33 rebellions per minute
"Never fit into the scheme of things"
1978
Boomtown Rats, A TONIC FOR THE TROOPS
The Boomtown Rats, an Irish ensemble formed from poverty and random chance, were associated with punk, with New Wave, or (in the meaner moments of a hostile British music press) with the memory of the wealthily short-lived Bay City Rollers, but they didn't fit. Their self-titled debut, in 1977, was too traditional and pub-rock for that: if you enjoy the music of Graham Parker or Nick Lowe or the first Motors album, you'll definitely want it. From then on, they failed to fit by being too professional, too superbly produced. For two years running, 1978-9, they beat out ABBA to be the best-selling band in the U.K. The British edition of TONIC was a bit of a hold-over from the debut, and sold despite a ridiculously ill-paced track arrangement. But in one very good result of the Rats' American obscurity, the record company deleted the eminently deletable "Can't Stop" and "Watch Out For The Normal People", salvaged the best track ("Joey's On The Street Again") from a debut that had failed with an American public uninterested in Graham Parker stylings, and had the debut's "Mary Of The 4th Form" remade in a vastly less tossed-off arrangement. And for one year, until the Rats cut album #3, this version of TONIC stood, in my opinion, as the finest album in the known universe: smart, detailed, mainstream, unabashedly catchy, and fabulously tuneful.
"Rat Trap", a #1 UK hit, and "Joey's..." bookend the album, which makes sense: they don't fit the other eight songs, they fit each other. They are punk (and in "Rat Trap"'s spoken/ rapped sections even hip-hop) in the single sense of being grim reflections on urban life as singer/ songwriter Bob Geldof knew it (with some melodrama tossed in). But in any other sense, they're original crystallizations of Bruce Springsteen's BORN TO RUN: the detailed characterizations and complex structure and elegant piano figures of "Jungleland" fused with the melodicism and E-Street Band brass energy of the great but vapid car-songs "Born To Run" and "Thunder Road". With a more urgent and proletarian delivery: I'm not sure how well "Just down past the gasworks by the meat factory door, the five lamp boys were coming on strong" reads, but I don't read them. Geldof _communicates_ the scene, just as his conviction empowers the bossy street lights that switch from "Walk/ Don't Walk" to "Talk/ Don't Talk". There's a moral center, too: if "they're screaming and crying in the high rats flats/ it's a rat trap, and you've been caught", it may still be possible, and is worth trying, to "find a way out, kick down that door". "Look at that brick wall gravestone where some kid has sprayed, saying 'Nobody could be bothered to rule here, okay?'"--- it's not a mere indictment, it's a call for corrective action. Which is one reason why punks were less than pleased with the Rats' success, crying "sell-outs!" in a way they never dared when the Clash played for Top Of The Pops.
The rest fits between punk and New Wave much more easily. The rousingly major-key "Me And Howard Hughes" and "I Never Loved Eva Braun" pick cheerfully at celebrities. The former's line "there's flies everywhere, buzzin' in the air, filling my body with filth and disease" is sung as one of the happiest declarations in the universe. The latter puts its serious considerations of Hitler inside (thankfully) a shiny package that begins with a teenage girl cooing "Is she _really_ going out with Adolf?", and a bashed-out riff over which the band sings "Oooooh, oooooh, yeah (oh yeah)!"; the song, proper, has Hitler getting tired of Eva's exercise routines and confessing to being "a little too ambitious, maybe". "Living In An Island", picking up after "...Braun" turned into a mournful piano elegy (the girl ends whispering "Gee...."), juices things up even perkier to sing about hara-kiri: "I gave my advice and the boy said 'Nice, but suicide leaves such a bad aftertaste...'". The agitated "Like Clockwork", with reflections on time that are far from new but equally far from irrelevant, arranges its staccato bassline, equally staccato singing, piano solos and percussion by the title, and ends side one (remeber the concept of "side one"?) with an alarm. Simple, cool.
