Bathtub Gin

Here comes the Joker
with his silly grin
He carries a martini
made of bathtub gin

Here comes the Joker
We all must laugh
'Cause we're all in this together
and we love to take a bath

~ Phish

So.  I'm housebound today while Bathfitter installs my new shower.  Seemed like a good idea to find a song lyric about bathing or showering.  I considered Little Feat's Fat Man in the Bathtub, but as much as I love all things Lowell George, I wasn't inspired to blog about it.  So I turned to Google and found Phish's Bathtub Gin.  (Oddly enough, Phish also did a cover of Fat Man in the Bathtub.)  And once again, I am amused by the temptation to apply the events of the day to the lyrics.  Is it coincidence that Mark Hamill recently recorded some of Donald Trump's tweets in the voice of The Joker?

Phish played three nights at Bethel Woods (site of Woodstock) back in 2011, so I may have heard them do this song.  Trey Anastasio has to be the happiest guy in rock and roll; the man cannot stop smiling while he is playing!  Such joy!  One of the reasons my son chose the University of Vermont in Burlington is because that's where Trey and Mike Gordon got together and formed Phish.  Despite that questionable motivation, Sam got an excellent education at UVM.

But back to the song.  Bathtub gin is a term born in the 1920s during Prohibition.  It refers to any kind of homemade spirits.  It may have resulted from the fact that the bottles of booze, which needed to be topped off with water, were too tall for the kitchen sink and needed to be finished from the bathtub faucet.  Or maybe it was the fact that, in order to supply larger establishments with the illegal alcohol, the distillers needed to be discreet in order to avoid detection by police.  The common metal bathtub was small enough to escape notice, but big enough to produce large quantities.  I find it humorous that one would drink a martini, a drink associated with "the elites," made from bathtub gin!  But we do live in a culture of knock-off purses and cubic zirconia bling, don't we?

'Cause we're all in this together and we love to take a bath.  As in "suffer a heavy financial loss"?  Fasten your seat belts!  Inauguration Day is only ten days away!