Label: Ford
Year of Release: 1971
The thing about crate-digging is that you occasionally turn up an obscurity which has no real monetary value and also (arguably) a less than modest amount of artistic merit, but its existence becomes an unsolvable puzzle. Why was it released (or never properly released)? Is there a joke here you're missing? Why has the artist and everyone involved with the record disappeared into a unGoogleable black hole? And is it really your job to unknot all these complexities in the first place?
This record is a classic example of this syndrome. "Unemployment" was seemingly only ever put out as a double-sided promo copy then never given an official release. It's a rather grating novelty record sang in a southern twang by a slightly unhinged sounding woman which is backed by puffing flutes, bar-room piano riffs and drumbeats which are just slightly on the wrong side of funky. It appears to be a surreal lyrical exploration of rural poverty, filled with dead dogs, drowning horses and venomous snakes, but it lacks enough of a comedy hook to be a successful novelty record and is far too deliberately disjointed to pass as a serious one.
My best guess is that Penny Lane was a comedy character at the time - and I would guess had nothing to do with the groupie Pennie Lane from around the same period - and this was an attempt at spinning their jokes into a successful 45. It's common enough for novelty comedy records to be utterly baffling when shorn of their cultural context, and this one has spun my head several times around while I've tried to make sense of it.
