Dirty Penny

California glam rockers DIRTY PENNY look and sound like they just walked off Sunset Boulevard in the mid-‘80s. A style influenced by Mötley Crüe, Poison, LA Guns, Guns N’ Roses, et al. The sex-crazed, booze-hound friends have shot a fresh wad of flavor into the sound of the often-praised but equally ridiculed metal subgenre.

The foursome started as a Poison tribute band, Antidote, but that was already taken by a Dutch band. So the band improvised by visiting an animated porn site. Immediately agreeing on Dirty Penny, the band took their sex-driven energy and glam-influenced sound and created catchy party-rock anthems on Take It Sleazy and the recent Young & Reckless.

Vocalist Binge Daniels, guitarist Jonny Prynce, bassist Tyno Vincent and drummer Spanky Savage are doing what they love. The band is getting some recognition and picking up fans by being road warriors.

SMNnews talked with the four before they headed out on their latest North American tour, appropriately named the Young & Wrecked Tour. Here’s the true-life story of how the tour got its name.

Kelley Simms (SMNnews): You’ve been rehearsing for your Young & Wrecked tour. Are you finalizing the set list and going through your whole show as if you were playing live? How do you plan your rehearsals?

Dirty Penny: We have a bunch of new songs, we have some new spins on some old songs, and we’re pretty excited about the new set we got going on here. We’ll take certain songs that we feel we need to work on instead of just playing the set over and over. We’ll work on the ones we feel need work on, including transitions, instead of just set after set. For example, we’ve never played “Wrecking Ball,” a song off our new album, live before. We’re going to try and play it every night on this tour. So yesterday, we probably played it five times and a couple other new songs about five times, and all the other songs we’re going to play. We’ll work on transitions between songs, and as it gets closer to the day we leave, we’ll do a full rehearsal where we’ll do the full set with transitions and kind of get an outline of exactly what’s gonna go down. It’s not like our set is choreographed. Our moves are just what we kind of do when we’re on stage. When we’re on stage, we just kind of blow through it.

KS: Anyone who has done a Google search for Dirty Penny can figure out the story behind your band name and some of its various meanings. Once you do figure it out, it’s quite humorous. But enlighten our readers on how you decided on the band’s name.

DP: When we started, we didn’t really know any of these new meanings that kept popping up after we kind of decided on the name. That’s why we kind of grew to love the name so much. It was a sweet name to us before we knew what it meant, and then we searched it, and when we searched it, the first search that came out, we were like “Oh my God. It’s official, that’s definitely going to be our name!” (laughing).
The first thought of Dirty Penny was just kind of like a lot of options, kind of something like you just want to throw away or you want to wash your hands after you touch, just kind of gross but kind of interesting at the same time. There’s so many more meanings beyond that, like, you know the taste in your mouth after going down on a girl … and it’s kind of like uuuuhaaay! There’s a lot of meanings behind it and they’re all good, like a stripper’s butthole! (laughing)

KS: Can you give me a brief history of the band? Did you guys know each other when you were younger or go to school together?

DP: We’ve known each other since we were 6, so we’ve been friends for a long time. Like going to the beach, surfing, all through high school. We’ve grown up together. We’ve been a group of friends, and then music was just another thing that we started doing together. It actually came down to us being bored one summer and our singer went to a Poison/Cinderella/Dokken/Faster Pussycat show, and he ended up sitting in the front row and was all wasted and called our guitar player Jonny and said we were going to start a band the next day and we were going to be a Poison tribute band, so we started a Poison tribute band called Antidote.

KS: Your style of music is definitely in the vein of Mötley Crüe and Poison. Obviously, these bands and the whole Sunset Strip-glam era were a big influence on you. What do think Dirty Penny brings to the genre in 2010 to make it fresh and not just a rehash of that time?

DP: I feel like we’re influenced by rock ‘n’ roll in general. Mötley Crüe, Guns N’ Roses, LA Guns, Ratt, Poison, all those bands were basically doing what they did to play off with that to get the point, there was pop, but rock ‘n’ roll was killing it over pop or all that other stuff. So we’re influenced by rock ‘n’ roll at its biggest point, but what we’re doing is just what we love. We’re a high-energy show, that’s the biggest difference that I see. A lot of bands I see are four guys standing on stage doing nothing. We’re bringing energy and a good time, you can’t just watch our show and just stand there … and you don’t want to. People who come to our show wanna have a good time. It comes from the music and it comes from the energy. We also grew up watching a bunch of punk bands coming through Santa Cruz and they always have high-energy stage shows. We feel like we wouldn’t be doing our jobs if we were just standing there playing.

KS: You have been well-received in the glam-rock community. How’s it feel to be getting recognized for what you do?

DP: It feels great. It’s always new to us, still, and any kind of recognition we get, it feels awesome. At first, when we were touring and there was nobody at our shows, we didn’t care. We still loved it and we still do. Then you see the numbers go up and more people come out and everyone’s just seeing what’s going on. It’s just really exciting to be a part of that.

