There's a new music writer in your town. Write his/her introduction...

"I look forward to seeing Clyde Stubblefield, the World's Funkiest Drummer, every week."

Yeah, except he'd rather play blues shuffles with way worse bands than he deserves instead of funk these days.

Ha-ha. The Yuengling fad always cracks me up. Yuengling was the staple beer of Schuylkill County for most of the breweries existence. I would wager John O'Hara, a notorious angry drunk knew it well and presumably thought very little of it. Only recently has Yuengling caught on as a fad in a couple of the larger cities of the eastern seaboard.

Pottsville had and has no music scene. It has one daily newspaper. The Republican, which contains about a page of canned entertainment articles on Saturday. There are no altie weeklies. The county is solidly Republican. There is one branch campus of Penn State University. It is backward and depressed, contained the wrecked industries of anthracite coal mining and garment mills, the latter which moved overseas about a decade ago.

There is an aluminum extrusion plant in Cressona, a dirty and polluted burb of Pottsville. Pine Grove, fifteen miles from Yuengling and where I grew up, hit upon the novel idea of raising revenue four or five years ago by taking garbage from New Jersey and NYC in a giant landfill overseen by a corporate predator.

Yuengling was the cheap local beer of parties and the firehouses. People looked down on it as piss, an indication of even poorer economic standing and taste. If you offered Yuengling to neighbors at the summer barbecue you were thought a heevahava, a dolt not having the decency to buy a case of Miller or Budweiser. Even more downscale brews like Pabst, Schaefer, Carling Black Label, Old Milwaukee, Piels and the lamentable Schmidts of Philadelphia were considered preferable substitutes.

Yuengling was also the de facto beer of the underage at the yearly Bavarian fest. No one seriously checked age at this shindig, so even twelve and thirteen year-olds could get ploughed on it, or some of its offshoot varieties like Bavarian and Chesterfield.

Calling Yuengling "a fabled beverage" is hilarious, a tribute to the power of what must be a very good but modern marketing campaign. It reminds me a lot of the pseudo-phenomenon of Pabst, another cheap and mediocre working class beer that was a firehouse and coal miner's staple because it was inexpensive and plentiful. The Washington Post and New York Times' features sections wrote a couple idiotic and mostly fabricated articles on its allegedly fresh and hip cache and voila -- everyone is said to think its the new premium brew nationwide although no sales statistics support it.

I'd definitely wish upon a rock critic the ancrestral home of Yuengling. It would mean he's going to be covering a lot of sewer meetings between record reviews. It would be much worse than an assignment to Detroit.

let's just say something about mongrels.