There’s a dusty old record in my attic that I dust off every few years, an LP so warped by time and Dutch winters it almost feels like an artifact dug out from another world. But every scratch, every warble in the playback, brings back memories sharper than the needle itself. The album in question? Gary Stewart’s *Your Place or Mine*, released in 1977. The track that always makes me pause and lean back, letting the smoke of yesteryear curl around my head, is “Drinking Again”—a song that never charted high, but which, for me, stands as a country masterpiece.
Now, if you didn’t grow up on long country highways or between the wooden walls of smoky barrooms, you may not know much about Gary Stewart. Even in Helmond—the Netherlands’ answer to Nashville, or so I always joke with the boys at Café De Kroon—he’s a forgotten name, a ghost in the jukebox. But in the 70’s American South, Stewart was called the “King of Honky-Tonk.” His voice had sawdust in it, a tremble that sounded perilously close to breaking, but which somehow, every damn time, held together. He sang for the ones who always leave last, bleeding heart and all.
“Drinking Again” fell between the cracks of the era’s bigger hits, overshadowed by Glen Campbell’s sweetness and the Outlaws’ rock rebellion. But that song—written with Paul Craft—drew a crowd of every lonely-hearted dreamer who ever propped up a bar, staring into the bottom of a glass.
The chorus etched itself in me the first time I heard it, sitting on the brown rug of my parents’ flat, a world away from Nashville but feeling every note:
*“Drinking again, thinking of when you loved me
Having a few, wishing that you were here…”*
The vinyl spun as rain lashed against our double-glass window, and I imagined endless American roads, salted peanuts on the counter, truckers and waitresses who knew each other by first name and heartbreak story. Gary’s lilt echoed through the walls of my youth, proof that you could hurt and be magnificent all at once.
Why does “Drinking Again” matter so much? Maybe, as a Dutch kid with a guitar too big for his arms, I was searching for my own echoes. The Netherlands in the ‘70s wasn’t exactly honky-tonk heaven. Pop, disco, and soccer ruled the streets. But for those of us who dug for gold in American radio signals or late-night Hilversum broadcasts, there was a profound loneliness in Stewart’s voice that felt like home.
Years later, as I began playing in small venues—Café Thuis in Helmond, Maloe Melo in Amsterdam—I’d see that same magic in the eyes of one or two old-timers at the bar, half turned away from their glass, listening. The secret of country music is that its stories are universal shadows. Take these lines from the first verse:
*“Sitting here thinking, I just wonder
Why you left me this way…”*
In that brief, slurred confession, I could see my own heartbreak—for a girl who left me for a German architect, for my parents’ silence when the house grew too quiet, for the simple loss of childhood itself. Every love story in Helmond feels, at its heart, like an American ballad when you’re under the right spell. Gary Stewart wasn’t just singing about Tennessee. He was singing for all of us who look at empty chairs across a table, wishing for what once filled them.
What sets Stewart’s “Drinking Again” apart isn’t just the lyrics, but the way he wears them. When he slides into that chorus, the steel guitar wailing behind him almost like a weeping friend, he balances on the edge of melodrama without falling. He makes you feel both the joke and the wound of loving too long, and drinking to forget.
I still remember, sometime in the mid-90s, playing a cover of “Drinking Again” at Café Het Wapen van Helmond. The room was shadowed, the air tight with purged breath and spilt beer. I’d barely started the first line before a man at the back—an old coal worker, it turned out—raised his glass and shouted, “That’s it, jongen!” There was laughter, but it wasn’t cruel. In that moment, the Atlantic vanished. We were all drinking to something, or someone, gone from our lives.
The bridge of the song, often overlooked, hits hardest:
*“I got through the day
But the night’s just begun
And this old bar stool
Sure feels like home…”*
It’s a portrait of the hours when regret grows larger, and the damage of daylight finds its echo in midnight’s mirror. I know that feeling: the barren after-show, when the applause fades and there’s only the slow clink of glassware as the bar empties out. You ask yourself what’s left, and if all these songs really mean something, or if they’re just ways to pass what remains of the night.
Maybe that’s why “Drinking Again” is so precious to me. It doesn’t try to cover up pain with rhinestones. It lets despair breathe and refuses to judge. And more than that—it offers communion for strays: the hopeful, the heartsick, the ones who almost made it. As an artist, as a man far from Kentucky or Texas, that simplicity taught me everything I ever needed to know about why country music matters.
If you’ve never heard the song, find it. Dust off your old turntable, or search out some crackling live performance online. Pour yourself something honest. Hear the voice of a man barely holding it together, and know that in that trembling, you’re not alone. It’s a song for anyone who’s lost their place in the world, and found a piece of it again, if only between sips.
I play it often still, sometimes for the crowd, sometimes when the crowd has gone—me, the crickets from the old canal behind my house, and the memory of a country king who made heartbreak beautiful. Songs like “Drinking Again” didn’t storm the charts, but they conquered a different world: the private, late-lit country tavern of the soul.
Raise a glass to the forgotten classics, friends, and to the people who remember them.
Yours in song,
Kroes den Bock