ALCOHOL!

SIN CITY SOCIAL '75 WELCOME TO BUDWEISER WOODSTOCK OR THE JUICING OF AMERICA

ALCOHOL!

RICK JOHNSON

BY

Yep, booze. It's always been around, but the doper's disdain.for splrltus fermenti is no longer fashionable among the young and hip. Tequila is fashionable. Puking is fashionable. Bloody Marys and bloody noses. (Peace and love was for sissies! EVERYTHING YOUR OLD MAN DRINKS IS HIP. But you know that already— that's why he's put a lock on his liquor cabinet. Because your destrucf o culture has caught up with his. Ain't it fun, being reunited at last in the same gutter?

The Sin City Social was billed by word of mouth as something of a Budweiser Woodstock, with more kegs of the stuff than five Evil Kneivels could shake a cast at. An annual brown-out staged near the unlikely town of Virginia, Illinois, it brings all the area basket brains tumbling out of the woodwork to out-drink, out-puke and out-boogiedown one another while local bands grind out some of the most hope-deadening power drool ever to fall off a stage.

Only a couple of years ago, the SCS was just another small town acid quiz similar to the ones that sprang up all over the midwest during the late 60's and early 70's. The usual yellow eyed pot grins and tripped out zeroes were to be found spread over the field like quivering ironing boards, everyone content in his or her own perspnal dimwit heaven. People sitting around thinking up new ways to give the peace sign and toying with the dull Sony introspection that was typical of the time.

Not this year. A few diehards still dropped acid, but mainly as a kicker in two-quart Kool-Aid jugs of gin and Squirt. Of course, there were enough joints going around to reconstruct the stage at Altamont ten times over, but the hoarse giggling and mind games were replaced by a canine aggressiveness that resulted in several gory stretchers stacked outside the first aid tent.

Kids that used to get stitches for stepping on broken glass were now having Ripple shards removed from their foreheads. And the real action was the continuous brawl at the flat-bed truck covered with kegs that were being drained so rapidly that SOS helicopters were being considered.

What ever happened anyway? How did this coarse new willingness to deal in the aesthetics of destructo impulses and world-gloom in such a partyfied way come about? Said one old timer, a 24-year-old with waist length grease, an Art degree and a Phillips 66 jar consisting of V2 bourbon and V2 Diet Shasta raspberry soda:

"Oh yeah, I remember what it was like back then-1 used to do tons of acid but it gave me such a swiss cheese memory that I switched over to booze so I could feel like something.

"We went through all that cosmosis crap... talking to windows, making faces at each other, the whole number. But a man can only go so far and then he's there, right? Now we just get a couple cases of beer and maybe a fifth of Jack for a rush and don't think about anything but the way to the john."

Quite a few people, mainly in their mid-to-late twenties, expressed similar sentiments. What's ironic is that creepy psychologists once had their, eyes on LSD as the perfect cure for alcoholism, the idea being that the alcoholic would have great revelations and clean up his act. Now a growing number of ex-acidheads are using alcohol to burn out the very insights they were cruising for in the first place.

Drowning out acid paranoia is hardly the major preoccupation of your average teen rock "n" roller, as anyone who's roller-skated over the empty bottles at any concert can tell you. Even the weekend downer duds and reds-^ and-wine geniuses that are still kicking are making the grand crawl over to swill. '

The reasons for the switch may be no more complicated than survival of the fittest: how much Sopors and Southern . can you load and still make it to the emergency room in time?

A few actual converts do exist however. A character who calls himself Lump dredged up at a recent Kiss concert is the classic product of the Juicing Of America. Two hundred pounds of fat jaws, muscled eyebrows and damprat hair on a frame like a sagging coffin, he was on his second fifth of some cretinous whiskey with a name like Old Dogfood when, he drooled out this explanation of his move from down to drown: "L did enough thorazine last year to flatten a fuckin" dinosaur. Had this buddy who used to' swipe "em from his crazy old lady and we'd take it and grind it up and smoke the shit! That way, it only takes about fifteen minutes and you turn all cold and start to feel like some asshole's got your head in a tin can. Then we'd head on out." After a few months of that, Lump couldn't wake up at all and started on the ever popular wake-up shots technique— "two shots of whiskey for every time the pipe went out." .

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When the hooch warm began to be mote fun than the down cool, he gradually switched over, not so much in a conscious plan as a logical progression like a chimp who finds the pleasure button some mad scientist has just planted in his brain. At any rate, Lump's now knocking off almost a case of Old Squidbarf a week with his friend, and he's starting to gag on blood every now and again.

"Tastes like dead rubber."

Although mixing downs & booze is gradually fading out along with its more' ardent admirers, it's still a favorite pastime among some of the less functional specimens one can still find sludging along at Uriah Heep shows. With Black Sabbath touring again, they should be rolling "em out in wheelchairs and iron lungs.

While they still create pretty much the same old pukeslides and bruise jockeys as heavy soakers, a mixer subwit with a broken bottle creates a bit more tension than a typical drunk or pre-sponge lude dude would on his own. There was something almost comforting in the knowledge that the urge to kill was generally the last symptom before trank thud. Double dosers just get stronger, more belligerant and less predictable as the night wears on. Nigger pulping, tooth shoveling and pole vaulting on unsuspecting women are just meat under the bridge to these jags, who— while possessing a certain malignant charm—can still get their last laugh out of separating you from your face while still barely able to distinguish between themselves and the upholstery.

"I use anything I can find to get fucked on," said one upstanding young retardo called Dommy (for Dominance most likely). "I drink, drop, shoot, smoke; anything. Nothin" replaces nothin" for me—I just keep adding shit."

The more everyday high school hardcores are about the only group of nouveau alkies getting any press these days> favorable or otherwise. They pee on their sneaks, get locked in their own lockers and pile up the highest number of car wrecks of any age bracket. Nothing to wet your pillow over: they're just aS bad as the rest of us, only they, get caught more.

It's the reasons that are so weird. Said one teen sighsucker with a two-ply voice soft enough for a snake to snooze on and budding tumescent pastries poking through her silk halter: "I don't think you really know someone until you find out what they're drinking. ReqWy..." Her bbyfriend, kind of turtletoed but retaining a genuine pimp factor, explained further: '"You ain't got what they don't want anyway, so who gives a fuck?" - /

Mostly , it just seems like the thing to do, as it always was and probably always will be. Suburban flash tonnage, ^s one smartass put it.

Back at Sin City, the last band is wrapping it up. The field looks like a tuha farm, with bodies in various degrees of slow motion flapping about here and there. Anybody with higher metabolism than a snail has crawled off into the bar; the car, or the pond.

It sure beats sensory deprivation.