Originally published at: You can finally buy a Thin Lizzy whiskey in the bottle (not a jar) | Boing Boing
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I’m going to suggest that a whiskey named in part for a guy who died at 36 due to alcohol and drug abuse isn’t the best way to either market the product or honor his memory.
YMMV
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You’re right I don’t listen to them enough, maybe because I heard “Boys Are Back” 100 times too much.
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I saw a post-Lynott, personnel-depleted version of Thin Lizzy (could have been one of the original members touring as the band?) at a tiny dive bar near Cape Cod in either 1999 or 2000. It was sparsely attended and the group had a downtrodden look about them, but they sounded like Thin Lizzy and the singer was trying hard to sell it. They ran through the hits - The Boys are Back, Whiskey in the Jar, a bunch of stuff I don’t really remember. There was a short intermission and when they came back their first song was Jailbreak. Maybe they figured it would rev up the crowd? I don’t know, but before the final chord had stopped ringing, the bar emptied out. The downtrodden band members started to look like they kind of hoped someone would just shoot them already and the singer looked like a 45 being played on 33. My friend and I finished our beers and left feeling depressed and I haven’t thought of Thin Lizzy again until today.
That’s my Thin Lizzy story, thank you for reading. If you ask nicely, next time I’ll tell my Tiny Tim story.
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I’ve been on a Thin Lizzy kick lately and will try to bring back a bottle on my upcoming trip to Ireland. Thanks for the heads up!
Okay you know you can’t just tease about having a Tiny Tim story without spilling the details. That guy was a bit of a nut so I’m sure your experience was interesting.
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Yeah, his mother, widow, and remaining members of Thin Lizzy pitched a fit when Romney used the Boys are Back in Town during his campaign in 2012, largely because they didn’t think Phil Lynott would have supported anything Romney supported. His mother died a few years ago, so I can’t help but wonder if she would have been ok with this.
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Growing up I just remember being told that he died of an infection and I don’t think I ever thought more about it. Septicaemia induced by drug and alcohol abuse is certainly a more sobering description of his passing.
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I was just looking up all the Thin Lizzy songs I loved, and half were The Clash, while the other half were Skid Row. My music memory is apparently not what I thought it was.
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The best Thin Lizzy song is Cold Sweat.
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The boys are back!
jazz hands
The boys are back!
jazz hands
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I’m having a hard time figuring out how you can confuse those 3 bands! 
No offense intended… I just think they are all very different styles of music…
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I can imagine Thin Lizzy playing English Civil War.
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I like to think Phillo had a spliff and went to see Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain and tried to explain it to someone after while they were listening to Funkadelic and decided they’d call it a song:
It’s on the record that Whiskey in the Jar is on. Must admit I like the lineup with Eric Bell on guitar before they got too rawk for me. Though boys are back in town is the obvious only correct song to play for a men’s sportsball team from my town.
I used to see the original drummer and guitarist in a jam session on a Sunday night when I was underage as a kid, dressed up all goth and all in a more biker situation. It was fun.
But yes, Phillo branded heroin or something isn’t a good look.
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I’m not sure interesting is the right word? But you asked nicely, so here it is:
The TIny Tim Story
August, 1991. My girlfriend and I had moved to Providence, Rhode Island for college and work. We didn’t know anyone; the phone and cable hadn’t been hooked up in our aparment yet, and we were at loose ends, looking for anything to do.
Driving around near the airport, we passed an old Howard Johnson’s motor lodge bedded in like a tick between the Jefferson Boulevard-95 onramp and a truck depot. The restaurant had retained its wedge-shaped orange roof, but the cupola and the motel had been given a patchy coat of scab-brown paint. Out front, a red and white sign decorated with a western rope theme announced that for one night only, the Beef Barn1 was thrilled to present Tiny Tim, live in person.
There was no cover charge and almost no audience. A half-dozen women wearing resigned expressions were drinking with determination at the bar. Most of the other patrons were part of a large wedding party. They too were drinking with determination, and had reached that penultimate, blackout-adjacent phase of inebriation where everything has to be done at maximum volume and drinks and furniture overturn themselves without warning.
In the center of the room was a low dais and on that dais was Tiny Tim. I don’t think I’d expected the authentic article; I’d had a half-formed idea that we were going to walk into a one-man show featuring a local midget wrestler or something of the sort, and I was okay with that because whatever we found was going to be entertaining, but the man on the dais was unmistakably the authentic Tiny Tim - awkwardly tall but hunched, hair hanging in lank ringlets past his shoulders, dressed in a once-white suit patterned with red and blue palm trees. He was strumming erratically on a ukulele and singing something I didn’t recognize that had an American Songbook vibe. At idiosyncratic intervals he’d belt out a quavering high note and during the sustain he’d stop strumming and point upwards, his palm resting on the bout of the ukulele and his wrist bent back, a long finger aimed up through the drop ceiling. Behind him, a smirking trio of local 20-something musicians, playing off sheet music and struggling to stay with him, grimaced and waited for him to return to Earth.
My girlfriend and I had arrived mid-set and it wasn’t long before the band wanted a break. They all exited smartly through an unmarked door at the back of the room (I thought this went to a green room, I discovered later it was the parking lot) and Tiny Tim followed them like he wasn’t really sure what else to do. When they returned, the band was clearly worse for the wear - smirking had given way to giggling and the loose song structures unraveled like botched knitting. At one point, during one of his quavering falsetto excursions, Tim stumbled off the edge of the dais and into the midst of the wedding party.
And then suddenly it was over. The band packed up and left. Tim looked lost, then sat down unasked with the wedding party. They plied him with drinks he didn’t seem to want and the bride kept trying to sit on his lap. I eventually worked up the courage to ask him for his autograph and he signed a place mat, “To Ms. [-redacted- ] and Mr. [-redacted-], many happy returns!” When we broke up a couple years later, my girlfriend kept the placemat.
For a long time, I thought of that story as an odd, funny thing that had happened to us. As I got older, it stopped being about me at all. When I think of it now, I’m sitting in my proper place in the audience; at the story’s center is a sad man marooned by fame, stumbling off a dais in a decrepit HoJo’s, trying to ride a quavering falsetto up through the drop ceiling out into the night to someplace where he belonged.
1It wasn’t the Beef Barn, the Beef Barn’s in Woonsocket. It was something western themed though, like The Roundup or The Musky Cowpoke Saloon. F#ck’s sake, how can I have forgotten this?
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Yes I was wondering about that myself. Has the author listened to enough Thin Lizzy? Especially “Got to give it up”?
He tried hard but his spirit broke
He tried until he nearly choked
In the end he lost his bottle drinking alcohol
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