Another idea for a book...
Whisky Rock’n’Roller
By Tom Morton
“Absolutely hilarious. And at least 62.3 per cent true.”
Rob Allanson, editor, Whisky Magazine
Well, I'm a whiskey rock-a-roller, that's what I am.
Women, whiskey and miles of travelin' is all I understand.
Sometimes I wonder where will we go?
Lord, don't you take my whiskey and rock'n'roll.
©Ronnie Van Zant, Billy Powell, Edward King. Duchess Music Corporation; Get Loose Music Inc; Super Tooter Publishing Inc.Leeds Music Corporation.
Forty years of motorcycling, and I’ve never fallen off once. Now here I am, in the deceptively sloping car park of Bushmills Distilery in Northern Ireland, lying underneath a Triumph Street Triple R, 675cc of rampant hooligan motorcycle which has just toppled with a sickening crunch onto my legs and torso.
There’s no pain, not yet. There was horror, a sense of awful inevitability as, swinging my leg over the heavily-laden bike to get off, I caught my foot on the tailpack, fell heavily to the ground and watched the Grey Beast (the R in its name, signifying its uprated thrash-punk credentials, standing in my opinion for Ridiculous) teeter on its dodgy kickstand and then descend towards my aged body.
Worse, there were witnesses. As I lay on the ground waiting for the inevitable agony and damage to both myself and the motorbike (brand new, borrowed, amid much dubiety about its insurance status, from the Triumph factory press fleet) I could see the horrified face of Gordon Donoghue, manager of Bushmills and keen motorcyclist himself. It was manoeuvring my bike close to his immaculate Triumph Bonneville that provoked my awkward and ultimately failed attempt to dismount. In fact, it was all Gordon’s fault. And I could see in his eyes he thought so too. Or rather, that it was all the fault of Bushmills Whiskey, its manager, Pernod Ricard, owners, and possibly the Protestant God who inhabits this part of Northern Ireland, makes the populace paint the paving stones red, white and blue, spreads Him (or Her) self among the dozens of competing churches of a Sabbath morning, and turns a blind presbyterian eye to the fact that Jameson’s, that good Catholic whiskey made at Cork in the Republic of Ireland, is actually bottled in Bushmills. Mostly by Protestants.
In the milliseconds the whole incident took, I could see Gordon’s brain turning over various considerations: The array of Bushmills new make spirit and finished whiskeys I had inhaled, if not drunk, that morning: had I addled my motorcycling body and brain, despite a rigid adherence to the sniff-spit-don’t-swallow rule? Would there have to be a full Health and Safety inquiry into the incident (yes, oh yes. In the UK’s current climate of namby-pamby corporate and national wimpishness? Are you joking?) Would I sue for bad car park camber? Meanwhile, I could hear the sound of laughter, somewhere. That would be Rob Allanson, my companion on this motorcycle adventure, editor of Whisky Magazine, rider of an identical Triumph and unsympathetic critic of my clumsiness, age and hapless incompetence as a motorcyclist. Not to mention my inability to wax lyrical about (1) the bass playing of Stanley Clarke (jazz noodling) or (2) the cinnamon overtones to be detected in the nose of a 1994 Glen Rothes single malt whisky (I’d go for warehouses, ash, sherry, dirty socks and ginger with the merest hint of baby sick and quarry dust).
What has brought me to this? Well, a motorcycle, obviously. Whisky, though, is the overriding reason for this trip. We’re collecting bottles from distilleries in Ireland, Scotland and, yes, England and Wales for charitable purposes. We’re stopping overnight at most of the booze factories to sip some of the stuff too. But you guessed that.
Why whisky? Why not...I don’t know, sail around rum distilleries in the Caribbean? Sledge around Siberian looking for Vodka? Skateboard from primary school to youth cllub, celebrating the alcopop, bigging up the Bacardi Breezer?