"Blind Date" is like the first (and only real) Sex Pistols album on a country-rock jaunt and an introspective fit about if it's worth the effort to revive their love lives. "Mary..." fantasizes a raunchy night life for a 10th-grade girl Bob had had a school crush on. "Don't Believe What You Read", like a more raucous early Elvis Costello, points out that magazine articles can lie. "She's So Modern", written explicitly (and successfully) to be a hit, is harmlessly smirking bubblegum a la the Knack: "and Jean confided to me, she's Mona Lisa's biggest fan. She drew a mustache on her face, she's always seen her as a man".
These songs, in most hands, would be the album's weak stretch: fun, catchy, dumb, of temporary charm. But with some combination of the band's talents and producer Robert John "Mutt" Lange's, the arrangements are layered and surprising, the playing is tight, the dynamics are well-maintained, and the songs are _still_ dumb but infinitely durable in their basic wonderfulness. The same virtues penetrate the six intelligent songs. "Mutt" Lange would go on to be the producer for Bryan Adams, Def Leppard, and Shania Twain, and I don't know what that means. Luckily, I don't have to care.
1979
Boomtown Rats, THE FINE ART OF SURFACING
One morning in 1979, as the Boomtown Rats toured the U.S.A., a 16-year-old girl named Brenda Spencer took out the rifle she'd been given for her birthday by her father, and loaded it. Her home happened to be across the street from an elementary school, so she aimed the gun out the window and started firing. By the time police had broken into her home, raced up the stairs, and stopped her, she'd killed the principal, a kid, and a teacher, and injured sixteen kids. Things like that didn't happen back then, despite the ready availability of guns and violent TV; this was _news_. The police, of course, asked her why she'd done this. She replied "It was something to do. I don't like Mondays". Bob Geldof heard about the incident and was genuinely horrified; but not too horrified to grab a sheet of paper and write "The silicon chip inside her head was switched to overload". An hour or so later (as I believe he described it), he'd written a reggae song about the incident, "I Don't Like Mondays". But the band had a performance that night, so he and the very talented keyboardist Johnny Fingers worked out a voice and quasi-classical piano arrangement. It was well-received, so they kept it.
Soon they'd recorded it, with some overdubbed strings, as a single, but even before then, they played on Saturday Night Live, touring with "Rat Trap" as the single. They also played "...Mondays" that night. The recorded single would be a #1 song in 32 countries including the UK and most of Europe, and could very possibly have done as well in the U.S.A. had the Spencer parents not successfully sued to take it off the air once it reached #60. A dumb suit, since the song never mentions the Spencers, and since "biasing the trial" seems an odd legality when the girl was caught red-handed (um, why wasn't she pleading guilty?). As a result, the Boomtown Rats never did sell squat in America, which then was over half the world's music market by itself; as a partial result, fused with a British market fickleness that makes American audiences seem like born historians, Bob Geldof was no longer awash in money or fame or purpose in 1983/4. As a result of _that_, he could see reports on the starvation in Ethiopia, form Band-Aid and the worldwide Live-Aid to raise famine-fighting resources, educate himself about the politics and economics of starvation, form an organization independent of the excessive compromises of Oxfam and the Red Cross, and--- by direct aid, town-rebuilding, and African-appropriate agronomy and literacy education programs (plus some compromises of his own as needed)--- save, and help give purpose to, millions of lives and hundreds of villages. Making Brenda Spencer's Mum and Dad, perhaps, two of the greatest indirect heroes of the 20th century. Weird, huh?
As for the SNL appearance, my Mom happened to be watching that night, which she usually couldn't. Ten years later she still remembered that one song's single performance, and while looking one summer day in Backtracks for used folk or used Jimmy Webb or used Art Garfunkel, she saw "...Mondays" on the track list of THE FINE ART OF SURFACING, Rats album #3, and bought it. I was in the computer room when she played it, but I kind of noticed, and asked her about it later. The next day, she went to work, and I, bored with my book, played SURFACING and followed along with the lyric sheet. Not bad stuff. The next day I played it again and noticed things I hadn't before. Next day, same routine, same sense of different discoveries. Three weeks later, I was still going, and still finding novelty, and pleasure, and fascination. I, Brian Block--- a teenage outcast with a growing band of teenage outcast friends who weren't invited to the parties that would have taught them rock'n'roll--- suddenly decided that maybe this rock music stuff was worth checking out. Which, given that my previous experience with the medium was as a 6-year-old having Kiss songs blare at me while my babysitter's 10-year-old son locked me in the basement or smeared mud on my library books or just punched me out a bit, was not an inevitable realization.