KS: What can fans expect on the Young & Wrecked tour?

DP: We’re bringing out oldies from the first album that we’ve never played live, and we’re playing a lot of new songs off our new album, “Young & Reckless.” We are stoked. The set is different than we’ve ever done before. We’re definitely going to kick some ass. We’re going to stick our foot in your Dirty Penny! We definitely feel like we’re 10 times better than we were on our first tour. We just want to grow as a band and keep touring and have our shows get bigger and bigger every time we’re in a different town.

KS: What’s the difference between “Young & Reckless” and your first release, “Take It Sleazy”?

DP: We feel this new album is us coming into our own a little bit more. Our first album will always get heavy-hair-metal references, like Mötley Crüe, Poison or whatever. We’re always going to have those influences in our music. But we feel that with this new album, we have other influences outside that genre. It’s all rock ‘n’ roll, whether we have a song that has an Aerosmithy feel to it, but it’s just us becoming ourselves a little bit more.

KS: Do you fully endorse the motto “Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll”?

DP: I don’t know if we endorse it on purpose, but we’re not claiming anything or trying to make any kind of statement. We’re just trying to have a good time. We’re not going to judge anyone, and we expect no one to judge us.

KS: Any wild drunken groupie stories to share?

DP: (Everyone starts laughing) Yes! This is the first interview we’ve had that we actually have a good answer! We were on the end of a two-month tour with Vains of Jenna. First of all, if you’ve seen the new tour poster …
We’re driving back from Arizona in the middle of the night after a show. Vains of Jenna had an accident earlier that day with their van and completely snapped their drive shaft. So they’re all in our van, driving with us through the night, and we stopped at a store so we can get some rock dogs and burritos ‘cause we were really hungry.
This stripper pulled up and she was fucked up on something, so she gets out and we ended up talking to her and she wanted to come with us to LA, where we were headed. It was like 3 or 4 in the morning. We told her she couldn’t come with us and we got in the van. So she ended up jumping in the van and threw all her shit in the van, said “I’m coming with you” and left her car at the gas station. We said, “No you’re not.” So after five minutes of telling her she couldn’t come with us, we ended up throwing her shit out of our van and locked her out. So we leave and were driving down the freeway with 10 of us in the van. She follows us for a half-hour out in the middle of the desert. Then she starts ramming our van with her car, she had a little $8 Prius, or Altima, I think. Our 18-year-old merchandise boy was driving, by the way. I think he might have pooped his pants.
We ended up pulling over, and she pulled over in front of us, and then everyone is freaking out, 10 guys, half-drunk and scared out of our minds, screaming from the van. All of a sudden, it was completely dead silent … and we all looked up to see her throw her car in reverse to try and ram our van from the front. It was like a horror movie. It was the first time any of us have ever been attacked. And you can’t really get out of a car and run out of there when you’re honesty worried about getting run over by another car on the freeway. This chick was trying to run us over. And our van is like our baby, so we can’t just leave our van to get attacked by this woman.
She finally takes off after hitting us four to eight times, so we had to stand on the side of the freeway in the middle of the desert, waiting for a cop to show up. It took three hours for a cop to get there. He takes our report, and they basically won’t return our calls now. On a side note: Arizona Police Department … go fuck yourself!
We had someone in Arizona go find her at her strip club, we called the cops and said “This is the girl, she’s working at the strip club, the evidence is on her car, go get her” and the cop said, “Call me on Monday.” It’s Saturday.  We said, “She tried to kill us in her car, so go arrest her.” But nothing. Arizona Police Department … go fuck yourself!
We decided we needed to immortalize that moment, so we had our good friend Shaun Logan do our tour poster re-enacting the whole scene with her as a zombie monster lady … which is pretty much what she looked like!

KS: You played last year’s Rocklahoma. Have you been asked back for this year’s festival?

DP: Nope. They turned us down and we’re not playing it. We’re still trying to be a part of it. From what we hear right now, though, we’re not a part of it. It’s a weird situation. We honestly didn’t ask for anything, we never even got into negotiations. We just wanted to be a part of it.
If anyone who reads this feels that it is the wrong decision, they should contact them. All the fans that have seen us the last three years at Rocklahoma and want to see us again, feel free to call them or e-mail them. It’s the best time we have all year. We’re not trying to start anything with them, we just want to be a part of it. Our biggest fear is us not being a part of it and fans out there thinking that we’re thinking that we’re too good or too cool for it or something like that. But we’re trying.
We have other festivals locked up this summer, it’s just we feel like that’s where our family is, you know, and we want to go back there. We have a lot of connections at that festival, but if they don’t want us, whatever. Then I guess we won’t be there.

KS: Any last words, comments or rants for our readers? Speak your mind.

If you want to check us out, maybe you’ve never heard of us … or even if you do like our band, we have a whole new line of merchandise that’ll be coming out and a new Web site. You can check us out on dirtypennysucks.com, myspace.com/dirtypennysucks, facebook.com/dirtypennysucks or twitter.com/dirtypennysucks.

By Kelley Simms

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