Ep 47: It's All Scotch

In this episode, John brings together two things he loves deeply: music and single malt Scotch.

On the surface, they may not seem to have much in common. One belongs on a stage, the other in a glass. But spend enough time with either one and you start to notice something.

This episode is an exploration of that metaphor. Let's have some fun with it.

Transcript

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You are listening to the Gig to Live Podcast. Welcome everyone. I'm John Folsom. I'm a full-time working musician. This podcast is about building a music life that holds up over time. It's practical, enjoyable, sometimes uncomfortable, but it's always about helping you stay in the game and actually enjoy the life that you're building. We'll meet some wonderful working musicians from time to time. So whether you're just getting started or you've been doing this for years, you're in the right spot. This podcast is for you. Well, hello, friends, comrades. Man, I think this is going to be one of my favorite episodes today. I I enjoy talking about all of the things that I get to talk to you about. And I enjoy meeting all the people we meet. But today I am going to combine two of my very favorite things in this episode. We are going to talk about music and a good scotch. Ha ha ha ha. Alright, you ready for this? This episode is all about metaphor, kids. Once upon a time, a friend by the name of Ted introduced me to single malt scotch. It was the first time that I ever tried it, and I did not like it. He laughed at me. Not really mockingly, but he enjoyed my reaction. I think there was a bit of the oh, look at the little baby. I told him it tasted like camphophonique. That's that stuff that my mom used to put on my cold sores as a kid. It was not appealing to me. Well, Ted purposefully introduced me on the very first taste to one of the most peaty, smoky, medicinal tasting scotches out there. It was a Lefroig tenure. And if if that means nothing to you, that's okay. Just know it's not really an entry-level scotch. And Ted was teasing me a bit. But the next scotch that Ted gave me was amazing to me. It was sweet. It was aromatic and warm. And that evening we sat around and we talked about all different kinds of scotches, where they come from, what they pair best with, after dinner scotches, afternoon scotches. And of course, as is the case with anything, it's all a matter of taste and tradition and preference, and it's super fun. For instance, one of those things I learned that night is that true single malt scotch drinkers do not put ice in their scotch. That's a big no-no. Now, are you going to get spanking by someone if you put ice in your scotch? No. By all means, if you want to do that, go ahead, knock yourself out. Just there are some rules and traditions that go with single malt scotch, and I kind of ate it all up. I loved it. I got way into it. I started collecting scotch. I started reading every book I could about scotch. And eventually I started a scotch club and I ran it like a secret society. I invited a handful of guys over that I thought would enjoy it. I sent them a handwritten wax-sealed letter, and I told them it was highly secret. And to join, they had to pony up a couple hundred bucks, but that would enable us to buy some bottles of scotch if we pulled all of our money. We could buy scotch that we couldn't afford on our own. And we would be able to sip on these scotches for weeks. We'd enjoy some scotches that maybe we would never have an opportunity to taste on our own. I really fell deeply in love with scotch, the different tastes, the different feels, the process, the places, the things that go into making scotch what it is. And eventually I ran a few gatherings and even did some fundraisers where I taught about scotch and we raised money for good causes. So recently I was going down memory lane thinking about this time of my life, this snapshot of time. I still like a good scotch, but I mean, it was that was a season where scotch was a big deal for me. And I was thinking about it and thinking about how being a musician is a lot like scotch. So I thought it would be fun to unpack this metaphor. Right at the top, let me say that scotch is what is known as a gentleman's drink. I know, sexist. So uh maybe I can say it differently. Uh it's a sophisticated drink. You don't slam it down. The point is not to get drunk. It's not a Jaeger shot. It is not even a cosmo. You sip it, you enjoy it, you converse over it, you talk about it. It's something that you hold in your hand when the more important thing is happening around it. And, you know, that's time with friends, relationships. It's meant to be part of a bigger thing that is happening where memories are created, it's communal, it's shared. Does that sound familiar? Music is just like that. I mean, sure, music is our own, you know, for us in some ways, but we don't really keep music to ourselves, it's for the world. And we don't