The Bad Penny (beta)

[This article was originally published in 2009 on IndiePit.]

So IndiePit will be at the Mayhem festival this weekend. Yeah, yeah, keep snickering, buster. Look, we all have guilty pleasures, and one of ours happens to be Mushroomhead, OK? Kidding, kidding … but Job for a Cowboy, Behemoth and Slayer? Not a terrible way to spend a Sunday afternoon. Sure beats mowing lawns.

Obviously, Mayhem is only one of about a gazillion festivals, hootenannies, throwdowns, hoedowns, showdowns and mow-downs (?) happening this “summer,” that wacky, wet and wild season that began oh, some 18 days ago and will last until September 22. At that point, autumn will swoop in, wrest the reins from its rival season and pulverize it into oblivion … for nine months or so, anyway.

Getting a little off-topic, are we? Oh, yes. Music. Sweet music. Since it is the summer and all, attention naturally gravitates toward festivals, those bastions of sweat-soaked sods, misplaced mods, knuckle-dragging clods, Christopher Dodds and other odds and ends.

They can be fun — if you’ve got buckets of patience, nary a phobia and an active-enough imagination to keep you distracted from all the dirt, heat, smoke and slick flesh sliding up against yours. But they can also be torturous and confining, like being helplessly strapped to a chair, at the mercy of a dentist from hell.