“ya ain't
half-bad fer a damn yankee...”
.....as
he handed me a quart Mason jar 'bout half full of a clear liquid that
could peel century old
lead-based paint at fifty feet. I figured “what the fuck,
I use bleach to disinfect the outside of me, this is the digestive
equivalent....” and took a
slash. I had to immediately
chase it with an entire 12 oz long-neck Budweiser just to dilute it
enough to slow down the possibity that I could do a two-legged
version of Smaug the dragon and incinerate the entire place.
Asheville,
North Carolina.
Yeah,
that was quite the zoo back in the mid 70's before it turned into the
music mecca it is today. I'd been through the town on my way to
and from home in Michigan to
the coast of North Carolina for family vacations to visit my cousins
for many years and, after a weird winter living in Miami, I bought a
bus ticket to Asheville on a
whim for my twenty-first
birthday and just decided to wing it with what I had in my backpack.
That was my first time diving into a completely alien environment,
not just cruising through and it proved to be the
wildest rollercoaster madhouse anybody could ask for. Thankfully,
my background as a Motor City Longhair gave me some resilience in
dealing with the weird fuckers I met and
we got down to some serious
fun-hog behavior pretty
quickly.
A
little backup here as an explainer before
I go telling stories, I've
worn glasses most of my life and one of the things that happens when
you go out and play in a Michigan winter and then go inside is fog.
Until you a) wait until your glasses get up to temp or b) take 'em
off and do a manual defrost with a tissue, you're essentially blind.
Looking back at those days
40-some years later, I run into the fog problem and it definitely has
an effect on any story I tell about those days. So,
fair warning.... this ain't entirely factual or anything close to the
“truth” as some may define it, just the ramblings of
an old fart who happens to have lived through a particular time and
place.
Last
time I was through there
was probably a dozen years ago and I had to make a run up Merrimon
Avenue just to see if the epicenter of all of our wretched adventures
still stood. Yep, there it was, closed and forlorn. The Brass Tap was
one of those places that could suck you in, spin you relentlessly and
spit you out at random.... folks came from three counties just to
misbehave for the sheer love of fun. Here's another background thing
needed to understand why this place got so nuts. Courtesy
of North Carolina booze laws, Buncombe County was a “wet” county
but two adjoining it,
Madison County and Yancey County, were “dry”.
I'll get to that shit in a minute 'cause “dry” had a whole
different meaning to those
folks....
How
I first darkened their door is absoluely lost to the fog, I suspect
it was as simple as thirst.
I've a lifelong
reputation for prodigious beer consumption and, when I first got
there, I didn't have a car but I did meet
a friend who gave me the use of an old ten-speed road bike that I
pedalled
everywhere for both work and fun. Biking around a hilly town can work
up a powerful thirst quite readily and I suspect that the Brass Tap
was in the right place at the
right time so I strolled on
in. Another thing that endeared me to that establisment was, when you
ordered a pitcher of beer, the glass was optional. Went right along
with my philosophy
of “Fuck, why pour it twice?” and
I was hooked.
It
didn't take too long for me to become a steady patron, everybody was
friendly and I kind of stood out every time I opened my mouth, the
only Yankee in the joint. Six
foot one and 'bout
a hunnert and forty pounds soaking wet with long blond hair, a skimpy
goatee and Ray-Ban Aviators. I
got ribbed about it but I gave as good as I took... that could get
pretty obscene at times. Something about goat-fucking and cornholing
cousins would be par for the course, George Carlin would have thrived
in that environment for sure. It
wasn't a very big place, walk in the door and there was a horseshoe
shaped bar right in front and a larger space behind, that was where
the tunes happened. That was what flat-out sucked me in to the
vortex, the music... That.
Music. An outfit called
Loafer's Glory seemed to be
the informal house band along with a whole raft of other local
pickers (somebody ask
Warren Haynes what he
remembers, it
will be damn sure more accurate than anything I can conjure up out of
my addled memory...) and they
would attempt to blow the walls out now and again, much to
everybody's delight.