force feed music to ourselves. We we listen to it, we enjoy it, we unwrap it, we look at its layers. Music is complex. The other thing about scotch is it begins with a place. Scotch begins with you guessed it, Scotland. As a matter of fact, you can't legally call anything scotch unless it comes from Scotland. Scotch is from Scotland. So before you get to the barley, the peat, the barrels, the stills, you have a place. You have a landscape. You have locks and glens and islands. You have peat bogs, we'll talk about that some more. You have mountains, you have coastal winds, you have tiny little villages that are tucked away into magical Lord of the Rings kind of landscapes that can look beautiful and romantic, but they also have this really harsh side to them. Once upon a time, distilleries grew up out of places where people lived and they found what they needed from the land. What do you need when you're looking for a place to live? You need running water, uh, good land for growing things, you need a way to keep yourself warm in the winter. So distilleries grew up in Scotland where there was good running water, there was land for growing barley, uh, and people would cut peat from bogs to heat their homes. And this is why, by the way, scotch names are tied to the geography. So you wonder where those bottles of scotch get their names? It's the land. Take something that's easily accessible, like the Glen Livet. You've probably seen this at Safeway or wherever you shop. It's an easily accessible scotch. You go to your grocery store, Glen Livet is there every day of the week. Well, you know right where that's from because it comes from the Glen or the Valley, where a river named the River Livet flows. Glen Livet. With Scotch, it's a place of origin that's part of its story. You you can't separate the Scotch from where it comes from. The place flavors it and it influences it. That's that's what it's like for us as musicians. We come from somewhere too. Once upon a time, all of our names uh were just like Scotch's named. Leonardo da Vinci was literally Leonardo, the guy Leonardo from a place called Vinci. It used to be real obvious like that. Francis of Assisi. And then names and the places uh the they they kind of melded together. So later on you have Abraham Lincoln. Well, his family is literally traced back to an English city called Lincoln. So uh long before he was born, he probably would have been called Abraham of Lincoln. But last names uh just kind of melded together with the place. Uh, and so last names like Hill have an etymology that's tied to a place. And it's super fun to think about uh if you give it some time. If you start going down this rabbit hole, take some famous musicians that we know, right? Like Pete Townsend. Well, that was Pete from the end of town. Carrie Underwood. Well, Carrie lived in the forest somewhere. Leon Bridges, that one's obvious. Ronnie Woods. They all owe their names at one period in time to a place. Wherever you grew up, it influenced you. Uh, even if you couldn't wait to get out of there, even if you're not named after the place right now, though. Maybe, maybe especially because you wanted to get out of there, you were influenced by it. But the other things that went along with the place you lived, like uh listening to the radio in your dad's truck, or the bonfires that you had in the Midwest with boom boxes, or the church that you attended, or your first punk band that was in your neighbor's garage, or the bluegrass band that you joined when you were a young Navy recruit, like where you grew up. It all influences the music. Then there's all of the other places that we've lived since the time we grew up, the places uh that we live along the way, we we meet new people, people that we love, people that we lose, the communities that we've belonged to over the years, and the ones that we've left that all influences us. All of that finds its way into what we do. Our music and our style are tied to our places. It's just a fact. Here's another fun thing about scotch. Before it was called Scotch, it was called Ushaba. Ushkiba. The Latin pronunciation of this phrase is Aquavite. That was the name of my Scotch group, by the way, the one that met my basement. We called ourselves Aquavitae. Aquavite means water of life. So before it was called Scotch, it was called the water of life. And the early reference, the earliest reference that we have to Aquavitae being made dates back to the late 1400s. There's records that we have that say malt was given to a guy named John Corr, he was a friar, uh, to make aquavitae for King James IV of Scotland. And the notes say, the history says it was enough to make hundreds of bottles in today's Scotch bottle sizes. So the earliest mass production of Scotch was to make the water of life for a king who just wanted this great drink around him all the time. Now, eventually the ooshka part of the Ushka ba just became Ushka, and then Ushka throughout the years became