Bob Geldof (well before becoming Sir Bob Geldof, K.B.E.)

Tell me why!
                        I don’t like Mondays!
Tell me why!
                        I don’t like Mondays!
Tell me why!
                        I don’t like Mondays! I want to shoot the whole day down.

Which side are you on?

For those of you who’ve come to us recently through Pat’s terrific posts on “Little Sadie”/”Cocaine Blues,”  I should mention up front that we tend to venture back and forth between the older and the newer, the roots and the branches, hoping to find the common threads. Today, we dive into late 70s/early 80s New Wave/Punk for a murder “ballad” with a good dose of adolescent nihilism and a more thematic, less narrative, approach to the real events: “I Don’t Like Mondays” by the Irish band The Boomtown Rats.

Oh, in case you were wondering, my picking this song is not a Monday blogger’s cry for help. Well, OK, that might have been part of the reason for picking it… But, that feeling of not liking Mondays, or at least being able to resonate with a simple reading of this song’s refrain, is probably helpful to keep in mind for understanding part of its popularity. Lots of people can get behind not liking Mondays.

“I Don’t Like Mondays” provides an opening not only into a different vein of songcraft–full of a certain kind of Punk petulance–but also a way to look at making art and meaning out of the most senseless violence. The events underlying this week’s song involve victims picked rather arbitrarily, with no real ties to the assailant. Unlike crimes of passion, murders motivated by jealousy or avarice, the story that this song relates taps into something far more mysterious and impenetrable.

Many of you probably know by now that we’re reluctant to address current stories in the news, and especially reluctant to take on school shootings, which are altogether too common. The primary force behind this is a desire for the blog to be about the music and not so much about the news, and especially the politics surrounding the news. The other force behind this reluctance is, I think, a natural tendency to be careful about devoting attention to particularly horrible things.

The Boomtown Rats

You’re probably thinking that ship has long since sailed, given that we’re talking about murder ballads to begin with–and we’ve covered songs relating to incest and cannibalism in the past. But the question has more to do with the widespread supposition, in the absence of any more coherent explanation, that part of what motivates school shooters is fame–that these crimes are some poor, desperate person’s attempt to do something of significance, however horrific. I have no delusions that our humble blog is an engine in the fame/infamy factory, but there is a danger of complicity. The need to process horrible events through art needs to be weighed against this concern. You will see that “I Don’t Like Mondays” draws attention to this dilemma–it definitely drew Bob Geldof’s attention.

“I Don’t Like Mondays” gives us access to these issues. I want to discuss it for that reason, but also because it has at least a minor role in my musical evolution. The song was part of a reputation that made The Boomtown Rats controversial and thereby interesting to me as an adolescent trying to figure out what musical boundaries I wanted to push and how hard.. It’s difficult to recapture the feelings of that time with precision at my age now, but one of the strengths of “Mondays” is that it gives voice to an unfocused adolescent discontent. You can take a kind of emotional “vacation” within its senseless explanation, just at a time when you might, as an adolescent, feel surrounded by senselessness.

I can’t say the song has stayed with me all these years, but it’s one of those songs that has again captured my imagination as I took it up for the blog. I find things underneath it that are worth exploring–not the least of which is whether and how you identify with the questioner or the answerer in the dialogue quoted in the refrain above…or both.

Fine Arts

The song first appeared on The Boomtown Rats’ third album, The Fine Art of Surfacing, in October 1979.
,

Listen to this recording on YouTube here.

Lyrics

For the moment, the important thing to note about the song is that it stands out, stylistically, from the rest of the material on the album. The only thing really Punk about it is the attitude. Geldof had thought the song was going to be a B-side, but it was well-received as it was introduced in live shows in the States. It received a more prominent release, and it turned into the band’s biggest hit. As with Bruce Springsteen’s “41 Shots (American Skin),” I wonder whether those live audiences really heard the song beyond its impassioned refrain. Geldof later states, in a clip we’ll see below, that it took fully six weeks after the song’s debut for the newspapers to tie it back to the story that inspired it.

Monday morning in San Carlos

Geldof wrote the song after reading a report of a school shooting in the San Carlos neighborhood of San Diego. He was at a university radio station in Atlanta in January of 1979 when the station’s telex machine delivered the story there. Sixteen year old Brenda Ann Spencer opened fire on students at Cleveland Elementary School from her house across the street. She wounded eight children and a police officer and killed the school’s principal, Burton Wragg, who was trying to rescue the kids, and the school’s janitor, Michael Suchar, who was trying to rescue Wragg. That no child died of his or her wounds was only a fortunate accident.

Spencer surrendering to police

After the shooting stopped, but before being persuaded to leave her house by police, a local reporter reached Spencer on the phone. He asked her to tell him why she did it. She reportedly answered “I don’t like Mondays. This livens up the day.” This New York Daily News story gives a succinct account of the events surrounding the shooting, as does this Mental Floss article. Spencer pled guilty to two counts of first-degree murder and assault with a deadly weapon. She received a sentence of 25 years to life. She has made four unsuccessful attempts at parole. Her next parole hearing will be in 2019, 40 years after the crime.

 Here’s how Geldof tells the story of creating the song:

“Not liking Mondays for a reason for doing somebody in is a bit strange. I was thinking about it on the way back to the hotel [after the radio interview], and I just said ‘Silicone chip inside her head had switched to overload [and] wrote that down. And the journalists interviewing her said. Tell me why?’ It was such a senseless act. It was the perfect senseless act and this was the perfect senseless reason for doing it. So perhaps I wrote the perfect senseless song to illustrate it. It wasn’t an attempt to exploit tragedy.”

Brenda Ann Spencer

Over the many years since the incident, Spencer has been a rather unreliable witness about her side of the story, but reading through of some of the sources linked above gives a deeply depressing picture of her adolescence. Her parents had split up. She apparently slept on a mattress she shared with her father on the floor of a house littered with empty liquor bottles. The gun she used was a Christmas gift from her father that she subsequently said she interpreted as an invitation to commit suicide.

Whether “I Don’t Like Mondays” is a senseless song is yet another question. I don’t think it is. Geldof’s very process of grappling with it finds meaning somewhere in that bleakness and disturbance. The song presents a compelling confluence of nihilism, adolescence, and violence–reminiscent for me of the themes that Shaleane explored in 2012, with her discussion of Bruce Springsteen’s song “Nebraska.”

Youthful transgressions 

The song grew in popularity in live performance for some time before people fully caught on to what it was about. When Spencer’s family heard of it, they threatened legal action and attempted to prevent it from being released in the States. San Diego radio stations refused to play it, out of sensitivity to the community’s feelings, and the song’s airplay was limited elsewhere in the U.S. because of the controversy. This whiff of trouble gave the Rats an edge, to me at least.

Geldof alludes to the controversy and the challenges his band faced in getting radio airplay in the below 1981interview from The Merv Griffin Show. They perform the song before the interview. The whole thing is worth watching, if only for Griffin’s good-natured, but clueless and sustained disbelief that Bob and company weren’t wearing thick sweaters and singing “Danny Boy.”

Geldof introduces the performance by complaining that the burden of having to play it over and over again is already starting to wear on them. He can’t resist the opportunity to position it as a protest song, performing it on the show “against the current gun laws in America.” I get the spirit of what he means there, I think, but it’s just a wee bit imprecise as a protest.

The performance that follows is so youthful and earnest in its affect that there are some moments of unintentional comedy for me in viewing it now.  Geldof has acknowledged recently that he was particularly disagreeable when he was younger, arguing with people just for the sake of arguing. “I got to be a complete pain.” he said to Bob Harris in 2013. The interview with Griffin explores the impact of reduced airplay. Perhaps representatively, Geldof and Griffin never go at all into the details of why or discuss specifically what the song he just sang was about.

As the interview concludes, Geldof discusses the influence of video as a growing medium for getting songs out there. The Rats’ music video for “Mondays” is a classic mash-up of hammed-up amateur acting and the “modern” music video production values of the early 80s. In a follow-up post, we’ll talk again about video storytelling augmenting songs.

Geldof discusses the making of the music video in this interview with its producer (unfortunately embedding has been disabled, so you’ll have to follow the YouTube link). It’s helpful context, but it’s particularly important for our purposes for a single disclosure from Geldof toward the end:

“She [Spencer] wrote to me, saying she was glad she’d done it, because I’d made her famous; which is not a good thing to live with.”