This probably means that my continued belief that SURFACING is perhaps the greatest rock record ever (at least until the Rheostatics came along) is hopelessly biased. But my conviction of its greatness has strengthened, not weakened, as my knowledge of the musical world has burst outward in all directions. The record didn't _just_ fit my tastes; although if I'd ever thought to find out what those SportsCenter soundtracks were, I'd've known my tastes then centered in the synth-rock region of Dire Straits' "Walk Of Life" and "Industrial Disease", of the Police's "Wrapped Around Your Finger" and "Every Breath You Take", of Rush's "Distant Early Warning" and "Subdivisions", all of which I still treasure. The lyrics to SURFACING are literate and eloquent, the song buildups are case studies in construction, Fingers' piano is agile and as pounding or delicate as it needs to be, the synthesizer sounds are glossy or eerie as appropriate. The flamenco-ish solo on "When The Night Comes" is the greatest guitar solo in history; and the way the final sad echoes of "...Mondays" are broken by steam-kettle, then snare-drum-rolls, then a quarter-note drum pound, then bass, then vocal "aarooom"s joining, is an equally matchless song-to-song transition. Or if not, I've gotten well past the 1500 album mark without my errors being called to my attention.
"Someone's Looking At You", Platonic ideal building-up silence-to-full-power exersice #1, is about wondering how much paranoia one's political activist stance warrants. "Diamond Smiles", Platonic yadda-yadda #2, coolly observes a socialite's suicide, from the dimly uncomprehending viewpoint of a fellow partygoer but with elegantly summarized details of the last day for us to diagnose by. "Wind Chill Factor"--- which, from the initial spine-tingling pipe organ that sets up a blankly pulverizing bass riff, is as effectively layered, purposefully complex a song as I've ever known, the source of many of my early day-to-day "Whoa!"s--- is a song of isolation: "We really shouldn't be alone tonight. Let's go to a movie where everybody fights but in the end there's dancing, songs, and smiles. You need lots of smiles, when...". "Having My Picture Taken", a rapture about just that, is the first light moment, somewhere midway from cheerful power-pop to good Def Leppard. The Johnny Fingers composition "Sleep", filled with counterpointing synth parts, closes side one with grimness again, worrying its way from mere insomnia to: "If I take enough of these red things (red things), get some permanent sleep (blue things, blue things), what lullabys would you sing (white things, white things) for me?". And lest anyone accuse the Rats of never being ahead of their time: there's a dorky little unlisted bonus track involving dissonance, a manipulated tape loop, and Geldof's disembodied cries of "this is not funny".
Side Two does the "...Mondays"/ "Nothing..." twofer; the latter is too polished to be taken as punk back then but has all the aggression and nihilistic misanthropy for the task (a newscast of "Today is Tuesday, tomorrow's Wednesday, and this is the date: March 28, and/ Some people died and some people were born, and some stayed the same, and some went insane"), plus fully adequate goofiness (a sing-along bridge about toupees and Spanish grammar). "Keep It Up", the most mainstream big rock song here, is about sex, but that's a real subject and a usefully upbeat one, and you needn't feel illiterate singing along: "I can remeber those carefully sharpened eyeballs, sparkling like bloodshot diamonds in the snowfall". "Nice'N'Neat", a rapid spew of big words, hummable guitar licks, and echoey drums, is a perceptive and empathic song about friendship, God, truth, faith, and "na na na na, bop shuwop shuwop/ na na na na, ohoh yeah". And the most musically expansive and rollicking tune ends, as "When..." rather awesomely fits the following rhymes into equal chunks of time: "The offices are emptying their pale-faced wards into the street/ Flickering their striplight eyes, shivering they readjust their lives from the air-conditioned heat/ the humdrum and mundane/ is nearly driving them insane/ but you get hooked so quick to anything, even your chains/ you're crouching in your corner as they open up your cage". It's about purposelessness in existence and about getting laid.