whiskey. Music changes names in our lives too. Maybe it starts out as a hobby, or maybe we call music a simple pleasure, and then it becomes therapy, maybe, maybe it becomes escape, and then maybe it turns into a dream, and then it becomes a living for some of us at some point. Maybe in your life you say music is a calling, you just want it around you all the time. Maybe music is your water of life. All right, I'm having so much fun. Let's talk about barley. I will quickly mention that whiskey starts out in the early stages, just like we make beer. It's the same beginning processes. Now, a bunch happens after those processes that that separate it, but and you can read more about that. You can look up that process, and and there's plenty of information for you. The thing about barley is barley has to change. Barley doesn't become whiskey the moment that you put it in the barrel. It's not like they just shove barley in a barrel, it has to be malted. So traditionally, barley was soaked in a local water source. Uh, you know, it wasn't brought to the factory on trucks, and then it was spread across a stone malting floor, and it began to germinate. Workers had to turn the barley regularly with wooden shovels and rakes so that the germination process would be even. It was super physical work, it was repetitive work, it was necessary work so the barley wouldn't just stay barley. Right? Wow, that's just like our music craft. Because owning an instrument does not make us musicians any more than having barley in the closet makes you a whiskey maker. We have to be worked on. Scales, the chords, band rehearsals, really bad performances, dead rooms, uh playing the wrong songs, breaking a string in the middle of a performance, uh, having bad sound, or being rejected, or you know, learning how to use a microphone as an instrument. We work the craft, but honestly, the the craft works us, right? It changes us into something that we didn't start out as. Okay, and then maybe this is my favorite part of the process when we get past the the germination of the barley. Then comes the smoke. Once the barley had germinated enough, then they had to stop the process. So traditionally the damp malt was spread all over a uh a kiln floor that was perforated. It had holes in it, and beneath that floor there was a fire burning. And in places where peat was readily available, then peat became the fuel. And they'd cut this peat out of the bogs like bricks, and they'd light it on fire and they'd let that smoke rise up. Like burning incense. Pete is so interesting to me because it's vegetation that accumulates over the years, years and years and years, and then it slowly decomposes in these waterlogged areas. I and I'm talking over thousands of years. And then they can cut this peat from the bog in blocks, and they would stack it to dry, and then they would burn it. And when peat burns, it makes a thick, yummy, aromatic smoke that rises up like an offering. And that smoke goes through the floor and it surrounds the damp barley, and the grain absorbs it and it stops the germination process. So thousands of years of decomposing landscape becomes smoke, and then the smoke becomes part of the whiskey. Not all scotches puted, by the way, it's not all smoky flavored or smelling, but I love this picture for the scotches that are smoky, like the one that I first tasted with Ted, which by the way, I enjoy now. I like to think of the smoke rising up like experiences that get to us and become part of us. They flavor us, right? We've all been through some smoke. Experiences get into us. Now, I don't buy the idea that as artists we need to suffer to be a good or interesting artist. Uh, not every Scotch needs Pete. And not every musician needs to have some tragedy in their life to be good, but it certainly does work favorably for some. You know what we all need though is we we just all need something real. I I think we all need some kind of experiential dirt on us. You know, we need some miles. Whatever we've actually lived eventually becomes part of the flavor of what we do. Are you with me? All right, now fermentation. After the malting process, the grain is mixed with hot water, and sugars are extracted from that, and it makes a really sweet liquid that's called wort. And then yeast is introduced into the process, and the yeast ends up eating all the sugars, and they produce alcohol, and that creates a liquid called wash. And at this point, if you were to taste it, it would taste a little bit more like beer. Not necessarily a good beer, maybe even a bad beer, but some kind of beer. And you know what? Musicians ferment too. We absorb things, we transform. All those early influences, like the people and places and records we listen to, they made us something, but then we start to grow into our own. All of those things flavor us, but then we start to shape our own identity. It starts to show itself along the way. So we're certainly influenced, but the way that those