One Hit No More, No. 102: The Boomtown Rats, the Ghost of Woody Guthrie & Cod Reggae

Somewhere around their peak...

This chapter covers one of my favorite bands through the second half of high school. When someone told me the ‘keeper on my high school soccer team loved them as much as I did, I tried to bond with him, but he wasn’t having it. I took it well, honest. Both own-goals were totally unintentional…

The Hit
“A reporter reached Spencer by phone while she was still in the house after the shooting, and asked her why she committed the crime. She reportedly answered: ‘I don't like Mondays. This livens up the day.’”

The “Spencer” in that quote refers Brenda Spencer, a troubled young woman who fired shots at the elementary school across the street from her house in January of ’79. A pair of Irish musicians named Bob Geldof and Garry Roberts caught wind of the story and decided to make a song out of it, and a statement. You can see Geldof very briefly explain in a 1981 appearance on Merv Griffin’s show (and do stick around for the banter at the end of it, because both men seem to get a kick out of needling each other). To wrap up Spencer’s story, it’s a sad one. She lived in squalor with a single dad who drank too much and what sound like some serious mental health issues. Suffice to say, her father wasn’t very supportive:

“Spencer later said, ‘I asked for a radio and he bought me a gun.’ Asked why he had done that, she answered, ‘I felt like he wanted me to kill myself.’”

The song was The Boomtown Rats' “I Don’t Like Mondays,” the only U.S. hit the band ever had. If you’ve ever heard Johnnie Fingers opening piano figures, you know it in an instant. It never occurred to me till that performance on Merv Griffin that the instrumentation doesn’t seem to go beyond what they had on stage: a piano, a swelling synth to fill in the sound and a timpani (or something similar) to give it a nice little boom. Still, it contains many touches of your average Rats song, most notably a knack for cutting to the bone of troubling subject-matter and the call-response in and around the chorus that…for lack of a better word, comes off like camp.

I never find a source that said how high “I Don’t Like Mondays” climbed up Billboard’s Hot 100 - though Wikipedia makes clear it stalled below the Top 10 - and I have no idea how long it stayed there. I do, however, remember coming back to that one sometime after hearing my first song by The Boomtown Rats, the radio edit of “Up All Night” that MTV played back in its early days (a lot, certainly the Geldof remembers). Suffice to say, I got the drift of The Boomtown Rats one big U.S. hit, even the lyrics aren’t entirely linear, far earlier than I figured out “Up All Night.” Sadly, “I Don’t Like Mondays” remains topical as the day he wrote it. From a 2020 interview with a site that was one called Hot Press:

One Hit No More, No. 84: Dean Friedman and His Date with "Ariel"

The Hit
My guess is that, if someone told you “Ariel” was a Billy Joel song, you’d ask why his voice sounds off. It actually came from a guy named Dean Friedman, who, near as I can tell existed in his own orbit, but that loping bass/piano on the bottom and the structure/phrasing of the lyrics does sound very much of the times (1977).

It’s a cute little vignette, “Ariel.” A tale of a lazy day set in suburbia where boy-meets-girl, they do some random stuff and wind up doing it, it has a day in the life feel. It has surprisingly open references of drug use - which stand out, because I haven’t heard many in this series - plus highly-local shout-outs to the “deep in the bosom of suburbia” where Friedman grew up, Paramus, New Jersey - e.g., the waterfall at Paramus Park, the young girl in the song is collecting money for an area radio station and, at the song’s climax, when the new couple makes love “to the sound of bombs bursting in air” as “channel 2” (WCBS-TV) signs off for the night. Can’t think of the last time I heard someone talk about a channel signing for the night…

Asked about the inspiration for the song in an interview with the UK-based Songwriting Magazine - e.g., was there a real “Ariel” in his past? - Friedman gave an answer that gives a fair impression of everything else I heard by him:

“Actually it was sort of a composite story of teenage crushes mashed together. I was self-conscious at first, having written it, because, in terms of the plot, nothing much happens – boy meets girl, they go on a date and end up making out in front of the television. That’s such a typical suburban scene, I was worried there wasn’t enough drama going on. That was until I played it to some teenage girls on the block, and they accused me of going through their diaries! So it occurred to me that, even though it was a simple story, it was infused with detail so it was recognisable to a lot of people. I think that’s what helped it become the hit that it was.”

And, for people interested in the mechanics of a song:

“[‘Ariel’] was something I was writing when I had my first access to a TEAC four-track tape deck, and I took advantage of that by doing a lot of multi-tracking and stacking up my vocals. So it was the technology that inspired me to develop what became the chorus, with all the layered harmonies.”