Well, the thing is, I have got form with whisky. Me and uisge beatha go back a long, long way. It’s a Scottish thing, and Scotland and myself have a shared history too. Mostly. I happen to think that whisky is very...nice. Very interesting. I have spent a great deal of time sniffing it, tasting it, talking about, even singing about it. Rock’n’roll, you see, is another major passion of mine. Not that I make a living out of playing my various guitars, of whgich I wone dmore than chords I can actually play on them. I earn most of my money out of playing records, and talking about them on the radio. Hey. it’s a bastard of a job, but somebody has to do it. What’s that? Do I hear murmuring from somewhere? Am I dying here? Is this a muttering chorus from hell, proclaiming ‘frustrated musician’ and ‘failed rock star’? Yeah, well. Everyone with a record collection is.
Whisky and rock’n’roll go together like...motorcycles and injury. Think of Keith Richards on stage with the Stones, in the old, pre-alarming baldness days, a bottle of Jack Daniels or Jim Beam atop his amp. The Faces with their infamous on-stage bar. tom Waits before he married that Kathleen woman and turned into a Bertold Brecht tribute act. Lynyrd Skynyrd. Thin Lizzy. Val doonican. And underrated figure, Doonican. No seriously. His version of the Elusive Butterfly truly rocked.
A little detour here, if you don’t mind. Hey, it’s my life that’s possibly leaking inexorably way into the Northern Irish gutter here. Indulge me. What do you mean, you suspect that this is just a literary decice in order to contextualise thinly-disguised autobiographical anecdotes about drink, music, religion and sex, and that they very existence of this book implies that I did, in fact, survive the Descent of the Triumph? Suspend your disbelief! Honestly, greater enjoyment will ensue. It’s not as if I remained a journalist. I later became a light entertainer.
Anyway, the whisky/whiskey conundrum. It’s basically down to Scotch being shite. And it’s allways Scotch, not Scots, which is always right when it comes to people of Scottish nationality. Except in the case of Berry Bros and Rudd’s Blue Hangar Scots Whisky, which is quite good but simply pretentious Anglified aristocratic twatting about by a bunch of wine merchants.
The tasting began with due ceremony. The correct glasses, the small jug of water, the holy libations themselves. Henderson sniffed and sipped, a beatific expression on his face. Time passed.
Here comes Gordon and Rob. They’re gingerly lifting the bike off me. Does it hurt, they’re asking? Are you all right? Not yet, I’m thinking. And all right? Well, is there any of that Bushmills 10-year-old new make spirit handy? I think a wee sip might help...
Whisky Rock’n’Roller
By Tom Morton
“Absolutely hilarious. And at least 62.3 per cent true.”
Rob Allanson, editor, Whisky Magazine
Well, I'm a whiskey rock-a-roller, that's what I am.
Women, whiskey and miles of travelin' is all I understand.
Sometimes I wonder where will we go?
Lord, don't you take my whiskey and rock'n'roll.
©Ronnie Van Zant, Billy Powell, Edward King. Duchess Music Corporation; Get Loose Music Inc; Super Tooter Publishing Inc.Leeds Music Corporation.
Forty years of motorcycling, and I’ve never fallen off once. Now here I am, in the deceptively sloping car park of Bushmills Distilery in Northern Ireland, lying underneath a Triumph Street Triple R, 675cc of rampant hooligan motorcycle which has just toppled with a sickening crunch onto my legs and torso.
There’s no pain, not yet. There was horror, a sense of awful inevitability as, swinging my leg over the heavily-laden bike to get off, I caught my foot on the tailpack, fell heavily to the ground and watched the Grey Beast (the R in its name, signifying its uprated thrash-punk credentials, standing in my opinion for Ridiculous) teeter on its dodgy kickstand and then descend towards my aged body.
Worse, there were witnesses. As I lay on the ground waiting for the inevitable agony and damage to both myself and the motorbike (brand new, borrowed, amid much dubiety about its insurance status, from the Triumph factory press fleet) I could see the horrified face of Gordon Donoghue, manager of Bushmills and keen motorcyclist himself. It was manoeuvring my bike close to his immaculate Triumph Bonneville that provoked my awkward and ultimately failed attempt to dismount. In fact, it was all Gordon’s fault. And I could see in his eyes he thought so too. Or rather, that it was all the fault of Bushmills Whiskey, its manager, Pernod Ricard, owners, and possibly the Protestant God who inhabits this part of Northern Ireland, makes the populace paint the paving stones red, white and blue, spreads Him (or Her) self among the dozens of competing churches of a Sabbath morning, and turns a blind presbyterian eye to the fact that Jameson’s, that good Catholic whiskey made at Cork in the Republic of Ireland, is actually bottled in Bushmills. Mostly by Protestants.
