Lu-La” was in the same car accident that killed Eddie Cochran, a fellow rockabilly now best remembered for the song “Summertime Blues.” The accident left Vincent with a leg brace and constant pain, which might explain why the singer started drinking. Then again, after The Beatles arrived in the United States in 1963, Vincent’s career bottomed out — like many other early rock stars, he languished during the British Invasion. Ironically, the only place Vincent could make a living was in England, and he spent most of the Sixties touring Europe while English pop acts stormed the American charts, which might drive anybody to drink. Vincent’s increased dependence on alcohol sent his health into a steep decline, and he returned to the United States in 1971, where he died in October of a heart attack. Perhaps it would have been best for Vincent had he died in the crash that took Eddie Cochran’s life. It would have spared him years of pain and decline. But Vincent recorded several sides of country music in his last few years of life that are gorgeous and haunted, suggesting that, had liquor not killed him when it did, he might have had a career ahead of him singing honky tonk. Country music would have been a good for Vincent, as it was for fellow disgraced rockabilly star Jerry Lee Lewis. After all, it’s a style of music that encourages singers to weep into their drink and complain of their troubles, and Gene Vincent had troubles to spare. (SPARBER)

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The Drinking Song: "Cigareetes, Whusky and Wild, Wild Women"

AMERICANS NEVER SEEM TO BE entirely satisfied with sinning unless they can regret it afterward. “I used to smoke and drink and dance the hootchy koo,” LaVern Baker sang in one of her best songs, and bully for her, as it sounds like she must have had a grand old time. But just when the listener is thinking that Miss Baker sounds like a great sort of gal, she roars out, “but now I’m SAVED.” She has, like so many before her, traded in her entertaining previous life for a stern-faced current one, standing on a street corner, banging a bass drum, and railing against wickedness.

Tim Spencer, the gangly, strong-featured cofounder of The Sons of the Pioneers, used to smoke and drink and dance the hootchy koo as well, it seems. He authored a song about the subject, released by his singing cowboy group (whose members included Roy Rogers) in 1947 and called, magnificently, “Cigareetes, Whusky, and Wild, Wild Women.” Over a background of a heavily plunked double bass and a chattering mandolin, the Sons of the Pioneers don’t bother with LaVern Baker’s reproachful tone. Instead, they affect an attitude of mock contrition, setting their voices warbling as though they were on the verge of an embarrassing fit of weeping as they recount their tale of woe.

And what is their tale? “Once I was happy and had a good wife,” they tell us, but then, tragically, another woman entered the picture: “She started me smokin’ and drinking whusky.”

And that’s it. The Sons of the Pioneers don’t even bother explaining what happened next. They didn’t need to. In the 1930s, such confessions were so common and so public that the degradation that followed exposure to sin needn’t be spelled out. Evangelists such as former baseball player Billy Sunday toured the United States in tents, dragging remorseful sinners, many of them alcoholics, onto the stage and demanding that they confess. And they did, in the thousands, in tearful, extended expositions.

But The Sons of the Pioneers weren’t simply creating a musical version of these exhausting atonements. With their choked, weepy presentation of the song's lyrics and the genuinely lust in their voice as they sing the chorus, they sounds as though they were slyly mocking such repentance narratives. To its credit, “Cigareetes, Whusky and Wild, Wild Women” sounds more like a song that you would sing while drinking — and while drunk — then while rejecting alcohol. These things might drive you insane, as the song warns, but you get the genuine sense from the singers that it might be a very pleasant madness. (SPARBER)