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By
Sebastian
Dead Rebel Of The Week
~ Jack Daniel ~
This week’s Dead Rebel is an important man in my and many other people’s lives. His legacy helped spawn millions of little rebels, dead and alive. It’s none other than Jack Daniel himself, founder of the world-famous Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey Distillery! *cue applause*
He was born in 1849 as Jasper Newton Daniel, the tenth child of a poor-ass family living in a small town in Tennessee called Lynchburg. His mother died giving birth to him and his father kicked the bucket only 15 years later. Old dad had remarried after his wife’s death so the children were stuck with their stepmother, who happened to be a zealous Primitive Baptist Church activist, leaving Jack a self-proclaimed heathen in later life, as all true rebels are definitely entitled to be. Since they were broke as fuck by now, the children were all sent away, one after another. Jack, who at age 15 was the first to go, eventually had the luck to end up with a charitable foster family that taught him something that would soon render him great services: how to make sour-mash. The family’s head, a Lutheran priest by the name of Dan Call, showed him all the tricks of the trade and young Jack knew that he had finally found his path in life.
Jack and Dan started to sell a little whiskey on the side, trying to come up with the perfect recipe. While that was merely a side-trade for Dan Call, who still had a farm to make a living of and a congregation to preach to, Jack realized that he had to take it to the next level if he ever wanted to get somewhere in life. Said and done… He started exporting their whiskey across state borders on frequent trips to Hunstville, Alabama. Which certainly wasn’t an easy task for a 17 year old at the time. On his way he regularly had to deal with militant tax collectors, looting Confederate guerrillas left from the Civil War and also Ku Klux Klan members who were against liquor because they were worried about the black man getting drunk and going after the white wimmen or some bullshit like that. But nothing could set him back. He bribed away in the name of booze and went on like that for about ten years.
When he was 25 and he finally started to make some money of his whiskey he bought some land and built the Daniel and Call Whiskey Distillery near Lynchburg, where it still stands to this day.
Another big throwback soon came in the form of the Federal Government. Taxes were going up all the time and Jack had problems keeping up by increasing his business. A retired Union general, Green B. Raum, must have been the fiercest tax collector known to man at the time. And naturally he wanted Jack to go down. On top of that, Jack was the target of many attacks by the growing prohibitionist movement. The Anti-Saloon League had gained momentum again after the Civil War and tried to deliver the country from booze once and for all.
But Jack Daniel wouldn’t be the subject of this tribute if he hadn’t fought back, of course. As it had become more and more difficult to bribe politicians around that time, Jack and his fellow booze manufacturers/competitors decided to join forces in regional, and later even national, associations of distillers and brewers. Subsequently they did the only right thing by taking their struggle to the little people. People who understood that not only the liquor business was good for the economy, but that without their precious booze they’d lose a good portion of the quality of life and last, but not least, their very freedom. Along with people like Jim Beam they founded the Personal Liberty League that even had elected officials fight their war against prohibitionists. After excessively campaigning the benefits of alcohol they succeeded. It wasn’t until 1910, one year before Jack Daniel died, that the prohibitionists won and alcohol finally became illegal in the state of Tennessee.
Speaking of his death… the story of Jack Daniel’s demise is definitely one worth telling: He didn’t die of liver cirrhosis or what people might expect; no, he actually died from an infected toe that he broke when he kicked his steel safe in a fit of rage one day. It took six years during which first his left foot and then the whole leg had to be amputated until he died on October 9th, 1911. Six years in which he still tried every barrel of his Old No.7 that was shipped. Even losing a leg didn’t keep Jack Daniel from daily going to bars and buying the crowd free rounds of his stuff. He was to whiskey what Rocky Balboa was to America. He was a true fighter for booze.
Okay, so maybe he wasn’t the biggest rebel who ever lived. But who cares if he was a total choirboy? In a way he’s still responsible for countless acts of completely senseless debauchery and Rock’n’Roll rebellion taking place to this day. Without Jack, Ozzy Osbourne perhaps never would have pissed against the Alamo, bitten the head off a live bat and generally scared the living shit out of two generations of parents. Without Jack, people like Joe Perry or Slash never would have performed on stage, planting the seed of rebellion into the brains of millions and millions of teenagers all over the world. There’s a reason why Jack Daniel’s whiskey has been the figurehead of Rock n’ Roll for decades now.
Without Jack, I certainly wouldn’t have dived face-first into the bumper of a car last weekend. Whether that was rebellious rather than fucking stupid is debatable but you get my drift. Jack makes people act out on their inner rebellion instead of only dreaming about it. Jack makes people speak their mind. Jack is frankness. Jack is honesty. Jack is courage. Jack is pure rebel-fuel.
Hey, I think that would make for great advertising. Fuel your inner rebel… with Jack Daniel’s Old No.7… with footage of the class nerd becoming a huge rock star. I’d buy it.
Unfortunately there’s not much left of his legacy these days as the original Old No.7 gets more and more watered down. It started as a potent 90 proof liquor and has just recently hit a new low at 80 proof, so every little girly girl can guzzle that piss down to get ready for a Coyote Ugly dance-off at her favorite bar. Sad but true. They could just as well have visited Jack’s grave, unzipped and defiled away. At least that would have been honest.
Now, I won’t call for a full-blown boycott here but I’d appreciate it if you just stopped buying it. Nothing wrong with drinking it, I mean, it’s still one of the smoothest Bourbons out there to get drunk on, so do me a favor and just pocket the bottles at the store instead. (Yeah, I know technically it’s not really a Bourbon, it’s a “Tennessee”, because of the special charcoal mellowing process but pompous fags who are so anal about shit like that won’t drink it anyway, so suck it.)
