It has been a long time since I last wrote, I know, but if there were any excuse I would probably have, not the best, but the most understandable of the bunch. My disappearance was abrupt yet entirely necessary for the sake of my own life, and that of my good friend/drinking buddy/partner in defending all that is good-and-holy: Dan Auerbach. Ah yes, I can remember it like it was almost three years ago ...
... Dan had just come back from touring every known square foot on the planet with his band The Black Keys, and wanted to dip into the batch of medium-grade bathtub swill he affectionately referred to as "Bathtub Whin," which was really just one part whiskey, one part gin, some unknown ingredients, and a dash of mescalin. Dan said the mescalin was "for the comedown," and at the time I thought he was referring to how awful the drunk (and hangover, for that matter) would be after imbibing any amount of the ungodly mixture he had sitting in a bathtub in the Mississippi backwoods for months at a time. I had never drank the stuff. Usually he would offer and I would decline, he'd write a song about some young woman messin' with his har-arrt, and we'd go get Justin Bieber banned from The United Kingdom.
However, on a particular morning in the month of February, in the year of 2011, I had accepted his offer and drank heartily from the old wooden cup Dan had bored out of a nearby tree stump with nothing but his bare hands and some good ol' fashioned elbow grease. I was having a hard time. It felt as if I had hit rock bottom, not knowing what the future held, and not understanding the past or present. Our work defending music and all that is good and righteous was not proving successful: Hip-Hop had turned into some terrible one-legged, lock-jawed, quasi-retarded version of itself. And whats more, Alternative music may as well have been written and produced by a single man, for it was an endless sea of repeating harmonies and rehashed hooks. Country music was somehow more vomit inducing than before. The ancient form of Polka was but a shadowed husk of its former self. It was only Rock that stood strong, and a good thing too, for evil will always look for a foothold in the world. She had a wise group of elders who meticulously cared for, and fastidiously watched over the realm of Rock. One of these said elders was Satan himself: Josh Homme.
Outside of that Dan and I were losing ground. Something had to change, something had to react and snap back the equilibrium to ensure the safety and progress of Music. This is essentially what Dan and I were discussing while I began to drink my second cup.
Dan: "What're we gonna doooo, brotha? We can only accomplish so much. Ev-er-y time we send one of these demons to he-ell, baby, two more pop up in its place."
Me: "Wasn't Lauryn Hill sent to prison recently?"
D: "Yeahhhh, baby! Good thinkin', alright. Maybe we can scoot out there tonight and scoop her up."
M: "Break her out! Fuck yes, this is just what we need. Go get your shit on."
And with that we were off to Danbury, Connecticut to break Lauryn Hill out of prison, because damn the Man. We grabbed our gear, hopped into the 1968 Nova parked outside of the backwoods cabin, peeled out and prepared ourselves for yet another adventure in the aims of saving the very soul of music. As soon as we hit the highway, the mescalin hit me like an entire warehouse full of brick shit-houses, complete with a million semi trucks fully loaded with bricks. It hit me hard is what I'm sayin'. Specifically, as hard as a brick.
Startled, I quickly cranked my head towards Dan. "What the fuck is going on?!" I shouted at him, loud enough to be heard over the music he had blaring. His head slowly turned as to look me dead in the eyes, and very calmly whirred; "The mescalin is knocking on your door, my brothaaaa. Will you answer?" The mescalin. I had completely forgotten already. Jesus, this stuff is incredible. Suddenly I was on fire. No, i was ice. No, a squirrel! "What the fuck IS this?!" I said, pointing to my reflection in the side mirror. Dan and I appeared to be surrounded by a thick white light, and for some reason the squirrel popped into existence on my shoulder this time. He was wearing an old bucket hat and some aviator glasses, smoking a never ending and never ashing cigarette. He looked at me, smiled, and started headbanging along to the music.
My mind was racing, my heart like a sturdy war drum, thrumming the beat the universe created Everything with. Mere words beyond these are incomplete, as they do not get anywhere near accurately transmitting what was happening. I suppose I could tell you that the sensation the bathtub Whin produced can only be described as to what it would've been like to have main-lined Hunter S. Thompson's unfiltered blood. We bent time and space in the Nova, and the three of us made it to Danbury without incident.
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