Booze Worthy

"The song is about my friend Jill," she explains. "She's fucking amazing. She's very vocal about her opinions, just this tough girl who can do anything. Then she got in this horrible car accident, broke every bone in her body. Someone else I knew had died a couple months before Jill's accident, and I remember calling her up and saying, "You cannot leave me. Don't do anything stupid. Don't die." And then she got in that accident and was in a coma forever. They were saying she was going to be a vegetable.

"The song is basically what I wanted to say to her when she was in the coma," she continues. "'What do I do now that you've left me? I wonder where you are. Are you going to forget me? Where do you go when you're in a coma? Nobody knows. Wherever you are, I hope you don't get lost and you find your way back home. 'Cause you promised me you wouldn't leave me here alone.' I guess it's sort of selfish, but I really looked up to her and needed her. Now, two years later, she still has to walk with crutches. But she made it."

Jim J. Narcy

Modern drunkards: Kyle McConnellogue, Sarah Rocereta and Tim Rosatti are Stoli and the Beers.

Details

Wth the Hacks and Whiskey Kiss, 10 p.m. Friday, February 25, 15th Street Tavern, 623 15th Street, $5, 303-572-0822

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More About

• Sarah Rocereta
• Tim Rosatti
• Laramie
• The Ramones
• Punk Rock

And so has Stoli and the Beers. Between touring the Midwest and producing their new disc themselves, the three friends have come further as a band than they ever expected. "People mistake us for a family," Rocereta states. "We have this really strong sense of loyalty. We're like a little independent city-state." Of course, they have more of a common bond than just camaraderie and rock; with a name like Stoli and the Beers, there's definitely a little rotgut chemistry going on between the bandmates.

"When we first got together, Tim said, 'Let's toss around band names,'" McConnellogue recalls. "We wanted to be the Beers, but 'the' names are lame: the Strokes, the White Stripes. But no punk band has taken the name 'the Beers.'"

"But I don't even drink beer," Rocereta protests.

"That's when we realized all great bands are 'Somebody and the Somebody Elses.'" McConnellogue continues. "So we told Sarah, 'You be Somebody, and we'll be the Beers.'"

Rocereta laughs. "At the time, I was drinking Raspberry Stoli and cranberry juice all the time with my friend Amanda, and she said, 'You should be Stoli and the Beers.'"

"We do drink, but we don't go overboard," McConnellogue asserts as he narrowly avoids spilling a PBR on the tape recorder in front of him. "Out of everybody, I think I'm the one who owns up to the name."

Speaking of owning names, Stoli and the Beers aren't as afraid of getting sued by Stolichnaya vodka as you might think. "Like we're big enough for a company to be afraid of us," Rosatti says. "Maybe they could just give us a case of Stoli a month. That would be cool. We're just hoping for a cease-and-desist order."

"Maybe then I'll just legally change my name to Stoli," Rocereta jokes. "Actually, we're looking forward to getting sued. That's how we know we made it."