Seventeen In '88 - Installment 37: In Search Of Jolt Cola

Seventeen In '88 - A story of teen angst, long walks, dirty jokes, haunted rooms, haunted psyches, records as refuge, roads like mazes, young love, bonding and unbonding, deep foreboding, senseless death, and innocence peeled away slowly, layer by layer.

In Search Of Jolt Cola

As summer morphed into fall the tone of everyday life took on a stale, washed-out quality. The shock of RD’s death, combined with my own personal philosophical turn to a raw-nerved truth-at-any-cost outlook on life, had left a bitter aftertaste. The leaves changed color and the weather turned cooler, but the prevailing mood was one of listlessness.

By this time I had a way of finding the right records to illuminate whatever mood prevailed. Or the records had a way of finding me. Sly And The Family Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On had been on Rolling Stone’s list of 100 Greatest Albums the year before, so given my relentless dedication to lists, it was natural I should be all over it. The accompanying blurb called it a blues album, and that sounded like the right kind of formula to help dissolve some malaise.

The only thing I knew about Sly and The Family Stone was their appearance in the Woodstock movie, where they performed a glitzy, loose-limbed, downright inspirational version of "(I Wanna Take You) Higher”. Based on that, plus exposure to “Dance To The Music” and “Everyday People” on oldies radio, I thought they were some kind of feel-good funk’n’roll party band. Which they were, kind of, at least early on. But, as I was in the process of learning out there in the real world, life is seldom so cut-and-dried simple, and things are almost never what they seem to be on the surface. Also, change happens, to everything and everyone, and it can sometimes be really fucking drastic.

The album opens with a slow-building, burbling bass and drum pattern, accompanied by a strange, treated wah-wah guitar sound and a choir of woozy gospel-ish voices moaning in the background. Then Sly comes in, his voice a combination of resignation and bemusement, and sets the tone for the rest of the album: “Feel so good inside myself, don’t wanna move.” That line pretty much nails the feeling of the whole record - it's a long junkie nod, set to jagged, slow-motion dance rhythms.

The sessions for There’s A Riot Goin’ On were a darkly debauched affair. All of Sly Stone’s success, fame and money had fostered in him an ever-expanding sense of paranoia. He holed up in a sprawling Los Angeles mansion, surrounded by shady, gun-toting hangers-on with a never-ending drug supply, and beholden to a helpless creative obsession. He dubbed new parts over the master tapes so frequently that the sound of Riot is muddy and faded, an effect that only enhances the mood of alienation.

Like Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band, it’s an album about disillusionment. Growing up and growing down. Fooling yourself. Cop-outs and craziness. Sly is a spaced cowboy poet out and down without a friend in the asphalt jungle. Crying just like a  baby.

It’s an entrancing listen, if you’re in the mood. Which is to say, if you’re not in the mood for much of anything.

I was in the mood for taking my mind off of the fact that I wasn’t in the mood for much of anything. Which is where the Jolt Cola comes in.

The Sly Stone album had been lent to me by Regina’s father. Regina was a new addition to our group. Previously she had moved among the straighter, more popular clans of our class. She’d grown tired of the egos and petty backbiting there, and decided she needed a new crowd. It wouldn’t take long to realize that inflated egos and petty backbiting were just as prevalent among theater nerds, maybe more so. She hung out with us anyway, and we began to use the big, brand new house she'd just moved into as our primary center of congregation. And that's where we ended up on the night we all went looking to score Jolt Cola.

The Great Jolt Cola Search Of 1988 may have been an effort to show Regina how funny and cool and “offbeat” we were. Or maybe it was just another self-conscious attempt at weirdness for its own sake. We had a habit of taking a seemingly silly, mundane idea and creating a happening around it. This was a side effect of being young weirdos in a small town.

In any case, while other teenagers were out looking to score alcohol or pot or trying to get laid, we spent the better part of one Friday night scouring our town’s convenience stores for cans of Jolt Cola. The soft drink had acquired a strange notoriety in the mid-eighties for its crazy-high doses of caffeine and sugar. It was Coca-Cola on steroids. Which to us sounded like a fabulously absurd idea.

We were all mentally worn out from the events of the previous days and weeks. The murderer who had torn through our little town had been caught within a few days of RD’s death. He was, as might be expected, a particularly disturbed individual. At the time I felt only rage and bewilderment when I'd think about him. He was a year older than RD and myself, and I’d actually shared a split-grade classroom with him during one year of grade school. Once, we had each accidentally worn the other’s similar-looking coat home from school. My mother remembered that, and when she reminded me it absolutely sent a chill to the core of my being.

Such thin lines exist between us. What are the factors distributed among three kids of roughly the same age that leave one of them dead, one of them deranged and the other sifting through the details trying to make sense of it all?

Everyone felt drained. Or agitated. A strange combination - both worked up and worn out.

Some serious unwinding needed to be done, and the regular stuff - listening to records, driving around aimlessly, etc - wasn’t going to do the job thoroughly enough. We needed an event, the stupider the better. Nothing reflective or morose, please. As Otter said in Animal House: "I think this situation requires that a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody's part!" And we were just the guys to do it. 

We must have gone to about ten stores before hitting the jackpot. When we finally found the motherlode of Jolt Cola in a musty convenience store on the outskirts of town it felt like a real accomplishment. We cheered and laughed and celebrated. At the very least it was a small catharsis.

The subsequent sugar rush left me so monumentally jacked up that my memory of the remainder of the evening is sketchy - all a blur of jittery nerves and indistinct chatter. A swelling of raw commotion morphing into a slow fade, Sly Stone's spidery Riot rhythms emerging to carry us into the fuzzy early morning hours.

As the Jolt high was reaching its peak, someone put Sid & Nancy in the VCR. The viewing progressed in a rollercoaster arc, with everyone initially laughing and shouting at the screen, Mystery Science Theatre-style, carried along on the infectious momentum of Sid Vicious’ rise to punk rock fame. 

Then Nancy and the drugs come in and everything goes to shit. By the end the tide had turned, and as Sid wallowed in blood-drenched misery on the screen we all sat quiet, motionless, a group of sad-eyed zombies. 

The mood had gone full circle from listlessness to elation, then back to utter emotional fatigue. 

“Wow, that movie really put a damper on things,” somebody said.

Near the end of the movie Sid dances comically, pathetically, to a song by KC and The Sunshine Band. I could just as easily hear Sly Stone in that place on the soundtrack, slurring and moaning and yodelay-hee-hooing through “Spaced Cowboy”. A disembodied voice giving voice to a disillusioned spirit. That would have been a pretty good reflection of the mood in the room. Worn down. Drained. Nerves completely wrecked. Right back where we had started from.

What do we do now?