Electric Lite Beer Orchestra

I am always up for a fool’s errand. A trip to a lost city. A snipe hunt. Alchemy lessons. Tracking down bigfoot. Bowling 300. Drawing a perfect circle. Grabbing a beer from the fridge using only my mind. Whatever. Impossibility doesn’t deter me. As I get older and rack up more mistakes, failures, and horrible choices, I found the best way to deal with regrettable quests is to just enjoy the trip to nowhere. In the immortal words of Lemmy, “The Chase is Better Than the Catch”. This holds true especially when there never will be a catch to be had. I am Wile E. Coyote. I am Elmer Fudd. I am Boris & Natasha. I am Tom…there is no Jerry. Squirrel and moose have got away again. Bugs Bunny fooled me with a dress and wig and an Acme Co. anvil just crowned me.

I know I’ll never find my perfect beer but Central Waters Peruvian Morning is in the ballpark. Why, you ask? Well, mostly, the immaculate blend of my three favorite liquids – bourbon, coffee, and beer. No sickly burn from the bourbon taste. No bitterness from the coffee taste. No weird aftertaste that big beers sometimes impart. It is like the kept the best parts of the three with no side effects. Perfectly balanced – a drunk tightrope walker prancing with wobbly grace between the ruinous remains of Macchu Picchu (okay, I don’t know where I was going with that, but I had to get it out of me). All this and remarkably drinkable, even light for a barrel-aged imperial stout.

Electric Light Orchestra’s Eldorado is an album for which I fight tooth and nail. Even as an ELO apologist, I am clueless as to why this record is never mentioned in the same breath as now revered under the radar early 70s production sort of classics Here Come the Warm Jets, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, Tago Mago, or Aja. Perfectly blended and balanced much like the aforementioned Peruvian Morning, Eldorado is an album that does everything right for me. Cohesive, original, rich, high soaring, ethereal. An album that sounds exactly like its theme…the blurring dizziness of the point where dreams and reality crash together.  A perfect blending of orchestra and rock band. Beauty and the beast. Kansas and Oz. You can’t escape reality by dreaming…but reality can’t shake the dreamer either (trust me, it makes sense in ELOese).

Both these under-heralded personal pleasures seem to just float above their peers. I am up there with them. Head in the clouds. And yeah, it’s true I am an excitable boy. That the record I listened to last or the great beer I am drinking tends to be praised with hyperbole and grandiosity and then forgotten tomorrow. Isn’t that the point? So, I keep chasing the dragon. Seeking the lost City of Gold and its fountains of beerfection. Hell, the only problem is, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I ever got there.