The Lord Picked Up the Tab
Every time I hear “Dead, Drunk and Naked,” I think about those LSD lost boys, suspended in time, stuck forever in the Florida panhandle
If you enjoy this newsletter, please forward this email to a friend. And if you’re not yet, please consider becoming a paid subscriber or leaving me a tip! Thank you for reading.
On “The Three Great Alabama Icons,” Patterson Hood famously says that he grew up hating football and rebelling against the music of his high school parking lot. Fifteen or so years later, I was doing the same thing.
Booker T. Washington High School in Pensacola, FL, housed 2,000 students in a mostly windowless building (it doubled as a hurricane shelter). In the mid ’90s, the social landscape split between Black and white, popular kids and outcasts. Most of the popular white kids went to arena-sized evangelical churches; they drank beer and went to football games and listened to pop country.
The outcasts included both stoners and nerds, and I sat somewhere between those two social strata. To find the outcasts, you could visit the cafeteria during pep rallies, where we were allowed to sit if we didn’t want to feel pep.