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The silicon chip inside her head
Gets switched to overload.
And nobody's gonna go to school today,
She's going to make them stay at home.
And daddy doesn't understand it,
He always said she was as good as gold.
And he can see no reason
'Cause there are no reasons
What reason do you need to be shown?
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.
The telex machine is kept so clean
As it types to a waiting world.
And mother feels so shocked,
Father's world is rocked,
And their thoughts turn to
Their own little girl.
Sweet 16 ain't so peachy keen,
No, it ain't so neat to admit defeat.
They can see no reasons
'Cause there are no reasons
What reason do you need to be shown?
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.
All the playing's stopped in the playground now
She wants to play with her toys a while.
And school's out early and soon we'll be learning
And the lesson today is how to die.
And then the bullhorn crackles,
And the captain crackles,
With the problems and the how's and why's.
And he can see no reasons
'Cause there are no reasons
What reason do you need to die?
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.
And the ship sets the sail
They've lived the tale
To carry to the shore
Straining at the oars
Or staring from the rail
And the sea bids farewell
She waves in swells
And sends them on their way
Time has been her pay
And time will have to tell
Soon your sailing will be over
Come and take the pleasures of the har - bor
And the anchor hits the sand
The hungry hands
Have tied them to the port
The hour will be short
For leisure on the land
And the girls scent the air
They seem so fair
With paint on their face
Soft is their embrace
To lead them up the stairs
Soon your sailing will be over
Come and take the pleasures of the harbor
In the room dark and dim
Touch of skin
He asks her of her name
She answers with no shame
And not a sense of sin
Until the fingers draw the blinds
Sip of wine
The cigarette of doubt
The candle is blown out
The darkness is so kind
Soon your sailing will be over
Come and take the pleasures of the harbor
And the shadows frame the light
Same old sight
Thrill has blown away
Now all alone they lay
Two strangers in the night
Till his heart skips a beat
He's on his feet
To shipmates he must join
She's counting up the coins
He's swallowed by the street
Soon your sailing will be over
Come and take the pleasures of the harbor
In the bar hangs a cloud
The whiskey's loud
There's laughter in their eyes
The lonely in disguse
Are clinging to the crowd
And the bottle fills the glass
The haze is fast
He's trembling for the taste
Of passion gone to waste
In memories of the past
Soon your sailing will be over
Come and take the pleasures of the harbor
In the alley, red with rain
Cry of pain
For love was but a smile
Teasing all the while
Now dancing down the drain
'Till the boys reach the dock
They gently mock
Lift him on their backs
Lay him on his rack
And leave beneath the light
Soon your sailing will be over
Come and take the pleasures of the harbor
And the ship sets the sail
They've lived the tale
To carry from the shore
Straining at the oars
Or staring from the rail
And the sea bids farewell
She waves in swells
And sends them on their way
Time has been her pay
And time will have to tell
Soon your sailing will be over
Come and take the pleasures of the harbor
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*wink
BMS: One of the stories in Vinyl Junkies is about
Jeff “Monoman” Conolly and his ongoing commitment to the authentic band-music experience with his group the Lyres. Toward the end of the story, Jeff fires his drummer onstage in mid-set. Another story I picked up somewhere was The Real Kids got into a fight with the club’s bouncers on stage at The Rat in Kenmore Square! I guess that’s what made attendance at local shows in the ‘70s mandatory.
BM: There are a million good Monoman stories. There’s one in Sound of Our Town about a fight with his late ‘80s drummer, who hit him in the eye with a cymbal onstage in Seattle. He popped his eye back in and finished the set. The drummer asked afterward if he could still be in the band. Speaking of drummers, Dumptruck’s drummer Shawn Devlin once got into a car accident on the way to a show. He played a full set with a concussion and went to the hospital afterwards. Shows the amount of devotion some people have!
BMS: The bands in San Francisco (Big Brother, Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, It’s A Beautiful Day, Moby Grape, Quicksilver Messenger Service) in the 1960s uniformly had a mature, accomplished sound, but the Boston rock music scene actually had a learning curve. It was as though many of the first bands connected to the local ‘60s “Bosstown” scene were channeling the psychedelica they saw in the movie “The Trip” or heard on the San Fran records. What’s your take on that?
BM: Willie Alexander says all the Bosstown bands sounded like Country Joe & the Fish, and he didn’t mean it as a compliment. I’d blame part of the trend on Alan Lorber who produced a lot of those records. He was into experimenting with orchestration and his production was pretty heavy handed. By all evidence, bands like Beacon Street Union and Ultimate Spinach were much better live than they were on record. And I do think that Orpheus’ stuff holds up, they were more a non-psychedelic pop band. But I don’t think it was generally a great time for Boston. You did have the tendency of a lot of musicians here to be classically trained and take themselves very seriously… Maybe the acid around here was a little too pure.
