New Year's Booze
The Source
It won’t be the first time I’ve been accused of being a fuddy-duddy, but I’ve never really gotten into the whole drinking-in-the-New-Year bit. And it’s not so much on moral grounds as it is the …well…silliness of it all. Perhaps it goes back to my childhood when on New Year’s Eve I first saw my parents take their annual sip of Mogan David wine … cut with one-half Seven-Up. I’d never seen my folks drink and thus immediately assumed that they were closet alcoholics. Perhaps I’ve never recovered. Then there were those deafening teenage years when I spent every weekend night playing in a rock band. Okay, “Louie Louie” wasn’t exactly heavy metal, but we thought we were pretty cool…and the chicks totally dug teen rockers, even if the boys drove John Deere’s through the week. But when rock and roll was your only source of weekend income, you didn’t mess around with the booze. Besides, you had a curfew and by the time you’ll loaded your equipment, the parties were over. When rock became less lucrative and the new age of country music began paying more of the bills I jumped aboard the yee-haw bar circuit. A few venues were nice. Most weren’t. The movies showing the bar band playing behind a protective chicken wire fence are not fiction. I grew to love chicken wire and made sure my keyboard was behind the double-strand section. Then there were the dives like one infamous bar in Jacksonville that should have invested in chicken wire but didn’t. Sure, there were late nights in my rock days when we’d hire two thugs at ten bucks a night to simply get us out of Beardstown alive, but the country-western days left us on our own. When you’re sixty miles from home, it’s 1 a.m. and the drunks are all over the road, you don’t mess with booze. You simply try to get home alive. No hungry musician passes up a New Year’s gig. If you’re union as this area was in the sixties and seventies, the pay was mandatory double…sometimes triple. And there’s no better way to make a buck than going single on a New Year’s gig. Of course, a solo act means you have no one to help you with your equipment and I still tremble when I remember a New Year’s in Pike County where a very friendly drunk insisted on helping me. I smiled and told him I could handle it. He stumbled and said, “No, no…I’m fine.” Somewhere between the Pittsfield Country Club banquet room and my Ford Mustang, he dropped my electric organ onto the asphalt. The good news: he was an insurance broker. I guess that asking a musician why he doesn’t drink on New Year’s is like inquiring of a chef about why he doesn’t eat as he cooks. I’m workin’, man. Don’t mess with me. Which is not to say that entertainers don’t drink on the job. I don’t know the number since being dead or crippled makes you hard to interview. And of course there’s always the old adage about New Year’s Eve being Amateur Night, an event only for the crazy, occasional drinkers. Local tradition has it that the serious drinkers make their sudsy rounds on New Year’s Day. I just hope that none of these guys are my mechanic or heart surgeon on January 2nd. The single largest week for Champaign sales in the U.S. are the seven days prior to New Year’s. This means that several of the cars meeting you on the highway may be fueled by drink to which the driver is unaccustomed. An ugly mix and another reason to stay close to your own hearth on the 31st. And although my evidence is purely anecdotal based on only two incidents, the two drunkest drunks I’ve ever encountered were both sleeping in trees when I spotted them. Another reason not to drink on New Year’s: I don’t like heights. When I was a boy, my father would sneak around the house and move the clocks forward two hours on New Year’s Eve. When the rest of the world celebrated the coming of the New Year, we’d been in bed for two hours. Pretty sneaky, Elmer. But truth me told, I do the same thing now without moving the clocks up.