PHANTASMAGORICAL PHRIVOLITY

Welcome to another chapter of Born to Booze, where we still use the word “crunk.” In this installment, our resident bartender/musician Kirk Podell (Subversive Rite, Anti-Machine, Neo Cons) tries to play it cool with his childhood heroes the Damned before realizing they’re just as goofy as he is. Well, life goes on (and on and on), doesn’t it?

Absinthe gets a dogshit rap. In 1905, Jean Lanfray was accused of murdering his family while on the stuff. Ernest Hemingway drank it every day. People tell tales of hallucinating wildly, ending up in situations that were less than beneficial to them. Anyone who’s visited New Orleans can describe visiting some spooky dime-a-dozen bar where it flows. People have been known to scoff at me when I order a Death in the Afternoon, which is a glass of champagne with a few dashes of absinthe. The Damned, basically my favorite band of all time, seem to be obsessed with the herbal concoction, even naming a song after it on their 2001 comeback album.

“If there were a Damned cocktail, truly it would have to have absinthe and be in a long, tall glass. It would have to be smoky and mysterious,” Dave Vanian (or, as Negative Approach’s John Brannon once referred to him, “Dracula Asshole”) tells me on Devil’s Night at Warsaw Music Hall in Brooklyn. If you’ve never been to Warsaw, it’s like a VFW hall with a pierogi bar in the back. Live Nation bought the place a year ago and was ready to debut it as “revamped,” but it looks like they put up a fresh coat of paint, fired all the sketchy security, and fixed the balcony, which used to be about four seconds away from collapsing whenever I was on it.

For any newcomers here, the Damned have been doing their thing since 1976. Their single “New Rose” actually came out before the Sex Pistols released anything, and they were the first U.K. punk band to come to the U.S., touching ground in L.A. in ’77. Nick Mason from Pink Floyd produced their second record and, when asked about it, seemed not to remember doing so. Algy Ward from Tank has played with them, 10 studio records, yada yada yada they are legends in their own respective right.

It was a four-day package tour with Baby Shakes and Fucked Up, which hilariously confused many

elder Damned fans in the crowd. Damian from Fucked Up pulled up to the stage, and I overheard a lifelong Damned fan say, “Sweatpants? Really?” before she threw her hands up and walked back to the bar. The crowd was a fussy bunch.

I'd been put on assignment to talk to the mysterious Brits, and of course, being unhealthily obsessed since my teenage years, I was about as sweaty as a priest at a playground. I mean, I taught myself how to play the drums along to Damned Damned Damned. I even snuck backstage at Slim’s in San Francisco trying to hand-deliver a single but instead had the shit beaten out of me by a bouncer who looked like a side of beef with teeth (to be fair, I deserved it when I called him a roly-poly-looking motherfucker). They’ve always been press-shy and are famously vague when asked about personal stuff, so naturally I was freaked out. I was in a backstage wormwood trip, and the only way out was to go deeper.

“If you want a story, ask the poor man who would drink this,” Raymond Ian Burns, a.k.a. Captain Sensible, tells me. Then Dracula Asshole breaks it down: “We want a Damned drink that is extremely alcoholic, something that would take you on a journey where your legs would turn to jelly by the end—a true belle epoque.” As the shy goths warm up, I hear Monty Oxymoron shout across the room, with the kind of inflection that this is imperative to what the men are cooking up, “AND IT NEEDS MUSHROOMS, LOTS OF THEM.” Then Dave interjects with an almost cryptkeeper-like cadence: “Oh yes, chocolate bourbon, too!”

Hearkening back to that 2001 absinthe song, they’ve had a solid output since then, culminating with this year’s Darkadelic. Look, I respect any legacy band putting out material they feel good about. But they really REALLY love this record, even though the album art looks like someone threw up on Photoshop. Half the set was dedicated to them working through it. Scores of folks were confused as the band basically played their new record with pieces of old stuff thrown about.

As absinthe tales start to unspool further, so do stories about spooky music legends.

“Tonight reminds me of the time we invited Screaming Lord Sutch on stage with us,” Captain Sensible tells me, giggling. “He asked us to bring him on stage at the Marquee in his signature coffin. We brought him out and set him down in front of the mic like he asked, but unfortunately we set the coffin down headfirst. You could hear him screaming, ‘Oi! What the bloody hell are you doing?!”’

“I used to see him walking around Harrow, going to visit his mom,” Vanian adds, as if to soften the blow of dropping a proto-goth legend on his head. “Nice bloke.”

The mysteriousness broke once I let the guys who basically created the genre of “goth” (disputed, I know) open up to be their goofy selves. I realized they are just nerds like you and me. What the hell was I so worried about?!

“I loved CREEM,” Dave tells me, celebrating the fact that we are back in the saddle. “I would pick it up at any newsstand I could in Soho—those days on Wardour Street, photos of Robert Gordon, pieces with Lou Reed. Loved it.”

We took some photos, and I told them I’d fluff up the piece when I got home. “THERE’LL BE NO FLUFFING IN THIS DRESSING ROOM, MATE,” the Captain warns me sternly with a laugh.

I met the Damned and lived to tell the tale, but for anyone who wants their cocktail, beware: You might end up somewhere you didn’t expect to go.