influences affect us, along with all the things that are unique to us and our story and the way that we're shaped, our personality, we start to change. Then there's the distillation process. All all those funky, interesting, beautiful stills that you've seen before, those are really important. Their shape, their height, the the twists and turns in the neck, the circumference of the neck. I I don't understand all of the magic. I don't make scotch, I just drink it. But I know that the magic matters. The wash goes into those stills and it concentrates and then it separates and it refines. And then the distiller separates what comes out into different parts. Now, the first part is unusable as it is. Uh, I've heard it's gross, it's full of impurities and bad chemicals, stuff I don't fully understand, but it's not used for the whiskey in the process, the first part. The middle part. That's called the heart. And that's the part that matters and goes into the next phase. Now, so you might be wondering how do they know the beginning, the middle, and the end of this? I don't know. That's where the magic of a Distiller comes into it, an expert. The last thing that comes out isn't desirable either, and it has low levels, uh, low levels of alcohol. So I'm not a scientist or a distiller. I can't explain how they do it, but I know some of it gets recycled, some of it gets redistilled somehow. It's not all thrown away, but that middle part, that heart, that's what matters. Now, I think this is a fun part of the metaphor for us. Knowing what to keep, knowing what needs to mature, knowing what to recycle, knowing what is toxic, musicians eventually have to learn to distill. When we're starting out, some of us think that getting better or cooler means we just keep adding things to what we do, you know. At least this was my experience. More notes, more pedals, more songs, more gigs, more flash, more impressive solos, which to be quite honest, I've always kind of sucked at. But eventually we begin asking different questions. We start saying, what can I remove? What should I remove? What gear don't I need? What songs should I take out? What gig do I turn down? We start looking for the heart of what we do. Oh man, this is so fun for me to think through. Still, it isn't Scotch at this point. And here's one of my favorite parts. I've probably already said that, but when the heart comes out of the still, after everything it's already been through, it still is not scotch whiskey. It has the makings of something special, but it hasn't earned that name yet. You you can't call that part scotch because it isn't ready. It needs to sit in an oak barrel and it needs time. Legally, in Scotland, it has to mature in an oak cask, which they get from America and Spain, by the way, for at least three years before you can call it Scotch whiskey. So the youngest scotch you will ever drink is three years old. And they don't really sell that in mass quantities. The barrels uh also have lived another life because Scotland buys used bourbon barrels from the United States, and they buy sherry casks from Spain. Mostly. But let's go back to time. One last thing about time. Actually, you know what? I don't even really need to unpack that part. You get it. You are smart. We know what time does for a musician. But let's talk about the barrel a bit more. It's not just time that matters, the barrel matters. There are barrels that are sitting in Scotland right now that are older than I am. The record oldest scotch right now was bottled last year, 2025, 85 years old. The Gordon and McPhel generations 85-year-old from the Glen Livitt distillery was bottled. Get this. No, it was distilled on February 3rd, 1940. It was bottled 85 years after it matured. And guess what? Man, gigging musicians, you are in luck. If you have an extra $175,000 lying around, you may be able to find a bottle of that. So just hope for a really good tip night. The type of oak matters. What the barrel held before matters, how many times the barrel has been used matters. The spirit that goes into that barrel isn't the same spirit that eventually comes out. So what is our barrel? Well, I think it's the gig or a collection of gigs. So many things go into making us the musicians that we are, but the gig, that's that's where the rubber meets the road. That's what matures us. They really flavor us. The weddings, the the biker bars, the pinkies out posh restaurants, those things all matter. They leave something on us. And maybe the barrel is more like the process of gigging, and the actual places we gig are the storehouses, the warehouses. Traditional warehouses have thick stone walls and low ceilings, and the floor is just dirt. And barrels sit in there no more than three high, and they exist in these places where the magic happens. But there's other magic happening, and that's outside. Outside the warehouses, Scotland happens. The cold, the rain, the dampness, the wind. On the islands, some of the warehouses are