SIGNED COPY! “It’s In The Book” is Waters’ attempt to portray, in Waters’ words, Johnny Standley’s “persnickety, droll, intellectually superior comic monologue,” a part song, part exhortation on the subject of Little Bo-Peep in the manner of a revivalist preacher. The original version of “It’s In the Book” was a huge, surprise hit upon its release in 1952, rising to #1 on the Billboard chart and selling over 1-million copies.
Its follow-up, the nursery rhyme gone-wrong, comedy routine, “Proud New Father” (released the following year in 1953), would not fare as well– perhaps due to its gory details. Waters recounts, “It may be the first sick joke I heard as a child.”
As in the original versions, the two Standley homages include gratuitous laugh tracks. Produced by Grammy-winner, Ian Brennan (Tinariwen, The Good Ones [Rwanda], poet Raymond Antrobus, Zomba Prison Project), Brennan states, “That recordings of dead people prompt living people to laugh is one of the more surreal aspects of recorded medium. That often identical canned laughter tracks have been used redundantly on countless albums and sitcoms for decades is all the eerier.”
Waters jokes that he chose to press the new single on gold vinyl so that he can at last be able to claim, “I’ve made a ‘Gold Record’.”
Author: John Waters
Producer: Ian Brennan
Publisher: Sub Pop Records
Size: 7.5 x 7.5"
Format: 45rpm, gold vinyl, signed
Release Date: December 2022