BMS: You may correct me, but I think of the ‘70s as a golden age for rock music in Boston. Except for The Remains, The Lost, Colwell-Winfield Blues Band, Orpheus and the Rockin’ Ramrods, most of the other bands of the Bosstown Sound were derivative and not particularly good. The next generation of bands –Aerosmith, Blake Babies, The Cars, The Del Fuegos, J. Geils Band, Human Sexual Response, DMZ/The Lyres, Mission of Burma, The Modern Lovers, The Real Kids were really good bands and contributed to the emergence of a legitimate local rock scene.
BM: Things started turning around by the late 60s. People were seeing Muddy Waters play Club 47, so electric blues was coming in via the early J Geils Band and Peter Wolf’s first band the Hallucinations. The Modern Lovers and the Sidewinders both started in the early 70s. That was the real beginning of what we’d call punk rock. And of course Aerosmith was playing every dance, high school and college before they got famous. So after a couple years of local music being deadly serious, Boston really rediscovered fun around 1971. The next shakeup of course happened around 1976 when people learned that something called punk rock was at The Rat.
BMS: In the ‘70s wonderfully grungy local venues like Cantone’s, The Channel or The Rat would feature Willie Alexander, The Atlantics, The Blake Babies, DMZ, Richard Hell, The Modern Lovers, The Queers, Talking Heads. This was before success and money and the expansion of the music industry began to change things for everyone. Although we all want the bands we love to have success, don’t you think there’s something primal, something great about seeing bands like that in their element in a small club? And which local band did you always enjoy seeing live?
BM: Without doubt, some of the best nights of my life were spent in those clubs. As Frank Black says in the book, there’s something special about seeing a band up close- you can see the personalities and feel the sweat. But I also thought it was healthy when a lot of those beloved club bands moved up to bigger venues- for instance, when the Del Fuegos played the national tour with Tom Petty and the Georgia Satellites, or when the Pixies toured with U2. People were proud to see their friends up on the big stage and it gave the club bands something to aspire to, made them hungrier. The list of Boston bands that I love seeing live could fill a book (and it just did!) but it’s no secret that I’ve probably seen the Lyres more than anybody.
BMS: How important is class in the Boston music dynamic? Although it is less so now, Boston in the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s was still very much the Boston of Harvard and the Brahmins, the wealthy ruling class, the Boston Symphony and classical culture. At the same time, working class kids from Chelsea, Quincy, Revere and Somerville were plugging guitars into amps in their basements and channeling Dick Dale, The Beatles, The Standells, Led Zepplin or Kiss, and then eventually they moved on to play their own music. In many of the Boston bands from the 1970s there is an obvious defiance, a rebelliousness that informs both their stance and music. I don’t see the kind of rage the Sex Pistols had, but for many of the Boston bands there was a push against the status quo, an attempt to challenge boundaries in a city dominated by cultural classicism and conservative machine politics. Is that fair?
BM: Very good question. Social class was generally something that musicians didn’t talk about- except the Upper Crust, of course. That Sex Pistols style of social rebellion was more of an English thing, though hardcore certainly absorbed some of it. The spirit of Boston music was generally more inclusive- the rebellion is more about looking a little outrageous and saying things your parents wouldn’t like. That continues today with the likes of the Dresden Dolls
BMS: Given that local musicians regarded the whole ‘60s Bosstown Sound debacle as akin to the Curse of the Bambino for the Red Sox, how much did MTV help Boston’s image as a place where cool music happens? In the ‘80s MTV played videos in heavy rotation by bands like Aerosmith, Boston, the Cars, The Del Fuegos, Extreme, and Til Tuesday. Did that help to further the idea that Boston bands had national appeal?
BM: Sure, but I think Boston was more part of the anti-MTV backlash. At the time there were great underground bands that didn’t care much about video: REM (they got more video friendly later on), X, the Dream Syndicate, Husker Du, the Replacements. People remember the ‘80s as an MTV era, but it was also a real renaissance of live music, and fans of the above bands were also discovering Boston bands like Throwing Muses, the Pixies, Bullet La Volta, O Positive, Big Dipper, etc. It was mainly the slicker Boston bands (Til Tuesday, Face to Face, Extreme) who were getting onto MTV. The Del Fuegos only got there with a beer commercial, which they took a lot of flak about.
