If you are under twenty-five and are reading this, I pity you. Find something better to do. If you are still here, you are likely atop a purple podium, waving your hands in the air to new-fangled "rave" sounds as last night's cocaine flakes fall from the walls like snow. Ah, youth!
I was thinking about my own distant, distant past, which twinkles at my memory like light from a long-dead star. What I cannot get my mind around is the concept of "drink and drown," which would take place at a local dive called the First Stop, where I also played many of my early rock shows (Beastie Boys' "She's On It" cover, "Working Man" into "Another Bites the Dust" medley, that sort of thing)...
Drink and Drown (the entity) took place on Thursday night and anyone who paid the cover ($3? $4? Possibly five bucks, but that seems a lot in 1986 money) could drink as much draft beer as they wanted. Especially stellar is that one could get in with ANY i.d. And I mean any. A typed piece of yellow card with a name and phony birthdate would work.
Now, I was a total wuss and did not go out on school nights but my then-girlfriend and her cronies would...what baffled me then and does moreso now is that things were so lax (drinking age for beer was 19, though that would change the following year) that the cops (who were perhaps paid to ignore it) would not swoop in and close the place down! And that no one I knew dies specifically from D&D related car-through-pole accidents.
Drink and Drown (the entity) took place on Thursday night and anyone who paid the cover ($3? $4? Possibly five bucks, but that seems a lot in 1986 money) could drink as much draft beer as they wanted. Especially stellar is that one could get in with ANY i.d. And I mean any. A typed piece of yellow card with a name and phony birthdate would work.
Now, I was a total wuss and did not go out on school nights but my then-girlfriend and her cronies would...what baffled me then and does moreso now is that things were so lax (drinking age for beer was 19, though that would change the following year) that the cops (who were perhaps paid to ignore it) would not swoop in and close the place down! And that no one I knew dies specifically from D&D related car-through-pole accidents.
Now, by the following pre-college summer, I was fully on my way to full-on drunk dumbass lifestyle, and so would drink anywhere and with anyone. I remember, when my first little fledgling band was still extant, getting a late night call from Dick B____, the owner/manager of the place, asking if we wanted to be "house band" for the rest of the summer Drink and Drown nights and, he made it clear, we did not necessarily paid in money (sniff, sniff). THAT would have worked out well.
The whole point is my high school years were more Less Than Zero than I thought at the time.
The whole point is my high school years were more Less Than Zero than I thought at the time.
I guess that's the point?
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