No. 191 – Machine Gun

Performer: Jimi Hendrix

Songwriter: Jimi Hendrix

Original Release: Band of Gypsys

Year: 1970

Definitive Version: Jimi Plays Berkeley, 1971.

I saw Jimi Plays Berkeley for the first time on cable soon after my musical rebirth, and it quickly vanished into the ether. A decade later, I rediscovered it thanks to a strip-mall video store by my apartment in Grand Blanc.

It was quite the comprehensive video store, not like the crappy Blockbusters that were going up everywhere. In addition to a back-room porn section that I might or might not have ventured into at one point, the store kept a good collection of music videos. One was Jimi Plays Berkeley. Hey, cool. I rented it and played it with the tape deck rolling.

After that, Jimi Plays Berkeley became a regular night-time play in my car when I drove to or from work. I say “to or from,” because in the winter, EVERY drive in my car was “at night.” The only question was whether it was night in the evening or night in the morning.

Some of those times, of course, were after being at the White Horse, which meant, yes, I drove home … well, not drunk. I had full recognition of my capabilities and surroundings. I suppose I might have been impaired, but no one else was on the road at that hour—either in the city, on the freeway or in Grand Blanc—so it didn’t matter. Besides, as Sam Kinison used to say, how else was I going to get my car home?

I’ve mentioned that my tenure at the Flint Journal was when I really learned how to drink. I got my start at Northwestern, but Flint is where I began to drink stuff that was harder than beer on a regular basis.

My hard drink of choice, of course, was Jack Daniels. The Sports crew would order a shot after we finished our pizzas and maybe a second later on if we felt saucy and were having fun. The only time I ever did a third was the time the bar owner brought the bottle over to our table at the end of the night—when you HAVE to drink. The only time I abused it was the time I poured my own shot.

I don’t drink JD any more, and in some ways my time with it was like that of a recovering alcoholic. When I began, it was great. Then I needed more to get the same feeling. Then it became a problem (when I made an ass of myself at a party—good ol’ No. 337). Then I stopped and haven’t been back.

I stopped drinking JD soon after I left Flint, not because I couldn’t control it but because I didn’t have anyone with whom to drink it. JD wasn’t something I wanted on my own, like a beer. And as I embraced my newfound love of gastronomy with Debbie in Columbus, it didn’t fit. JD doesn’t go with food, like wine. It goes with beer, and that’s it.

I’ll never forget the first time I had JD though. I’m pretty sure I’d tried whiskey before—maybe even JD—but I didn’t like the taste, and I wasn’t big on getting drunk just for its own sake, so there was no attraction to it. Circumstances change.

I learned via trial by fire that working Sports wasn’t all fun and games. I had run a Saturday night shift before, so I could do it, but the night of the semifinal games of the 1991 NCAA tournament, I pulled a huge rock.

For reasons I can’t remember, I watched way more of the basketball than I should have, and I got way behind in my work. I got so far behind that I had to pass off a lot of my own work to whoever was available so the section could get out somewhere in the neighborhood of on time. When I wrote up the report on why we were late, I did the only thing I could: I fell on my own sword. We were late entirely due to my poor judgment.

No one needed to beat me up over the fact that we were late, because I was doing a fair Tyson act on myself. I was inconsolable. I promised dinner and drinks at the White Horse on me to try and make up for making it so others had to do my work for me.

Finally, Brendan came up with a remedy. He and Dan were the ones who drank JD, and when he arrived at the White Horse that night, he got the drinks and put a third glass in front of me. All he said was, “I think you need this right now.” Maybe I did.

I slammed back the JD with he and Dan. Maybe it was the rationale or the camaraderie of doing it together, but it tasted good. It wasn’t an instant process, but I started to feel better, and by the end of the night, everything felt back to normal.

Dan said that although he wasn’t glad what happened, he was glad that it taught me a valuable lesson—that it might be OK to have the TV on to follow what’s happening, but you have to tune it out when it’s time to get the work done. So true. I learned my lesson, and it never happened again. I still was late on rare occasion, but it never again was due to my poor judgment.

The other lesson I learned that night was I DID like hard alcohol. By the next weekend, my error had been forgotten, but the memory of JD remained, and I was ordering it because I wanted it, not because I “needed” it.

And you know the rest of the story.