Wine with a side of Miles

Milwaukee singer-songwriter Joe Crockett knows a thing or two about drinking songs. He wrote a bunch of great ones for his band The Championship's stellar 2008 release, Midnight Golden, which spills over with tales of love lost and lives renewed in the blurry environs of the city’s tavern scene. You don’t need a bottle of good bourbon to love the record, but it doesn’t hurt. With that in mind, Decider asked Crockett to name some of his favorite drink-and-music combinations.

Beer: AC/DC, Back In Black
Joe Crockett: It’s a good beer-drinking album. They don’t write ballads. There are no sad songs. You can’t break up with your girlfriend and listen to that album. It’s rock ’n’ roll through and through. If it’s the summertime and you’re drinking some beers, you can pop that record in, and it will satisfy the party urge.
Decider: AC/DC seems like a cheap domestic kind of band.
JC: I normally drink imports, microbrews, and a lot of IPAs, like Lagunitas. It’s really good. They have it down at The Cactus Club. That’s probably my beer of choice. I’m not a beer connoisseur, but like most IPAs it’s a hoppier beer that goes well with cigarettes.

Wine: Miles Davis, Kind Of Blue
JC: I like red wines, mostly: cabernet, merlot, and pinot noir. When you’re drinking wine, I don’t think you should be slugging it down to get drunk. I mean, you can, but I think wine is more of a sipper. You’re feeling classy, so you’re listening to classier music.
D: What brand of wine do you like?
JC: I usually get whatever’s in the liquor store, like Yellow Tail or something like that. It doesn’t taste foul, so it’s good.
D: Why Kind Of Blue?
JC: I bought that record in high school, and I remember getting drunk for the first time on wine with a buddy on this giant jug of port wine. We were listening to that record, smoking cigarettes for the first time, and drinking this disgusting wine, and we ended up stealing my dad’s golf cart and driving it down the highway until it broke down. I was puking while trying to explain myself. Not exactly a classy moment in my life as far as wine and jazz go, but I definitely make that correlation.

Whiskey: Waylon Jennings
D: Do you have a favorite brand of whiskey?
JC: I like Bullet bourbon. The guys in Juniper Tar got me hooked on that stuff. We went on tour two years ago, and they bought us this bottle of bourbon as a gift to enjoy on the road. I think it was gone by the end of the first night. We were playing somewhere outside of Illinois at a Christian place or something, so there was absolutely no drinking. We showed up early with nothing to do, so we started passing the bottle around in the van, and it was smooth. Next thing we knew, five guys had just drank a whole bottle of bourbon.
D: Whiskey and country music go hand in hand.
JC: It’s a man’s man drink. Waylon Jennings, that dude’s a man’s man. We’ve been listening to a lot of that on the road lately. Our drummer, Travis, has downloaded a bunch of stuff on his iPod. I think there are 180 Waylon Jennings songs on there. We’ve listened to a majority of them, and it’s all about women doing him wrong and drinking whiskey.