randy_byers (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
randy_byers) wrote2011-01-26 09:57 am
randy_byers) wrote2011-01-26 09:57 am
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A beer with my name on it
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.
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.
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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.
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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."