The Spirits #155: The Rusty Nail

It's a mysterious thing we're all involved with

~ THE RUSTY NAIL ~

60ml Scotch
~15ml Drambuie
Dash of Islay single malt (optional)

Couldn’t be simpler, TBH. Fill a whisky glass with ice cubes. Add the Scotch. Add the Drambuie. Add a little spray of Islay for the smoke you understand. Stir. And garnish with a length of citrus peel.

Some Rusty Sour notes:

1. Wouldn’t it be funny if I prepared this for Burn’s Night - and then missed Burn’s Night altogether, wee ninny that I am? What can I say! I am yet to calibrate myself with this whole “2025” business. It’s Joe Biden’s fault of course. Joe Biden - and… the DEI. But never mind, we’re up and running again. And I’d remind you that whisky cocktails are for life - not just for Burn’s Night.

2. I assumed the Rusty Nail was the product of some ancient Highland druidry but actually, it’s fairly recent in cocktail terms. Drambuie itself was only invented in 1908. No one seems to have thought to combine the stuff with Scotch until 1937, when the combination became the house cocktail of the Little Club, New York City. The name “Rusty Nail” only hammered itself into the drink in the 1960s when the Rat Pack became fond of them. Cocktail historian Robert Simonson describes the Rusty Nail as a “emblematic of the era’s hard-drinking ways” and notes its popularity with suburban bartenders, requiring as it does “almost no skill to put together”. It’s similar to the B&B in construction - that’s the extremely simple combination of Brandy and Bénédictine (which isn’t so far away from Drambuie, taste-wise).

3. In other less reputable sources, you will find the Rusty Nail proportions listed as 2:1 Scotch to Drambuie. Dial that back!!! Start with 4:1 and see how that fits. The particular “Scotch” you use really depends on your inclination and budget. Use a workaday blend and you will have a serviceable approximation of a 60s/70s Rusty Nail. But by all means, try it with 15-year-old Macallan if that’s the kind of home you keep.

4. I used Muriel Sparks’ The Driver’s Seat as a coaster. It was once described by the Guardian as being “unlikely to win” the Scottish mid-century novelist new fans on account of its “excruciating heroine, bleak mood and unconvincing plot”. Personally love it.

5. An exhaustive guide to other things to do w/ Drambuie will follow next week - including instructions for how to make your own.

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🖊️I am Richard Godwin, journalist by trade…
📚… cocktail writer when I’m skirting deadlines.
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PLAYLIST

As I say, I’m yet to calibrate to this new quinquennium. I have too much to say to say anything worthwhile so I will not importune you with my unprocessed thoughts. But this is why music exists. To express the ineffable. So, here instead is a playlist I pulled together in honour of the great David Lynch, RIP. I’ve found it quite companionable these last couple of weeks.

And actually, below is a review of the 2018 Lynch biography ROOM TO DREAM that I wrote for the Evening Standard. It’s not online for some reason and so here it is now.

THIS PLAYLIST UPDATES AUTOMATICALLY EACH WEEK. The idea is, you download it and return to it each week in your Spotify. If there was an old song you’d like to hear again, you’ll find it RIGHT HERE in the ongoing archive of past playlists.

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PIECES OF PEOPLE AND BABIES
(A review of Room to Dream by David Lynch and Kristine McKenn, published by Canongate, 542pp, £25)A David Lynch review, from 2018)

DAVID Lynch changes the way you see the world. Spend too long in Lynchland and you don’t simply see the American filmmaker’s influence on cultural artefacts (Mad Men, Lana Del Rey, Black Swan, etc) but sometimes, seemingly, on reality itself.

An old man eating a sandwich in a certain kind of light becomes the funniest, most poignant thing you’ve ever seen. The news seems hallucinatory. The nonsense makes total sense.

It was David Foster Wallace who provided the go-to definition of Lynchian: “refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter”. Now that humanity uploads its collective unconscious online every day, we’re used to the horrifying and the mundane occupying the same space. But apparently, at the first screening of Lynch’s masterpiece Blue Velvet (1986), no one knew what to make of the collision. “Audiences now are quick to find unusual things hilarious or delicious,” recalled the actress Laura Dern. “Before David, nobody made it sad and funny at the same time, or terrifying yet hilarious, or sexual but odd.”

Room to Dream is a peculiar book. Los Angeles journalist Kristine McKenna has written a fairly conventional Lynch biography drawing from interviews with childhood friends, ex-wives, actors, producers, etc. She takes us from Lynch’s dreamy 1950s childhood in Boise, Idaho (where he nevertheless spent a lot of time blowing things up with pipe bombs), through his art school years in the riot-stricken Philadelphia of the 1960s, and on to the L.A. of the 1970s, where he found success in film and peace in transcendental meditation. There are accounts of the transcendent highs (Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Mulholland Drive), the one miserable low (Dune), and the multiple WTF’s (Fire Walk With Me, Lost Highway, Twin Peaks: The Return.)

Each chapter is followed by Lynch’s own reflections on McKenna’s account so what you’re reading is “a person having a conversation with his own biography.” I can’t imagine that this was an entirely comfortable process for McKenna and the result is a little patchy and over-reverent. Still, the quasi-Pale Fire format periodically serves the material well. McKenna’s diligent marshalling of the dates provides an accommodating structure for Lynch’s more diffuse reminiscences, say, about the time he met at guy at diner in Philadelphia who had a key to the city morgue: “There was a parts room where there were pieces of people and babies, but there wasn’t anything that frightened me.” The only time he’s ever seen to cry is when the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi dies.

Childhood friends remember Lynch as a kind, loyal, immensely practical boy with a gee-whizz vocab – “nifty”; “peachy keen” etc – and wondered where all the darkness in his work came from. But it was all out there. Lynch recalls playing out after dark with his brother when a nude and badly beaten woman materialised under a streetlamp. “She was scared and beat up, but even though she was traumatised, she was beautiful.” Lynch recreated the memory in Blue Velvet.

A lot of the book makes for uneasy reading in the post #MeToo era, not least Isabella Rossellini’s account of Lynch making her remove her underwear ahead of the disturbing scene with Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet. “By the way, David laughed throughout the shooting of that rape scene!” she recalls. “I said: ‘David, what is there to laugh at? Are we doing something ridiculous?’”

But it’s striking how many actors pay tribute to Lynch’s courtesy, his attunement to the moment, and his uncanny ability to exorcise performances they didn’t realise were in them. Buried beneath the darkness is an often-overlooked sympathy for each human soul. “We live our lives not knowing a lot of things,” Lynch said when I met him in Los Angeles ahead of the Twin Peaks revival last year. “Where were we before? What’s the purpose? What’s going on? I always say that people are like detectives. When you’re lying in bed at night sometimes, you realise it’s a mysterious thing we’re all involved with.”

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SHOPPING LIST

OK my Drambuie Opus will be with you Tuesday, I hope, providing paid subscribers with all the Bonnie Prince Charlies, Atholl Broses and Bay Roc Specials they could possibly desire.

Then on Friday we’re going to make something involving gin, orange liqueur, raspberry syrup (or raspberry + sugar) and lemon juice.