John Tabin has the full text of a National Review interview with Modern Drunkard founder Frank Kelly Rich. A few highlights:
Q: Well, what do you think the culture in America is like right now towards drinkers?FKR: It’s weird. It is kind of going both directions at once. It is tending to move toward prohibition. The pendulum tends to swing every hundred years in that direction. MADD is getting more powerful. They are attacking the bars to get rid of cigarettes. Now they’re trying to get rid of happy hours and making shots illegal. But at the same time some states are getting rid of their old blue laws where you can’t buy liquor on Sunday. They also did a “pop the cap” thing in North Carolina where they raised the [allowable] level of alcohol for their craft beers. So it’s going in both directions. We’re kind of stuck in the middle now but I tend to see it going toward prohibition because MADD is becoming more powerful. I just think these kinds of nanny groups are moving in that direction.
Q: Is it just MADD or are there any other groups?
FKR: There is a whole bunch of them. All these nanny organizations. They’re against almost anything that is fun.
Q: The Center for Science in the Public Interest?
FKR: Yeah. Then there is the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which has a huge half-billion dollar budget. They give all of this money to all the anti-drinking groups like MADD. It’s funny too because that organization was founded by one of the Johnson brothers of Johnson & Johnson. What they do now is they produce a lot of the pharmaceuticals that are kind of trying to replace alcohol.
I see a conflict of interest there.
Not so unusual, I think, that politics can move in two direction simultaneously. Elected officeholders tend to respond to interest groups, and both the nannyists and the liquor lobby are fairly well organized. Here's a cute story -
Q: We have a president who is a former drunk and is now a professed teetotaler. What do you think of that?FKR: Yeah, I guess he was a pretty wild boy until he was, what, 40, 42? Then he went solidly straight. I’ve heard rumors that he is drinking but of course there is no proof of that.
I think he needs to drink. I think he needs to have a couple of drinks.
Back in the day though presidents used to drink like crazy. FDR was loaded every night. Even Ronald Reagan drank a couple of beers a day I think. I don’t know about Carter. I’ll bet Clinton did.
In fact, I had a friend who was a waitress at some Louisiana [Arkansas?] place. I’m not sure if this was when he was governor or president. But he had this system where he would only drink the neck of the beer down and then she would have to bring him a new. This happened all the time. This made it look like he wasn’t really drinking all that much.
More political observation:
Q: In parts of the world it is completely illegal to drink. I’m speaking specifically of the Middle East. How much do you think that is a contributing factor to the radicalism there?FKR: Oh absolutely, I’ve always said that. I’ll be talking with these prohibitionist types and they’ll be like, “There’d be no crime. Everybody would be so much happier. There’d be no domestic abuse if we just got rid of alcohol. It would just be this beautiful paradise.”
I’ll be like, “Can you think of one place in the world where those laws are actually in effect and how peaceful they are?” And they’re like, “Well …” And I’ll be like, “The Middle East!”
It’s not peaceful there at all. Everybody is always blowing each other up. They have got really oppressive laws for women. They have honor killings all the time. It is a really unhappy, unstable place.
I think if they started drinking, if they started introducing alcohol into that culture it would definitely help out. If you get off work and you’re all pumped up about some new cartoons in Denmark or something, if you had a couple of beers you could just chill out. But there’s no release in that place.
And to {ahem} top it off:
Q: And you landed in Denver precisely because you thought it was a good bar town?FKR: Yeah, specifically one bar. I knew I was going to launch this magazine but wasn’t sure where so I moved to Denver because my parents live up in the Rockies. So I visited them and came down to Denver. I was just driving through town and I was on my way out when I saw this sign for the Lion’s [Lair]. It was this old great retro sign up above this bar. So I stopped in there at about noon and got drunk and I met all these really great people. In the daytime it was all these old men telling stories. In the nighttime it became this hipster place for kids. The bar was just the epitome of what a great American dive was. I had spent the previous year driving around the country investigating these and I said this is the best dive bar in America. So I slept in my car – or passed out – and then in the morning I had a couple of bloody marys and started walking in concentric circles until I found a place for rent about two blocks away and I moved in.
I wrote my third and fourth book right inside that bar on and old Tandy laptop.
The Lion's Lair is still there, still as he describes it. One very memorable evening Mrs. In Denver and I managed to get into a Reverend Horton Heat show there - we've been fans since a decade-and-a-half ago when we lived in Dallas. The Rev had played several nights preceding that night in the Denver area, at several venues, each with hundreds of fans. But the Lion's Lair is not much bigger than your living room. We got in early, staked out a couple of bar stools, and didn't budge all night. By the time the show started they had crammed a hundred-plus people in there, it seemed. Couldn't have been legal. The Rev played just on the other side of the bar from us, not much farther than arm's reach away.
The strangers on bar stools next to us became friends by the end of the night, and we still keep in touch with them. Frank Kelly Rich was right about the Lion's Lair, and I recommend the rest of the interview.
Posted by Walter at April 2, 2006 12:19 PM