I like big topics, if the writer has something worth saying and no overweening sense of "hey! I'm important!". I like mainstream production, if it doesn't insult my intelligence. I like easy shiny hooks, and I like eloquent non-meandering playing, and I like buried mazes of effects and countermelodies to uncover and navigate. No amount of experience will change my mind. Can I change yours, then?
1980
Boomtown Rats, MONDO BONGO
"Two roads diverged in the woods
and I, I chose the one less taken
Now I'm living off nuts and berries
and if the park ranger doesn't find me soon
I'm a dead man"
-- some guy
The nice thing about being tremendously popular is that it gives you the chance to take risks that, for non-celebrities, would not be "risky" but "career-aborting". REVOLVER and SGT PEPPER had to be recorded by the most successful group the world had yet seen, because they could afford to lose some fans by the wayside and still outsell almost everyone else. They did lose fans (the Beatles' most adventurous singles were the ones that broke their streak of #1 singles), and they did change the world. The Beach Boys ended up making a lot of money off PET SOUNDS, but at first it and the abandoned weirdness of SMILEY SMILE were money-losing disasters, and only because they were the Beach Boys could they relegate that to "at first". Jethro Tull became kings of FM radio, and used the opportunity to author two of progressive rock's weirdest concept albums; they never fully recovered their mass audience. U2 stayed successful in following THE JOSHUA TREE with the Eurosynth and processor oddities of ACHTUNG BABY, but only after they admitted the failure of "Zoo Station" and "the Fly" as commercial singles and instead made videos for the easily hummable "One" and "Mysterious Ways". ZOOROPA and POP, even weirder and with fewer obvious tunes, dropped U2's sales by 90%. R.E.M.'s steadily denser sound over MONSTER, NEW ADVENTURES, and UP has lost more like 80% of their audience - but then, U2 and R.E.M. still outsell most bands. That they take the risks of changing their sound in difficult ways is admirable; that some of their audience stays with them is a sign that the effort is worthwhile, and I hope none of the artists regret their decisions. But their record companies, well, probably regret bigtime.
Rarely has career suicide been so pure as on the Boomtown Rats' fourth album, MONDO BONGO. They were the world's bestselling band, as long as the United States (half the world market at that time) didn't count, and "I Don't Like Mondays" was evidence of their potential to break America. But world success meant world touring, and world touring, where Bob Geldof was concerned, mean the chance to see and hear far more provocative things than the hotel bars. He came back broadened. Uh-oh.
Simon Crowe's drumming is the first sign of something different, using Hispanic percussion to drive the opening track, "Mood Mambo". The song itself shows up as affected by a different sort of broadening, as the Rats decided to ditch producer Mutt Lange, a control freak, for David Bowie's frequent producer Tony Visconti, and discovered themselves able to drink, play video games, and sunbathe while their bandmates worked on parts. "Mood…", the most blatant result of this new attitude, was recorded when Geldof rapped improvisational lyrics with drummer and bassist told to "play whatever you feel like"; ten minutes were edited to three and a half, a chorus was dropped in, and the result is giddy horns and percussion over chatter about snakes "crawling down thick, black, Latin American stairs". I think it's pretty compelling, actually, Geldof's hamminess selling the whispered riduculous "secret of this place", Fingers's sound effects punctuating a dazed formal cited address of an "International Dance Band Competition", and the "mambo crazy!"'s catchiness topped when a throwaway backup cry of "yes we do!" is countered on the sport with "no we don't". It also sounds absolutely nothing like Foreigner, or new wave, or anything the charts had time for. It was chosen as MONDO's first single.