Those
folks could throw down a jam for the ages on any given weekend, the
drummer always showed up to play in his flannel pajamas. A couple of
decades or so
later I saw Fishman playing his
drums in a sun dress at a
Phish concert in Montana and thought back to Asheville, he told me
back then that
it was all about comfort as playing a kit can
be wildly physical at times
and the last thing you want is your
testicles in a knot 'cause your jeans are too tight....
One
of my fondest memories of that place was a rather intoxicated
conversation between several of us barflies and the bartender one
evening that resulted in the Four-Way Moon. I was willing to go out
to the intersection and drop trou and stick my lilly-white ass out on
the yellow stripe to the
passing traffic on Merrimon
Avenue for a pitcher of beer,
the bartender challenged the rest of the customers that if “this
damn Yankee is willing to go for it, howzabout three more of you join
him and moon the intersection four ways and
I'll give you a pitcher of beer apiece?”
Sure enough, within seconds
we had a quartet willing to
give the passing traffic a grand view of bare-ass lunatics. We
emptied the bar and the four of us hung it out four ways to the
honking of horns and a standing ovation from the other patrons.
Nobody called the cops and we each got a pitcher of beer. Cain't get
much better than that, eh?
Just wait, it
did.
One
of the very most fun things that came out of hanging around the Brass
Tap was that the Madison/Yancey contingent sort of adopted me as some
kind of poor, culturally deprived Yankee and started inviting me to
their benders back home. By then, I had gotten a car to replace the
bike which expanded my range considerably. I
had No. Fucking. Clue.
I found out quite quickly what a powerful combination family brewed
'shine, long neck Budweisers and pure LSD 25 could do to a human....
I already had a considerable
history with acid, the Motor City was awash in the stuff by the time
I was 16 years old and it was nothing to chow down a couple thousand
micrograms on a Saturday morning in the summer and go wander off
into the woods until Sunday afternoon, we smoked joints and drank a
few beers
to cure cotton mouth. It really didn't hit me just how much
booze you can drink without
apparent effect when you consume a large quantity of LSD first until
I ran up against those fuckers....
It
was pretty brutal the first time I went to their world, when
I was coming up in Michigan we
used to have stump fires (and
I mean BIG ones) out in the
country north of my hometown, smoke an ounce of weed, eat some acid
and drink a few beers, these fuckers had a monster tire-fire, gobbled
down a couple hunnert
hits of acid amongst a couple dozen folks, broke out the family
'shine and cracked the long neck Budweisers and
turned up somebody's car stereo with some Charlie
Daniels just to start the
festivities, things just got
louder thereafter and we consumed truly heroic amounts of booze in
the course of the night. That was the first time it hit, LSD
+ moonshine = unhinged. I woke
up, all wadded up, in the front seat of my car sometime the next
afternoon and had to figure out how to get all those little black
burnt
rubber flakes off my windshield so I could attempt to drive home. I
thought “fuck, that was interesting, what's next?”
.
Shit,
little did I know. Those
fuckers were well and truly deranged and I just rolled with it 'cause
it was... out and out fun to
hang with them. We would meet up at the Brass Tap and try and get a
grip on the weekend and then go with
it. I'll never quite figure out why the docents at the Biltmore
Mansion didn't have us escorted off the premises that day. Through a
series of circumstances, I could get up to ten passes for free to
tour the estate and I got the
crew together on a Friday afternoon and had everybody meet at my
place on Saturday morning for cocktails. I had also obtained a liter
can of industrial ether by
nefarious means, best way I
found to do it was a paper towel soaked in it stuffed into a toilet
paper tube and I showed everybody before we even got out of my
driveway. Needless to say, we were all blithering idiots by the time
we poured ourselves
out of our cars at the mansion. After
you did the inside tour, the gardens were much more open, we hit the
cars and fortified ourselves and did the big wander. One note of
caution to anybody who wants to mess with industrial-strength
ether.... that shit is insanely flammable, just
pour a capful in your sink, stand back and throw a kitchen match at
it if you want to know, we
left a big black spot on the ceiling tiles of a high school science
lab back in the day.
Anyway,
we ate a
bunch of acid later on
our way to watch the band at the bar and I have no idea just how that
evening ended, all I know is
that we got away with another day of outrageous behavior without
going to jail. That only encouraged further misbehavior down the
line....
The
tall grass. Exceedingly thick grass about three or four feet tall,
never been mowed. On a rather steep incline. The only way you could
get right up to the log edifice was with a four by four pickup as the
lane up to it resembled a road about
as much as a game trail in the woods resembles I-40, so everybody but
the owner parked along the edges of the road and trudged the short
distance up the hill with their contributions to the festivities. I
had been recruited earlier in the evening at the bar to help
transport a large quantity of long-necks as my car had a cave for a
trunk and air shocks on the rear axle, ideal combination to traverse
the twisty mountain roads in Madison County. After
we lugged all that beer up to the house, things got going. The locals
had all brought out the family's finest jars of 'shine and decorated
the table in the front room with them, somebody brought about a
quarter-pound of weed all rolled into joints and there were several
different varieties of acid floating around for anybody to indulge in
as well as a killer stereo system to keep the energy going.
Back
to that tall grass, the place had a full length porch on the front of
it overlooking the valley and, as everybody circulated in and out of
the house, you would sometimes find yourself grabbed by the back of
your jeans and the scruff of your neck and pitched over the railing
into that tall grass. A couple of sideways end over ends and you had
to walk (crawl) back up that steep incline to the porch and then you
were on the
lookout
for a victim of your own in this demented game. I
don't recall any broken bones out of it but then, given the
circumstances, it's a wonder that I remember anything at all.
Loafers
Glory (remember them?) didn't just play the Brass Tap, word went
around prior to one weekend that they were hosting a big-ass barn
party up in Yancey County which,
of course, resulted in business at the bar to dwindle and a whole
bunch of crazy people making the run for the fun. After
the mandatory stop at the beer store to load the cave, we headed out
for another adventure, when we got there it had already drawn quite
the crowd and the bonfire was just
getting going and the band was getting set up in the barn. We
unloaded the cave into a couple of old bathtubs full of ice to join
all their other long-neck bretheren and started wandering.
This
is one of those memories that I can give you an accurate account of
how it began but have about a twelve hour technicolor
gap thereafter. The band got
to it and we were bouncing that old wood structure pretty fucking
well when I saw this bald head about five feet off the floor winding
its way towards me in the crowd. He would stop every so often and
laugh and go on, when he got to me, he was laughing and holding a
baggie in his right hand. Naturally, I stuck my hand in there....
nothing. I looked at him and said “eh, nothing there.” . He
stopped laughing and said “lick your fingers.” so I did. I said
“eh, nothing there.” He wadded that one up, stuck it in one
pocket and pulled out another one from another pocket, opened it up,
and stuck his hand out again, again I stuck my hand in there, this
time I just licked my fingers before he could say so. I found out a
week or so later that I had been licking up the dust of a... large
quantity of high end LSD 25. It was a fun 12 hours but, I wish had
dosed myself later, I pretty much missed the last half of their gig
(and they played a long
time) due to the wonderwall of color.... I was laying across the hood
of my car as the sun came up, still tripping my ass off and mystified
as to how I'd found it in the dark.
Asheville,
North Carolina.
That
was a time of wretched excess
in a beautiful setting with
a colorful cast of characters,
there's other stories from those days not yet told, maybe I'll get
around to telling them someday in the future. Meanwhile,
I'll just enjoy my retirement, content with the fact that I survived
a level of insanity few others could handle and still walk and chew
gum at the same time....
