New Recording!: "Penny Dreadful"

wredfright · Penny Dreadful

Well, we're finally through the Dick Bennett ep, and we're about done with Yeast? in general.  I was surprised this song, "Penny Dreadful", was written earlier than I remembered it.  I don't know if Yeast? ever played it.  There was a whole slew of songs at the end of Yeast? that never got anywhere.  I'd bring them in, and Dave would dislike them and put country beats on them, and we'd just give up and play "Generic Smokes" or some Big Black covers instead.  Most of those songs ended up not being so great, so Dave was probably on to something, but if this was among them, then we definitely missed out on something here.  Instead, The GoGoBots picked it up.  In fact, I think it's the first track on the Noise Prescription cd.  It's about a kid growing up and liking to read science fiction.  A penny dreadful is more associated with a lurid true crime story (they cost a penny at one point), but the term spread a bit to encompass all of pulp fiction, including science-fiction.  Speaking of which, I recently went to a pulp fiction convention to hang out with my pal Mark Justice.  I had never been to one before, but it was interesting.  It reminded me a lot of a comic book convention before cosplay became such a large part of it.  It was mainly dealers with copies of Conan paperbacks and other pulp stuff, including some of the original pulp magazines.  Prices weren't bad, though of course the rarer items were expensive.  I bought a collection of fiction inspired by the work of cartoonist Fletcher Hanks.  The stacks of Stephen King and James Bond novels, among other objects there, reminded me of my adolescence, and did make me want to pick up my Stephen King bibliography from where I left off in 1988 or so (I have periodically checked in on his work with the odd novel or two over the years, but he's so prolific, he probably has two dozen novels that I have never read).  Anyway, genre fiction of the pulp type fits in well with this song.  Musically, I just used some pennies for odd sound effects while in the background my son had fun with a toy microphone.  Other than that, it's the usual guitar, vox, keyboard as bass, and percussion.  It looks like the next few songs are those of The GoGoBots, though Yeast? did at least one of them before breaking up.  

To hear more music, get the Dick Bennett ep