THE FINE ART OF SURFACING

Album review written and submitted by Brian Block

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 have known my tastes then cantered 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 build-ups 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 exercise #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 counter pointing 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 lullaby's 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 remember 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 strip light 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?

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