In the milliseconds the whole incident took, I could see Gordon’s brain turning over various considerations: The array of Bushmills new make spirit and finished whiskeys I had inhaled, if not drunk, that morning: had I addled my motorcycling body and brain, despite a rigid adherence to the sniff-spit-don’t-swallow rule? Would there have to be a full Health and Safety inquiry into the incident (yes, oh yes. In the UK’s current climate of namby-pamby corporate and national wimpishness? Are you joking?) Would I sue for bad car park camber? Meanwhile, I could hear the sound of laughter, somewhere. That would be Rob Allanson, my companion on this motorcycle adventure, editor of Whisky Magazine, rider of an identical Triumph and unsympathetic critic of my clumsiness, age and hapless incompetence as a motorcyclist. Not to mention my inability to wax lyrical about (1) the bass playing of Stanley Clarke (jazz noodling) or (2) the cinnamon overtones to be detected in the nose of a 1994 Glen Rothes single malt whisky (I’d go for warehouses, ash, sherry, dirty socks and ginger with the merest hint of baby sick and quarry dust).
What has brought me to this? Well, a motorcycle, obviously. Whisky, though, is the overriding reason for this trip. We’re collecting bottles from distilleries in Ireland, Scotland and, yes, England and Wales for charitable purposes. We’re stopping overnight at most of the booze factories to sip some of the stuff too. But you guessed that.
Why whisky? Why not...I don’t know, sail around rum distilleries in the Caribbean? Sledge around Siberian looking for Vodka? Skateboard from primary school to youth cllub, celebrating the alcopop, bigging up the Bacardi Breezer?
Well, the thing is, I have got form with whisky. Me and uisge beatha go back a long, long way. It’s a Scottish thing, and Scotland and myself have a shared history too. Mostly. I happen to think that whisky is very...nice. Very interesting. I have spent a great deal of time sniffing it, tasting it, talking about, even singing about it. Rock’n’roll, you see, is another major passion of mine. Not that I make a living out of playing my various guitars, of whgich I wone dmore than chords I can actually play on them. I earn most of my money out of playing records, and talking about them on the radio. Hey. it’s a bastard of a job, but somebody has to do it. What’s that? Do I hear murmuring from somewhere? Am I dying here? Is this a muttering chorus from hell, proclaiming ‘frustrated musician’ and ‘failed rock star’? Yeah, well. Everyone with a record collection is.
Whisky and rock’n’roll go together like...motorcycles and injury. Think of Keith Richards on stage with the Stones, in the old, pre-alarming baldness days, a bottle of Jack Daniels or Jim Beam atop his amp. The Faces with their infamous on-stage bar. tom Waits before he married that Kathleen woman and turned into a Bertold Brecht tribute act. Lynyrd Skynyrd. Thin Lizzy. Val doonican. And underrated figure, Doonican. No seriously. His version of the Elusive Butterfly truly rocked.
I know quite a lot of about whisky. I have strong opinions about the unutterable shit some so-called connoisseurs spout when faced with a dram and an audience. Indeed, I have myself uttered such unutterable shite, during whisky tasting evcents from Johannesburg to Wigtown (where I accused the wife of a distillery owner of drug dealing. But that’s another tale, which we may get to if we have time, and this is hydraulic fluid leaking from the Triumph I can feel pooling underneath me, and not blood or worse, cerebro-spinal ectoplasmic gunge. Better lie still.
There are worse places to die. Distilleries are, after all, locations of glory and delight, magical repositories of wondrous, alchemical arts, centres for the transformation of base agricultural substances into golden spirit. I’ve visited stills and their accompanying mills, maltings, mash tuns and other ancillaries. Slurped from illicitly opened barrels in dank, cavernouse warehouses. I’ve been from Wigtown to Wick, from Bruichladdich to...Bushmills. Where it now looks as if I may have to stay for a while. Resting here in my back, a rather nice Triumph on top of me, like some kind of mechanical comfort blanket in steel and plastic.