So, we return to the song as vehicle for fame/infamy. We have discussed before the “there are no words” rationale behind why some horrific events can’t be developed in song. We’ve also talked with artists about the imaginative, moral, and emotional challenge of inhabiting the lives of real and fictional killers through songs they write and/or songs they sing (see here, here, or here). These are challenging artistic burdens to bear.

I don’t believe we’ve yet come across misgivings about the murderer taking pleasure in the fame that comes with the song. The song gave the story more legs than it might otherwise have had. The burden for what Spencer did is obviously not with Geldof, who did what artists do–come up a way to re-present intense experience through song. You can understand, however, that some of what makes it difficult to live with might be the idea that such publicity may be a draw to similar actions from other troubled souls. Geldof gave voice to something important for him as an artist in response to a shocking event. It gives voice to listeners’ feelings about the same, but this function is not without risk.

On the other hand, Geldof pulls much of the punch of the story at the outset. However stark some of the lines might be, it’s not a ballad in the sense of providing clear narration to the event. This not only helped Geldof avoid lawsuits, but also probably made the song more approachable. In a later post, we’ll take a more focused look at the question of detail and vividness, and get a sense of where “Mondays” falls and what that might mean for its accessibility and popularity.

Now that I think of it, there’s also something catchy about the way he exploits the name of the day–something your faithful bloggers here would never do….  The “Mondays” refrain made it a good song for radio airplay, and because the song was sufficiently thematic, every disaffected 9-5 worker and stressed-out middle school student could plug into the “I don’t like Mondays” refrain without either knowing or caring that they were reprising the words of a killer.

The song’s accessibility as a sing-a-long comes from at least two places. First, for some it’s as much about the stress of starting out a new week as anything else. The bookend to Todd Rundgren’s “Bang the Drum All Day” or Richard Thompson’s “I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight.”

Second, it gets to that adolescent angst–where everything is shaken up and nothing is settled, but you still care a very great deal and think it should be settled. However senseless the acts that inspired it, the feelings make complete sense to a particular age. It’s an adolescent cri de coeur. Turn it up louder and see if you agree. It doesn’t quite stop there, though. Ultimately, the song works for broader audiences because the singer and listener get to plug in fully to both sides of the refrain–“Tell me why!”  “I don’t like Mondays!” 

“Our generation has failed so utterly. So spectacularly”

In an interview on the Bob Harris Show on BBC Radio 2 in September 2013, Geldof said of his songs from that era, “Tragically, what’s changed? I could have written those things, that way, yesterday. That’s terrible. Our generation has failed so utterly. So spectacularly.” Whether the other issues Geldof protested through his songs in the 70s and 80s should have been resolvable or not, and however sad and terrible it is that outbreaks of murderous violence happen with increasing frequency, I can’t lump “Mondays” in with them.

The power of the song has to do with acknowledging our connection with those irrational feelings of rage and a sense of meaninglessness on the one hand, and recognizing that we really have no firm security against arbitrary violence on the other. We may never have the ability to make sense of it. We can see no reasons, because there are no reasons, but confronting that realization itself is meaningful. I’m not sure the issues the song raises admit of a temporal resolution. It’s part of being here, any day of the week.

Later Performances

“I Don’t Like Mondays” is a standard in Geldof’s repertoire with The Boomtown Rats. The Rats performed it at The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball in 1981. You’ll note that the cranky weariness that Geldof expressed on The Merv Griffin Show that same year is replaced in the brief introduction of the song. In this performance, he acknowledges it as having been quite good to them. Like that show, however, the song is as much acted as sung–truly a performance.

The Boomtown Rats also featured the song as the opening number of their appearance at Live Aid in 1985, the concert spearheaded by Geldof’ and his musical humanitarian initiative for famine relief in Africa. In the context of such earnest do-gooding, a murder ballad is an interesting choice, but it was hands down their most recognizable song for that broad audience.

Twenty years later, The Brit Music Awards gave Geldof a lifetime achievement award, and featured the band with symphonic accompaniment. Although he’s still quite expressive in presenting the song, you can see and hear a certain mellowing.

Finally, this audience member recording from last year’s Isle of Wight Festival gives us our most recent version. The quality is a little mixed, but gives a greater sense of the song as a sing-along for the audience.