really close to the sea, and the salt air and the Atlantic weather surround everything. And some say that early barrels were actually even buried by the sea, so they would take on more coastal influence. Now, some say that's a myth. Some say baloney, you can't really taste the sea in a scotch. And I beg to differ. Poo-poo on you. And guess what? It doesn't matter anyway. What matters, environment. And it matters for us as musicians, too. By the way, a single malt scotch doesn't mean it came from one barrel, it just means it came from one distillery. So many different barrels can be blended together in one distillery to make a legit thing that came from that one distillery. So, as opposed to like a blended scotch, which can come from multiple distilleries, a single malt comes from one. I think that's a neat way to think about originality. None of us came from a single barrel either. We're made from hundreds of influences. Original doesn't mean that we aren't influenced. Original comes from a mix of stuff. And it means that all of those influences have finally become something that maybe is recognizably ours, original. There's also something to be said about the regions. Scotch has famous regions and you know, and places, right? Spayside, highlands, lowlands, isla. That's how you pronounce that, by the way. If you see I-S L A Y, uh, you'll hear people say Islay sometimes. I'm not that smart, but I know from years and years of doing this, it's Isla. Uh Campbelltown. Those are useful to know because they tell us something about history and geography and tradition, but they don't they don't tell us everything because not every Isla tastes the same, not every spaceide tastes the same. The label gives us a clue to what it might taste like, but it doesn't really give us the whole whiskey. And I think you and I, musicians, we have regions too. Maybe we think of regions like genres that influence us. So country, jazz, rock, pop, bluegrass, rap. Those labels can be useful for some things, but none of those regions make you and I a copy and paste musician. Neither region gets the final word about what you and I can become. Then there's this punk rock side of Scotch that I have to talk about. We have to talk about the smugglers. Before Scotch became a respectable international industry, and where there is an enormous amount of whiskey being made right now, once upon a time, an enormous amount of whiskey making was illegal, and it was still happening. And taxation drove this distilling underground, hidden away. Uh, there were they were hidden in remote glens and up in the hills where the tax man wouldn't easily see the smoke, and whiskey was transported in the dark, and casks were hidden away. It's such a pirate-like thing. There are stories of barrels being buried in remote coastal areas that they haven't even found, which adds to the folklore about you know, tasting the sea in your scotch, by the way. That that kind of adds to the whole thing, which I think is so fun. They most likely weren't really burying them because the underground maturation was producing something, you know, some magical sea soaked whiskey. They were hiding them, yeah, hiding them from the man. And then eventually the laws changed, and what lived partly in the shadows now became big industry. So now we get to this spot, right, where finally scotch has a name. After the water, the barley, the germination, the peat, the smoke, the fermentation, the copper, the distiller doing the cuts, the the oak barrels, the weather, the evaporation. By the way, that happens, they call the evaporated part the angel's share. Oh man, I love that. And here's what I really love about scotch. There isn't a correct flavor. Some are delicate, some are dainty, some are extra, some taste like fruit and honey and caramel. Man, I'm I'm craving a scotch right now. Some taste like my favorite pipe smoke. Some are sweet, some are dry, some are uh they call them elegant, right? Some taste like camphophonique to some. Although, like I said, I have grown to love that scotch. And there's another part of the metaphor that I didn't even think about. Ah, sometimes you can not like a scotch at first, and then it becomes a favorite to you as your palette expands. Ooh, I like that part. That's so like music. Anyway, nobody who understands scotch expects them to all taste alike. And why would we expect musicians to? I I do think there's something to becoming recognizable for us. I don't think we should necessarily sound like everyone else, but eventually our audience returns to us because they know that we have something special to offer. We eventually become worth the poor, worth the chase, worth the time. We become the thing in the room that enhances everyone's experience. We enhance it for everyone as they sip it in and they converse with one another as they laugh together. We become the thing that everyone shares. So fun to think about. Stay creative, stay after it, stay hired. I'm gonna go drink.