HIVE MENTALITY

Welcome to another chapter of Born to Booze, where all we see are pink elephants. This time around, our resident bartender/musician Kirk Podell (Subversive Rite, Anti-Machine, Neo Cons) goes reverse-Viking on those Swedish boys in black and white, the Hives. They’re backand biggerthan ever, but they’ve never forgotten their roots. And they’ve got the drink to prove it.

New York City is full of private clubs that fuel the ultrarich, places for the “elite” to host their coked-up private pitch meetings for God knows what. Years ago, I went to the now-defunct Norwood Club with my friend in lower Manhattan. There I felt so poor it was like being karmically unblessed. I ended up drinking my weight in free 20-year-old scotch and almost punching out a young man who told me—and this is a direct quote—“Ronald Reagan was the greatest thing to happen to this country. Got any ketamine?”

The CREEMers (that’s what I call us now) were invited to Soho House for a press dinner ahead of the first Hives gig in NYC in almost 12 years. Representatives from the label, Hives management,