Dead Rock West, The LA rock band led by vocalist Cindy Wasserman and singer-guitarist Frank Lee Drennen, had a new single out before the recent Presidential election. It’s a gutsy demand for change, questioning why money is always king and compassion is for suckers: “the lights go out / And the house grows cold / And I wonder what it’s like / To be a billionaire In America.“
It’s a song of the times, and to be frank it’s a song that should be out of date now – with the maybe a billionaire but maybe not so much having been dispensed with. What’s ironic then is that this song is 30 years old, as Frank Lee Drennen explains “This song was written 30 years ago by me and Patrick Dennis when we played in a duo called The Homer Gunns from Leucadia, CA near San Diego. A simple direct to DAT recording was produced by Dave Sharp from THE ALARM but never released. It was written in response to the Bob Dylan song ‘When the Ship Comes In,’ except ours was a rolling 6/8 folk punk reaction to what the future looked like through our 20-something eyes. During the time of lockdown here in L.A., I began sifting through boxes and boxes of home cassettes collected over the years and fell upon this song. Cindy insisted we recorded it because of the times we are in–strangely just like the times 30 years ago–only worse in some ways it seems. I said to David J Carpenter that I was into recording it only if we rocked it out. So that’s what we did!”
Photo: Mark Dektor