A song pops into my head. Lynyrd Skynyrd, it could be argued, only had about three real tunes (Freebird, Sweet Home Alabama and The Endlessly Extended Chug-a-Lug Blues Jam). Whiskey Rock’n’Roller tended to become The Endlessly Extended Chug-a-Lug Blues Jam live on stage, but its lyrics have that genuine sense of breast-beating look-ma-ah’m-drinkin’ rock excess that has, in a moderate, restrained sort of way, informed my life. Motorcycles, whisky and music: central to the Skynyrd myth (and cars, and aeroplanes, sadly, like the one that nearly wiped the band out) and to my own. You could add some religion to the mix, if you like. Skynyrd certainly would have been uneasily aware of that Robert Johnson rock’n’roll deal with the devil they’d made, and the fact that God was just longing to take a little vengeance. Me, I’ve been waiting for the lightning bolt to fall from an annoyed divinity ever since I gave up my faith and life as a travelling evangelist to follow alcohol and music and sexual excess. I quickly swopped the latter for journalism, which is not quite the same thing, I suppose. But, you know, there was a time when journalism was a reasonably exciting occupation. And you got paid real money for doing it, too.
Anyway, there are a couple of lines from Whisky Rock’n’Roller that capture it all: religion, in the form of a prayer: ‘Lord, don’t you take my whiskey and rock’n’roll,’ and the rest. Sex, alcohol, movement across the planet: ‘Women, whiskey and miles of travelin’ is all I understand.’ Quite. Couldn’t have put it better myself. Didn’t. Though I might have spelt whisky without the ‘e’A little detour here, if you don’t mind. Hey, it’s my life that’s possibly leaking inexorably way into the Northern Irish gutter here. Indulge me. What do you mean, you suspect that this is just a literary decice in order to contextualise thinly-disguised autobiographical anecdotes about drink, music, religion and sex, and that they very existence of this book implies that I did, in fact, survive the Descent of the Triumph? Suspend your disbelief! Honestly, greater enjoyment will ensue. It’s not as if I remained a journalist. I later became a light entertainer.
Anyway, the whisky/whiskey conundrum. It’s basically down to Scotch being shite. And it’s allways Scotch, not Scots, which is always right when it comes to people of Scottish nationality. Except in the case of Berry Bros and Rudd’s Blue Hangar Scots Whisky, which is quite good but simply pretentious Anglified aristocratic twatting about by a bunch of wine merchants.
The thing is, whisky is more than indulgence, more than drunkenness. It is both magic and science, conviviality and solitary insight. And to those who say, it’s all the bloody same...well, yes. You’re right. And you’re wrong. The difference between a childishly disgusting George T Stagg 2009 small batch Kentucky straight bourbon, bottled by idiots at 70.7 per cent alcohol (a crap Friday night Humvee, steering erratically along a single track road), and a stunningly sophisticated Glen Rothes 1994 (a smooth-but-heartbeat-thumping Moto Guzzi Bellagio on a deserted A96, the smell of sherry butts and pine trees wafting down on you as you power along towards Speyside nirvana). Should be obvious to any taster. One tastes of burnt shit, the other doesn’t. One is a bad car, the other a motorcycle (Italian too; they don’t make whisky there, but they really, really like it).
On the other hand, there is the Truth According to Hamish Henderson. Henderson was (he died in 2002) an intellectual, lecturer, folk song collector, hero of the German resistance to Hitler, pacifist, soldier (he personally accepted the surrender of Italy from Mrashall Graziani) and poet, seen by many as Scotland’s greatest since Robert Burns. He was, in many senses Scotland. On one occasion, a friend of his who was involved in the whisky industry decided it would be a good idea to obtain the great man’s verdict on a few rare single malts, for possible marketing purposes. After all, wouldn’t the great poet capture the grandeur and greatness of these fine spirits with words of deathless beauty, aesthetic insight and intellectual rigour?The tasting began with due ceremony. The correct glasses, the small jug of water, the holy libations themselves. Henderson sniffed and sipped, a beatific expression on his face. Time passed.
Here comes Gordon and Rob. They’re gingerly lifting the bike off me. Does it hurt, they’re asking? Are you all right? Not yet, I’m thinking. And all right? Well, is there any of that Bushmills 10-year-old new make spirit handy? I think a wee sip might help...
