No. 900 – Pennies

Performer: Smashing Pumpkins

Songwriter: Billy Corgan

Original Release: Zero EP

Year: 1996

Definitive Version: None

While I was playing Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness to death, Smashing Pumpkins decided to up the ante and release a bunch more music in the form of singles. I wasn’t much for CD singles—even during the height of my buying frenzy: What’s the sense of paying a couple of bucks for something that you already bought?

But several of my favorites during this period released CD singles that had excess songs that ended up on the cutting-room floor. Zero, which I thought was nothing special, of course, had five extra songs. It was almost an album unto itself, so I dove in. For five extra Pumpkins songs? Heck yeah.

When I hear this song, all I can think of is me and Debbie’s bedroom in Gahanna. It was a wide room, and, like most people, we had the entertainment center at the foot of the bed—more for the music than the TV. The bedroom faced West, and we’d have a ton of sunlight in the evening, which made the gold carpeting stand out even more. The door was at one end of the room, and you’d have to walk in a U around the bed to get to the master bedroom, which was a master, I guess, only because it had a second sink. The bedroom’s far wall consisted entirely of closet space, and Debbie was magnanimous: I got one-quarter of it for my clothes.

We kept most of my music in the bedroom. I had a giant CD carousel, and it didn’t look good downstairs with Debbie’s higher class furniture, so it was hidden away upstairs. Actually, that was fine with me. After I got my new computer in 1996, shortly before Zero was released as a single, I never went downstairs much during the day anyway.