Tuesday, December 17, 2019

Tuesday Tuneage
Gary Stewart - “Whiskey Trip”
1978

I was looking for Wild Turkey rye, this was before the Bonded Whiskey Revelation of 2018*. Dude working at the store asked me if I needed help, told him what I was looking for. (A mistake, if it wasn’t on the shelf surely they didn’t have it.) He said he could get someone from the back who knew “the guys” from some up-and-coming distiller. “I think you’d get a great whiskey at a good price point.” Um, price point. I briefly saw a graph with X and Y axes and me dully nodding in affirmation as my bang for the buck was reached. Geez Louise, I just wanted some rye ... “good old boys were drinking whiskey and rye, singing “this’ll be the day that I die”... I didn’t want to sip samples and talk to the assistant-to-the-assistant-manager, who would invariably be wearing a tie or a vest (or both) about my palate or food pairings or any other such babble. Because I had to get the car back to the hub, sometimes those HourCar rentals are a beat the clock situation I mean I had fifteen minutes to drive home, drop off the booze and cat supplies and get the car back to 31st and Lyndale, and while the offer to stand around in this store which was once featured in Dark Star commercial spots on The Sports Show swilling errr “tasting” whiskey was tempting, I ultimately simply had a rental car to return. “That’s okay,” I said, “I’ll just go with the Old Overcoat,” then grabbed a bottle of Old Overholt off the bottom shelf and headed for the beer cooler.

*Revealed in the Netflix limited series Godless, where Sam Waterston’s character walks into taverns and orders “whiskey, bonded.”