A beer with my name on it

[randy_byers]

Jeff Alworth at Beervana reviews a new brew from Portland's Upright Brewing called Billy the Mountain. According to Alworth, it's their version of a traditional English old ale, which is a style I really like, and this one is aged in pinot barrels with brettanomyces clausenii (not to be confused with the brettanomyces bruxellensis used in Belgian beers), which apparently gives it a bit of tartness.

So it sounds like a beer I would love to taste, but it's also true that "Billy the Mountain" was the first Frank Zappa song I ever loved with all my heart. I'll always remember the first time I heard it in 1978 or 1979, which for various reasons I really shouldn't describe in detail here, but suffice it to say that one of my clearest memories of that night is my friend and ex-co-worker Phil's face looming over me, where I was lying flat on my back on the floor in his apartment struggling to breathe because I was laughing so hard at the song, and Phil's face asking, "Are you okay?" Sounds like this beer might put me in a similar state. Now if I can only track down a bottle of it.

Comments

[maryread.livejournal.com]

Ethel was a tree! growing out of his shoulder!

I had a couple friends in the co-op who would recite and sing this off of some live album, when the Firesign Theater ran out.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

When I walk the Burke-Gilman trail, I regularly find myself singing:

A regular picturesque postcardy mountain
Residing between lovely
Rosamond and Gorman
With his stunning wife Ethel,
A tree!
A tree!

Although to be honest I always heard it as "residing between the bleak Rosamond and Garvey," and I still have no idea what that refers to. Wikipedia says Rosamond and Gorman are two cities and places Billy "in California's Tehachapi Mountains, or possibly the Sierra Pelona Mountains."

[galacticvoyeur.livejournal.com]

My first real big rock show was seeing Zappa with Flo & Eddie in the old (but still not yet gone) Pittsburgh Civic Arena, using the folding-out opera stage, not a big flat one built on the hockey rink floor. They didn't use the opera stage much, and finally quit using it because they were afraid it might not fold up again. They stopped opening the dome roof, too, after a few decades, for fear they couldn't get it to shut. The arena was too far ahead of it's time, meant to be a showpiece of Pittsburgh industry. It's 50 years old and they're voting on whether to wreck it in early February.

Anyways, Zappa did... Billy the Mountain! It was, like, their newest song. What a great show! Don't remember a lot about it, it was the '70s after all...

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Well, color me green. I never saw Zappa with Flo & Eddie (that was too early for me), although I did see Zappa with a different group twice in 1978 or thereabouts. I also met Howard Kaylan (a.k.a. Eddie) at a World Fantasy Convention back in the '80s or '90s (John Shirley had brought him), and I drooled all over him.