TICKLED PINK PICKLES, WITH A TWIST

Welcome to CREEM’s cocktail column, commandeered by our resident bartender/musician/obscuro-power-pop DJ/man of many fancy shirts, Kirk Podell (Subversive Rite, Anti-Machine, Neo Cons), who will be handling all things related to alcohol, because Born to Booze is where we talk about alcohol-related things. We almost called this column Kunning Kaptain Kirk’s Kurious Kocktail Korner Karnival, butthe alliteration, while initially thrilling, quickly became exhausting, and something about all those Ks made usfeel gross inside. So we tried out more titles about consuming alcohol: Highballs to Hell; Drink, Baby, Drink; Dead Men Tell No Cocktails; (We Are) The Corkscrew; Living After Midnight; The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swizzle; Butt Chug 3000 (???); Plonk Rock; The Opposite of Straightedge, etc., and, as you can see, we eventually settled on Born to Booze. Who knows, maybe we’ll change it next issue. In the meantime, BTB’s inaugural column features Kool Keith, who wandered into CREEM's imaginary bar one night and told Kirk a curious story that could only come from Kool Keith.

Like so many of my comrades in the service industry, I’ve also been playing and touring in bands forever. In my travels, I’ve been given all kinds of weird shit—it’s almost like all logic goes out the window when it comes to your needs on the road. One time when I left my mother’s house, she tried to give me a first-aid kit big enough to service the shores of Omaha Beach. It was an overnight trip! Once in Shizuoka, Japan, a very fuckin’ eager and insane-looking punk flagged me down frantically as we were leaving, handing me a bag full of tins of “emergency fish.” You know, just in case we couldn’t find any regular fish in an industrialized nation.