your choice: Ripple Wine or Lone Star Beer ........ (Bob chooses: Ripple)

Click and tasty alcoholic beverages

will pour out of your printer.

Hoyt Axton, the Country & Western singer from Neptune, died on 26 October 1999.

If you have children either near you or perhaps a small child inside you, you can rent a gorgeously beautiful and thrilling movie called "The Black Stallion" and see Hoyt Axton as Alec's father at the beginning of Alec's marvelous adventure. It wasn't a long role, but if there had been a button that said

MAKE THIS GUY
MY DAD

I would have pressed it. Like most good musicians, he was also a very excellent comic/comedian (it's all a matter of timing) and was the star of a very strange and very funny horror movie called "Gremlins." It goes very well with popcorn, but it's particularly appropriate to eat Milk Duds while watching it.

Vleeptron has previously posted the lyrics to another Axton song, "The No No Song," a huge hit for Ringo Starr. But another song which paid Hoyt Axton's mortgage and college for the kids for decades was "The Pusher Man," which Steppenwolf yanked from its C & W birthplace and sang in a movie called "Easy Rider."

Substance use or abuse is the theme of many Hoyt Axton songs. In the final few years of his life, after he'd had a stroke or two, various law enforcement agencies chose to give this ailing gentleman a Very Hard Time over his penchant for ingesting cannabis, which is Prohibited in the USA.

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[In 1998], Axton was given a three-year deferred sentence and fined $15,000 for marijuana possession. [Axton's wife Deborah] Hawkins had pleaded guilty to possession of dangerous drugs and drug paraphernalia, getting a one-year deferred sentence and a $1,000 fine.

-- from the Associated Press obituary by By Susan Gallagher

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If the USA ever manages to encarcerate every musician who shares this penchant, the USA will be listening exclusively to the music of Donny and Marie Osmond, and maybe the Chipmunks, but I'm not sure about Alvin. I'm pretty sure Donny and Marie are clean.

Axton's original lyrics for "Lightning Bar" were

I don't need no diamond ring
I don't need no Cadillac car
Just want to drink my Lone Star beer
Down in the Lightning Bar

but when Arlo Guthrie (Woody's son) covered it, he sang

I don't need no diamond ring
I don't need no Cadillac car
Just want to drink my Ripple wine
Down in the Lightning Bar

These are also the lyrics sung by Finland's premier thrash nihilistic self-destructive suicidal punk band, Hanoi Rocks, one of whose members almost drowned in a toilet bowl once. (Not his whole body, they only found his mouth and nostrils submerged in the toilet bowl.)

Lone Star beer is a cheap industrial failed Pilsner which tastes like urine. It's manufactured in Texas, and I hope it stays there, because I no longer have any reason to be in Texas. For a year earlier in my life, if I had tried to escape or flee from Texas, the FBI would have tracked me down and thrown me into a federal military prison, probably Leavenworth, Kansas.

Ripple wine is apparently no longer manufactured, but during Arlo's youthful alcohol consumption days, it was among the first alcoholic beverages known today as Industrially Fortified Fruit Wines. When a true vintner makes wine en le mode traditionelle et naturelle, it comes out of the cask with what this bottle of Languedoc Medoc (Fat Bastard 2004, I'm not making that up) says on the label is

13.5 % Alcohol by Volume

Ripple and the other IFFWs come out of giant stainless steel vats in a factory indistinguishable from a pharmaceutical giant's with

17.5 % Alcohol by Volume

and that nasty, repellent taste of Languedoc Medoc '04 is disguised with added candy-like synthetic fruit flavor sweeteners -- IFFWs are excellent Entry Level alcoholic beverages for Young Drinkers because

* they taste like candy

* they fuck you up real fast

and


* they're really cheap

Ripple may have gone out of business because it could not compete with the Big Giant IFFW manufacturer, Magen David, which, besides vile-tasting Passover swill, made one of the first IFFWs called MD-20/20, commonly referred to in the Inner City as Mad Dog 20/20, because it fucks you up real fast and it's cheap and easy to swallow.

IFFWs are marketed aggressively to a target audience of hard-core alcoholics, who are typically very poor, and drowning in whole-life torment and alienation to such a degree that the only obvious logical solution is to get totally drunk and stay that way continuously, until an early death or Intervention, which in this case almost always means Jail or Prison.

Other IFFWs of my acquaintance are Boone's Farm and Annie Green Springs. When I worked in a very fine bookstore in the Georgetown section of Washington DC soon after I got out of the Army, the wannabe poets and wannabe novelists and wannabe psychotics who were my colleagues were very big fans of Annie Green Springs, which comes in several enjoyable fruitatronik flavors. It was cheap, tasted like candy, and it got us fucked up real fast.

The financial health of the IFFW market does not depend heavily on young wannabe poets and novelists; but it does depend heavily on Young People and on African-Americans and other poor ethnic minorities who need to live together in slums for the cheap rents.

Finally, about fifteen years ago, one or two large cities (I think Los Angeles was the first) calculated the Huge Volume of Life and Health and Community Damage caused directly by the aggressive marketing of IFFWs -- Bus Station Wines is another good description -- and outlawed their retail sale in liquor stores in the Inner City. So now I guess you have to go to the bus station and take a bus trip to the White Affluent Suburbs to buy your Mad Dog 20/20, and then drink it out of a brown paper bag on the bus back home.

If you want to leave Reality, or you want to leave Planet Earth, and you don't have access to a Zeta Beam, and you don't have a lot of money, and Life looks pretty fucking Hopeless to you, the answer is Industrially Fortified Fruit Wines. No more Ripple Wine, but these other vintages Vleeptron has reviewed will get you fucked up real fast, taste like candy, and are real cheap.

The image of Ripple wine above was found by a Web Guy who reviews cheap IFFW wine as a screenshot from an episode of the American television sitcom "Sanford and Son," about an African-American geezer who owns a junkyard, and enjoys drinking IFFWs. It was directly stolen from an earlier UK sitcom called "Steptoe and Son," about a Cockney geezer who owns a junkyard, and enjoys drinking IFFWs, or maybe cheap English beer. Both sitcoms were very popular because they depicted these communities as being exclusively inhabited by illiterate amoral subhumans, which generated Enormous & Endless National Mirth.