LSD + Moonshine = Unhinged

“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....