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. 101: The Crusaders and Their Damn Long Crusade

The time they really committed to the word association.

I apologize in advance for this post on the grounds that, it’s pretty much: a handful of dudes put an actual shit-ton of music and over 30 years. They might have done it under a couple different names, some key members came and went (but only after 14 years), but this basic story here isn’t more complicated than talented professional musicians releasing a ton of material and landing a hit somewhere in the early middle. But, because I have a format.

The Hit
The Crusaders’ “Street Life” came out in late 1979 and, based on all the one-hit wonders I’ve heard around it and my general sense of the mainstream sound of the era, something close to out of nowhere. It’s less than it doesn’t sound like its time - between the vocal style (especially with the lonely opening), the entire rhythm underlay, the pulse of electric organ, the funk guitar, the “warmth” of the production, it very much does - but that fucker’s north of 11 minutes long and I never saw a radio edit (even the Youtube clip gets within a few tics of 10 minutes). That didn’t stop it from breaking into the Top 10 on the R&B charts and sneaking as high as No. 36 on Billboard’s Top 100. (Fans in the UK lifted as high as No. 5.) The album did all right too. No. 18 on the pop charts ain’t bad.

Well, that takes care of that.

The Rest of the Story
“This group took the blues-based saturation of Texas, and melded that with the gospel and soul from the church…”
- Jake Feinberg, in an interview with Wilton Felder (which puts it sometime before September 27, 2015)

The story begins with three friends who attended high school together - Joe Sample (piano), Wilton Felder (tenor sax, at least then), and Nesbert “Stix” Hooper forming a band they called The Swingsters in 1954. It continues with Sample checking out for a couple years to study piano at Texas Southern University - where he definitely met Wayne Henderson (trombone), and might have met Hubert Laws (flute) and Henry Wilson (bass). After taking a head-count, they updated their name to the Modern Jazz Sextet and continued to build their name as a hard bop act. After introducing some R&B influences to their sound, they updated their name to the Nighthawks and/or Nite Hawks, and, for those wondering at home, nearly all of these notes will be chronological and, yes, most of it comes from Wikipedia’s entry on The Crusaders. I had what I had to work with and…mostly lucid as Felder was through it, that Feinberg interview felt too much like the latter badgering the former for what he wanted to get out of him.

One Hit No More, No. 100(!): The Itinerant Zelig Behind M and "Pop Muzik"

A Persona.

The Hit
The biggest surprise I found in researching M’s 1979 hit, “Pop Muzik,” was that the man behind, Robin Scott, first tried to record it as either R&B or funk. That detail comes from Stereogum's entry in on M in its (and very good) series on No. 1 hits. As noted in the same piece, Scott cleared out the analog instruments and started working with keyboards to create “an otherworldly synthetic take on the song that was inspired…by Donna Summer.” It also contains an old quote on the inspiration for the single:

“Scott later said that he envisioned himself speaking as a disco DJ, floating above the crowd and making ridiculous voice-of-God statements. Talking to Melody Maker at the time, he explained, ‘I get the feeling that people want to know that someone is in control. I see everybody in the disco like being in an enormous army which is waiting to be told what to do. They’ve all rallied under this call, and now they’re sweating out their hang-ups there.’”

For anyone wanting to dive…pretty damn deep into Scott’s life, influences and process, a site called Discog Info mined all sorts of old quotes that get into all that, but the Stereogum piece does the best work both placing “Pop Muzik” in time and breaking it down. It calls it the first true new wave song to hit No. 1- a fair call based on the competition, Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” (more on Blondie here) and The Knack’s “My Sharona” (more on The Knack here) - and it makes a strong case for the future-forward originality of the song’s style and structure:

“A mechanistic drum pounds out a steady, basic thump. Keyboards make noises — blips, pings, squirts, hums — that sound strange and spartan and alien while still somehow resolving into catchy melodies. A British man deadpans absurdist non-sequiturs, sounding bored but also excited by his own boredom.”

That sums it up better than I ever will. And now…

The Rest of the Story
Robin Scott never lacked for interesting associations. Born in Croydon, Surrey, UK, in 1947, he attended Croydon Art College where he started a long friendship with the future Svengali of English punk, Malcolm McLaren, and another collaborator, Vivienne Westwood. Though he did do some work with McLaren - e.g., he told Music Hit Box in a circa-2017interview that he helped them develop ideas for the “Let It Rock” boutique, though Wikipedia’s entry says he passed on the chance to work with them at the Chelsea fashion shop SEX - Scott committed to music early, and in one form after another.