Second single "Banana Republic" was a #5 hit in Britian and #1 in Germany, a last shot at glory; it's a skeletal reggae attack on Ireland as a nation of brilliant writers and tavern philosophisers who never do anything, unlike the violent religious thugs: "so the purple and the pinstriped mutely shake their heads/ a silence shrieking volumes, violence worse than they condemn/…/ heroes going cheap these days/ price: a bullet in the head". "The Elephant's Graveyard", the third single, put a catchy tune and more commentary behind explosive percussion, inventing a new cliché in "justice isn't blind/ it just looks the other way". "Up All Night" ponders, half-awake, the similarities between Africa and ghetto NYC, and got danceclub American play with its understated bass/snare beat and nuersery-school synth squiggles.
However, there probably just wasn't a market for "This Is My Room", the most grandiose song here, thunderously announcing a three-year-old's satisfaction at a major life step. "Another Piece Of Red" followed the piano-song thread "Mondays" established, but too quietly perhaps, and its reflections of the loss of Rhodesia and the British Empire weren't built for permanence (sure, I agree with "I was reading in New Zealand about Ian Smith/ I was thinking they were lucky to be rid of that shit", but I'll understand if you've forgotten your opinion). "Go Man Go" is catchy and I like Geldof's cartoon-Japanese accent, but Tokyo environmentalism, again, rates behind love songs and isolation songs on the pop lineup. "Under Their Thumb"'s reverbed rewrite of a Rolling Stones hit; "Please Don't Go"'s typewriter percussion and scatted vocal break ("a blee bop bleeda gidda didda da duu"); "Don't Talk To Me"'s Buddy Holly impression; and "Hurt Hurts"'s humungous layering of sound are other odd detours. There's even a folky unlisted 13th song which itself pauses to let the listener speak up.
MONDO BONGO was fun to record. MONDO BONGO is even more fun, say I, to practice drums to. The tunes take second stage sometimes, but not always, so parts are fun to sing to. Rarely if ever has a record combined heavy, originally expressed thoughts and musical experimentation with such an obvious good-time atmosphere. So it stiffed… well, nothing this enjoyable, this worth looking back at with pride, is ever really a failure. Artists choose their goals, and choose the criteria by which they decide if they've succeeded. The audience gets only a straw poll.
1982
Boomtown Rats, V DEEP
For their fifth album -- also their first with only five members, after guitarist Gerry Cott left; hence the name - the Boomtown Rats started integrating their impulses into the most representative album they ever did. In sheer terms of songwriting, the results you'd get by paring everything down to vocals and simple guitar, I'd probably also grade it as their weakest (ignoring the debut), which makes it an ideal place to examine what, exactly, I find so consistently brilliant about their output.
Their strength was not, precisely, originality. The Rats were always with their time, not in front of it. Simon Crowe's polyrhythmic, multitracked, multiethnic, layered drum parts on V DEEP were even more sophisticated and danceable than on MONDO BONGO, but Talking Heads had hired a slew of African drummers to do something roughly equivalent on REMAIN IN LIGHT two years earlier, and King Sunny Ade's Nigerian juju music was then topping critics' lists and being purchased by hundreds of thousands of future Starbucks patrons. V DEEP explored electronic textures playfully at the start of "Talking In Code", but the song proper's sounds weren't far removed from Siouxsie's Banshees crossed with "Stayin' Alive". "Never In A Million Years"'s synth anticipated "Born In The USA" by a mere two years, while "a Storm Breaks" and "Skin On Skin" were akin to Georgio Moroder's darkest versions of disco. "Skin…"'s rap section came a year after Blondie's "Rapture" topped charts. "House On Fire" was warm reggae, in time for the first Rats' album after Bob Marley's sad death. Gerry Roberts's restrained-by-polish guitar heroics would fit a Pat Benatar album. "The Bitter End" and "Charmed Lives", in their untutored swooping melodics and ravaged moments of starkness, may have influenced the next two Midnight Oil albums, though given V DEEP's sales I wouldn't bet on it. The peppy Mexican horn breaks of "Storm…", "Charmed…", and "House…" make an interesting mix with the rest of the music, especially given the New Orleans piano of "Storm…", but aren't exactly avant-garde. Neither are the sixties spy music of "Whitehall 1212" or the finger-snapping cool jazz of "the Little Death".
In the Rats' favor, though, were four huge factors. One is Bob Geldof's singing. Not a natural singer, and stuck with a gruff, impish, slightly nasal voice, he made up for everything with his expressiveness. The just-out-of-bed yawn/growl on "Skin…"s rap gives full conviction to the unfocused creepiness of lines about "where's the riot/ it's much too quiet" and "tonight I go to sleep with the lullaby sound of buildings falling down", while extreme automated echo enhances the panic in the yelped chorus. "Charmed Lives"'s too-obvious jab at rich people ("we're wonderful. Hear the news, it's all grief and gloom/ things are bad, really bad, we're clearly immune") is made fun by his playground singsong sneer, with a group-sung hook of "Na na na na na na na na". For "He Watches It All", a thoughtfully oblique song about a media titan, Geldof focuses on delivering the winding Costello-ite melody as accurately as possible, but on "Never…" anti-military protest, elegant enough to allow a similar treatment, he sacrifices a little tuneful precision for volume. His backup singers, though even less born for the job, give similar support, their slow "oooh"s artificially panned in and out on the abstract ominousness of "a Storm Breaks", but their gang-up enthusiasm helping the joyous sprint though "He Watches…"'s bridge of "Did you read in the Sunday paper?/ Headline called him 'the Sailor's Deacon'/ fell in love with a lighthouse keeper/ now he's bringing home the beacon".
Virtue #2, simply, is the sturdiness of Geldof's frequently ambitious melodies. #3 is general literacy, as even trivial topics are delivered with style. "House…"'s jungle-commune fantasy casually tosses off lines about "bony Watusi fingers beating on the bark of a tree" and "executing loop-da-loops takes a lot of skill and bad taste". "Talking…"s probably one-sided complaint about his girlfriend's indecisiveness does deliver the venom with accuracy: "toss me a code/ astonish me, dear, with a new point of view/ well I like you I think/ it varies sometimes and it really depends". At best, of course, literacy yields songs like the anti-heroin "Little Death", whose "There's a man over there, he's got cold feet/ he'd march to the drum, but the drummer's dead beat/ he's fragile tonight, but he says he's clean/ he's uncertain when he's speaking, but he knows what he means/ he's shiverin' now but he don't look cold/ he says 'turn up the weather', so I do as I'm told" has also become my lyric of choice to sing to the tune of "You Shook Me All Night Long".
Better than any other group I've encountered, though, the Boomtown Rats strike me as having been masters of structure and detail. Not only were vocal inflections and interlocking rhythms perfect to the last detail. You could also count on lots of little fluttery hooks that lasted less than a measure; on slow tension buildups that dissolved into giddiness just before they went from tense to unpleasant; on experimental intros being overtaken by driving, authoritative rhythms. It must, in part, be simple correspondence between their instinctive sense of pacing and mine; by their own account, V DEEP and MONDO BONGO were created in highly relaxed circumstances, not intense slavery. Nonetheless, there's objective effort going on.
One
of pop music's dirty little secrets is how completely vulnerable it would be to the attentions of one of Frederick Taylor's old time-study men, reworking industry by breaking each task to its smallest components and teaching human beings to put the components together with zero waste or slack (pain and suffering not being defined as "waste" for industrial purposes). Pop is intensely repetitive: identical choruses three times in the same song and often using repetition internally; one verse using the same melody as another; drum patterns repeated for minutes on end. Cut down a song to its building blocks and very few would exceed thirty seconds. The repetition, of course, has all sorts of uses. There's the beneficial brainwashing in which good tunes go from puzzling novelties to familiar to precious. There's the chance to learn and sing along; the pleasure of anticipating correctly. To lose those benefits is to take intellectual purity over the happiness of your hoped-for audience… and yet the right amount of repetition for one person can bore another would-be fan completely. The Boomtown Rats understood, at an unusual level of insight, the importance of having repetitions, yet varying each on multiple levels, so every trip through the familiar could yield new insight. And still be fun to air-guitar to.
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