In the strictest of senses, this song by The Rolling Stones isn’t about the Kentucky Derby. However, to me — and perhaps for you — “Dead Flowers” is the only imaginable soundtrack each year, far transcending “My Old Kentucky Home,” which has not worn particularly well in modern times.
By extension, the most relevant observations about the Derby to be made in writing were recorded more than a half-century ago by a native Louisvillian, who concluded that the event hasn’t ever been exactly as it appears.
Which is to say that Hunter S. Thompson had arrived.
(Ralph) Steadman wanted to see some Kentucky Colonels, but he wasn’t sure what they looked like. I told him to go back to the clubhouse men’s rooms and look for men in white linen suits vomiting in the urinals. “They’ll usually have large brown whiskey stains on the fronts of their suits,” I said. “But watch the shoes, that’s the tip-off. Most of them manage to avoid vomiting on their own clothes, but they never miss their shoes.”
Thompson grasped the Kentucky Derby better than most, and his 1970 account “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved” remains essential reading precisely because it deconstructed the mythology and described what the Kentucky Derby symbolized — what it really “was” — as foreshadowing where it was going, and very shortly would become.
(The Texan) had, after all, come here once again to make a 19th century ass of himself in the midst of some jaded, atavistic freakout with nothing to recommend it except a very saleable “tradition.”
Big-ticket events like the Kentucky Derby always have been exceptions to the rule. They’re capstones with exclamation marks. Breeding thoroughbred horses and racing them is a big business, albeit not exactly what it was 50 years ago. The conversion of Churchill Downs from racetrack to casino-driven entertainment complex proceeds toward inevitability, and just as surely the old-school, tactile joys of an outing with the ponies, bourbon and burgoo recede into the distance.
A few years back, F&D’s bourbon columnist Susan Reigler (musician, author, educator and former local restaurant critic) was chatting with Sara “Bar Belle” Havens. Reigler phrased it beautifully in a single sentence.
(Reigler’s) affinity — or awareness, we should say — for bourbon came much earlier in her life, when she would spend Saturdays at Churchill Downs with her family.