One Hit No More, No. 99: Randy Van Warmer Needed You. Most.

Think this honors him best.

The Hit
The man’s name sounded like a parody stage name and the one big hit he landed probably would only deepen that impression for someone listening over 40 years later. Randy Van Warmer’s “Just When I Needed You Most” makes the average easy-listening song sound medium-rock at a minimum; his melted-butter vocals let it go down even easier. If you listen closer (or just again), Van Warmer’s smarter touches come through - e.g., the way he hangs his verses over the bar-line, the spindly, picked guitar that, if you’re willing to stretch far enough, evokes a spider’s web.

Lyrically, “Just When I Needed You Most” tells a tale of abandonment, but with a kicker of his failure to stop his special someone from leaving and how he keeps reaching out too late to get anything back but silence. It's a damn sad song, regret piling on regret.

Bouncing around the Internet, I found multiple origin stories for Van Warmer’s heartache - everything his father’s passing when he was just 12 (Wikipedia), a girlfriend that broke his heart (Country Thang Daily), even his favorite old car breaking down on his way to work in Denver (also, Country Thang). The thing about the girlfriend comes up most - a deep-dive into his songwriting process/career on American Songwriter puts it on a high school sweetheart who moved with him to England only to leave - so my money’s on that fount of heartbreak.

The inspiration aside, two key figures helped Van Warmer put polish on the song: one, an Englishman in the music publishing business named Iam Kimmet, who took him under his wing when he started songwriting, the other Hot Chocolate’s Tony Wilson. The song did really well on its release - which was a minor miracle for several reasons - but it landed him a No. 8 on the UK charts, a No. 1 on Billboard’s Adult Contemporary charts and an impressive No. 4 on Billboard’s Hot 100. The song includes an autoharp bridge, one played by John Sebastian of The Lovin’ Spoonful fame. Van Warmer credits the bridge for making the song a hit…now about that minor miracle…or series of them.

One Hit No More, No. 98: Steve Forbert, an Unlikely Romeo

First impression.

The Hit
With Steve Forbert’s 1979 hit, “Romeo’s Tune,” we hit…yet another song I’d never heard. No memories or associations with childhood, nothing about the old man playing it and telling me about “real music” (his tastes go back 20 years prior, for the record), which leaves just the song itself.

To speak in the royal mode, Forbert comes off as an acquired taste the first time you hear him. Musically, it’s a fine song, great even, for people who are into sparkling piano phrases tangling with extended keening altos on the guitar and, a personal favorite, that warm, grounding glow an electric organ lends a song…and then Forbert starts singing. His voice sounds pinched to where you wait for him to clear his throat and, if not flat, possessed of a similar quality. Unless he’s not rasping out something like a shout, his vocals seem to fade into the music of the chorus, and so on.

And then, as one does when listening for what else someone did in his career, you keep listening. You find Forbert’s voice growing on you, and in a way you can’t put words to until someone does it for you - in this case, a Rolling Stone article from 1980, where they noted what sold Danny Fields, one of the original interpreters of New York punk to the mainstream, on Forbert as a performer:

“He attacked his acoustic guitar fiercely, took raw, careening harmonica solos, and sang in a manner nobody had heard before — hoarse, almost whispering at times, but with a sure command of texture and nuance and a sense of high drama.”

And, sure, I guess that makes his voice an acquired taste. To wrap up “Romeo’s Tune” - and it is a great song, worthy of a No. 11 hit - Forbert wrote it about a girl he either knew or heard about in his hometown of Meridian, Mississippi, but he had it dedicated to Florence Ballard of The Supremes out of sympathy for the way the music business screwed her over. As I discovered bouncing around the internet, that seems pretty on-brand for Forbert.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 37: Al Dexter and His Pistol Packin' Hit

Honky-tonk, from his lips to our ears.

