The author Tom Robbins says that he “hesitated not much longer than it would take to pop open a can of Budweiser” when Ben Lee approached him with a pitch to turn Robbins’ 2009 book B Is For Beer into a musical theater piece. But Lee remembers things a bit differently as the duo prepares for the Oct. 12 release of the all-star B Is For Beer: The Musical album — whose track “Everything Is Better With Beer” ft. Jon Cryer premieres below.
“It was just a very gradual thing,” Lee tells Billboard about the project, which is coming out some eight years after he first approached Robbins with the idea. “I think Tom was cautious. While I think he likes the idea of mainstream success and recognition, he’s not someone particularly willing to alter his creative impulse for the sake of the masses. So I think he was like, ‘OK, who is this guy calling me?’ and it played out for a number of years before our friendship developed and we began to have these great phone calls about all these things we’re both interested in and (B Is For Beer) began to gain momentum.”
The B Is For Beer musical idea was actually a lightning strike moment, starting when Lee was on a family vacation in Portland and found Robbins’ book in a store. Robbins was inspired to write it after seeing a New Yorker cartoon in which a publisher dismissed a writer’s idea, saying that, “‘I don’t think a children’s book about beer would sell.’…I decided then and there to prove the fictitious publisher wrong.” Reading the book, Lee himself had “a very intuitive moment of ‘I’m gonna make a musical of this book.’ It was one of those bizarre things I think artists don’t find so bizarre, ’cause a lot of our life……READ MORE