Sources disagree on the birth year of Clarence Albert Poindexter, but most list either 1902 or 1905. Whatever the year was, Al Dexter was born in Jacksonville, Texas. Either nothing remarkable happened in his childhood or people didn’t find anything worth mentioning, but he started playing music during the 1920s. According to Country Thang Daily, Dexter did a little recording even back then, religious numbers mostly, until something other than divine intervention pushed him to another track: “However, after a friend asked him if he wanted to “write pretty songs or make money,” he was inspired to switch to honky-tonk music.”

Dexter made the switch, but the weight of the Great Depression squeezed Dexter out of music and into the painting business. The fire still burned bright enough that he started moonlighting with an all-black band playing private clubs and square dance parties, just to keep playing. For the record, Wikipedia tweaks that narrative, saying that Dexter kept forming bands throughout the early 1930s, including the all-black ensemble because he couldn’t get white musicians to play his style of music. Once he had enough of everything in place, Dexter toured his band and sound around East Texas oil-boom towns, finally earning enough to return to a career in music.

With money he’d earned on the road, Dexter settled down, opened a tavern, named it Turner Town, and set up as the house band. With that as a base, he further refined his sound until he had something new for American audiences. From a bio on the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame's website:

“Al Dexter is considered to be one of the forefathers of the honky-tonk music style. But rather than specializing in forlorn heartache laments, he emphasized the rollicking, good-time, barrelhouse side of this country barroom genre.”

Dexter recorded a smattering of songs in the 1930s, the biggest being “New Jelly Roll Blues” (1935) and “Honky Tonk Blues” (1937). The latter slipped the phrase “honky tonk” into a song’s title for the first time and into the American musical lexicon, but he spent years struggling to write a follow-up. As the slump deepened, people at his then-label, Columbia Records, urged its president to drop him, but Art Satherley still saw potential and the sound and the act and kept him on. Dexter kept playing Turner Town and tinkering with bands until 1939, when he finally found the right mix. With his name finally clipped to Al Dexter and “his Texas Troopers” behind him, he returned to the studio to take another run at recording…and then World War II broke out.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 36: The Harlem Hamfats, Session Musician Superstars

A reason you may have heard of them...

I often type “this post will be short” at the top of these posts, only to delete after going on for four pages. This post, however, will be short. Because it cannot be otherwise.

The Harlem Hamfats barely survived to the Internet age. The entries on individual members top out after a couple paragraphs at most (e.g., Kansas Joe McCoy, and he was the long one) and their Wikipedia page doesn’t run much longer. Normally, that’s enough to convince me to skip an act, but two things recommended them for a short entry. First:

“They were perhaps the first studio recording band to become a performing act in their own right, and they recorded extensively.”

Chicago's pioneering producer J. Mayo Williams brought together The Harlem Hamfats to give Decca Records an in-house band to record that labels talent in the second half of the 1930s. For anyone familiar with the name, Williams bounced between Chicago labels from the mid-1920s until leaving Decca in the mid-1940s. Specializing in what the times dubbed “race records,” Williams recorded several of the early blues greats (e.g., Blind Lemon Jefferson (profiled here), Tampa Red (profiled here with Son House), plus jazz trailblazers, Jelly Roll Morton (profiled here) and King Oliver. By the time he'd moved onto Decca, the trend toward popular singers had picked up steam - i.e., the same shift that, along with the musicians strike of the early 1940s, did in the big bands - which meant Williams needed a stable of musicians he could rely on for recording sessions. Enter the Harlem Hamfats.

As sometimes happens, Wikipedia's entry on Kansas Joe McCoy (guitar/vocals) omits Williams’ role and states that he formed the Harlem Hamfats with his younger brother, Papa Charlie McCoy (guitar/mandolin), after divorcing his wife, a guitarist known as Memphis Minnie. As suggested by Kansas Joe’s name, he didn’t hail from Harlem. None of the Hamfats did. The McCoy’s weren’t even from Kansas; both grew up in Mississippi and came up in the New Orleans’ music scene. Some other members came from New Orleans as well - Herb Morand (trumpet/vocals), John Lindsay (bass), and Odell Rand (clarinet) - while the rest - Horace Malcolm (piano), Freddie Flynn (drums) and Pearlis Williams (also, drums) came from Chicago. It’s likely other members came in and out, but that’s the list I have.

The second thing that recommended the Harlem Hamfats for an entry actually involves a couple things: