BONGO FURY IN BOOMTOWN

BONGO FURY IN BOOMTOWN

"I wanted to be recognized as an individual. —Bob Geldof"

BOB GELDOF, FRANK SINATRA NOT LINKED

by

Dave DiMartino

“I thought the last album, where we thought we did something musically in a different direction, stood up,” says Boomtown Rat Johnny Fingers. He’s talking about Mondo Bongo, his band’s newest album. “We were really kind of proud of it, you know? It was recorded in a different situation than the other albums. So I thought that the British press, the NME would be a little more favorable to us on a musical basis. But it just came out as the same old thing, you know? The hatred that they have for Bob.

“After a year and a half of getting that continually—you just turn off.”

Johnny Fingers, the “second” Boomtown Rat, the one who’s not Bob Geldof, the one who always wears pajamas, says these things with little malice in his voice. The hatred that they have for Bob should sound foolish—especially to a journalist’s ears; instead, as he mentions such things matter-of-factly in the back of the Rats’ tour bus, it’s clear that sour grapes aren’t making him say such things, nor any rampant paranoia. Sure, Johnny Fingers would rather be talking about other things—especially in America, where the Rats don’t have an image, let alone a negative one—but the sense of betrayal and hurt the band has been feeling for over a year now is a little too obvious to not talk about.

“It’s past the stage where you can do anything about it,” Fingers is saying. “We don’t give them any tickets to our gigs, or any records or promotional stuff—and if they want to write about the band, it’s their own thing. I suppose they have to, in a way, and that really makes them annoyed as well.”

On a very foggy, wet night, the Boomtown Rats and accompanying CREEM writer have ended up in Dekalb, Illinois, a place where corn somehow plays a vital role in the economy and no one—least of all the shamed Yank scribe—can explain exactly why they know this. What a contrast: the night before spent in Chicago’s architect’s nightmare the Aragon Ballroom; tonight at Northern Illinois University, your standard College Town, USA, and a stage the size of the bus we’re traveling in. The .Rats have hit the States for a third time, this jaunt promoting Mondo Bongo—a passable album on their part, but nothing particularly exceptional. This tour seems the first that isn’t a novelty; “There’s nothing I can do to convince people to come to see us if they don’t want to now,” head Rat Geldof had told a radio interviewer in Chicago the day before. There was no small hint of irony in his voice when he later told the interviewing DJ that if he really wanted to help the Rats he’d get his station to add the record to its playlist. And even less when the jock told Geldof to take it up with his boss, he wanted to keep his job.

American radio has never been especially kind to the Rats. Their biggest hit, “I Don’t Like Mondays,” never scored hugely in the States the way it did worldwide, that^due mainly to the “sensitive topic” it was supposedly based on—Brenda Spencer’s schoolday massacre j)f ’79, shooting her fellow teens and explaining her motive with the phrase the Rats yanked for their song title. “Rat Trap,” from Tonic For The Troops, had earlier paved the way for U.S. airplay with its Springsteen/Thin Lizzy working class lyric—but Geldof’s introduction of the tune in New York (“Springsteen couldn’t write a song half as good as this”) didn’t exactly light a fire under the seats of BROOOOCE-fan radio bigwigs. Mondo Bongo’s biggie, “Banana Republic” again scored heavily in the international market—particularly in the U.K.— but, in radio parlance, hasn’t “happened” in the States, and the CBS powers-that-be have since pulled “Up All. Night” for a follow-up. If it happens it happens, but Bob Geldof isn’t expecting much. “Will they play us on FM?” he asks rhetorically. “No, because the formats have now changed to AC/DC and Judas Priest. When FM has gone over to that, and AM is playing the Top 20, what’s left for us? We don’t have a niche to fit into.”

And so the Rats take to the roads, playing gigs in Chicago and small ones in college towns. Both shows I see are virtually the same; each audience enjoys the gig, enjoys Geldof, and enjoys singing the chorus to “I Don’t Like Mondays” as if it was some sort of anthem. “I consider singles the highest form of pop art,” Geldof remarks later, “and potentially the most subversive. All the great singles, things like ‘Help’ and ‘Satisfaction,’ they’ve all said something, they’re never like ‘Yummy, Yummy, Yummy, I’ve Got Love In My Tummy,’ they’re the great singles. I’m not saying we’ve had any great singles, but I think ‘Mondays’ will be remembered by people when they’re 60, they’ll hear the song and it might evoke some memory of 1979.”

What’s most telling about Geldof’s remark, though, is his rapid insertion that he’s not saying the Rats have had any “great singles”—a remarkable admission from the man the British press have termed “Modest Bob.” A turnabout that, to my ears, seems like a working defense mechanism: don’t be too brash, Bob, or they’ll hang you for it. Geldof—himself once a rock journalist in the mid-70’s—is now on the defensive. A startling change.

Of all the Rats, Bob Geldof is actually the last one I meet. After the Aragon gig, I’d been introduced in the dressing room to guitarist Gerry Cott (who looks vaguely like Paul Weller wearing sunglasses, though I’m sure he doen?t like to hear it) and pajamaman Johnny Fingers. Realizing any actual interviewing wouldn’t take place ’til the bus ride tomorrow, I’d inadvertently gotten sloshed during the gig and then contented myself with asking Fingers obnoxious questions: Is your red/ last name Fingers? Don’t you feel like a dope wearing pajamas all the time? The entirely affable Fingers had answered all questions cheerily, even offering a Rats T-shirt someone had just handed him. Geldof, sitting in a couch nearby, had been speaking with a UPI reporter and I didn’t approach him.

Next day, though, sharing orange juice on the bus with.the band, I managed to pay respects to every Rat but Geldof, who stayed in the rear of the bus while the others came forward. He emerged once, a Chicago TV guide in his hand, pointing out a Tomorrow show listing that promised as appearance by “British punk rocker” Iggy Pop. He apparently found it quite hilarious.

Hours later, on the post-gig trip back to Chicago, we finally spoke. Or, more accurately, he spoke. Geldof is the lazy rock journalist’s dream; ask one question and you needn’t ask another for 20 minutes.

Innocently, I ask Geldof for his side of this Rats/NME controversy.

“There’s no side to it,” says he. “They’ve just been writing personal, vitriolic attacks. Largely against me, but also including other people in the band. And we don’t have a defense against it, short of what we do. And what we do—because it’s the Rats—they deem to be trivial and trite. It’s gotten to the point that if we brought out Sgt. Pepper’s, they’d still say it was shit. Precisely because it’s us.

“So you have no means of defense, when you can’t reply to them—because even if you write a letter with a serious intent, they’ll just put a one-liner at the end that’ll destroy that intent and trivialize it. What you’re dealing with is a form of newspaper fascismi; you can’t reply in any way whatsoever. And violence in the printed media is the same to me as actually hitting somebody in the face.

“I seriously think that it’s...not a combined attack, but I’d say that 98 percent of the writers at NME personally hate us. I ' think they would like to see us destroyed— I don’t think that’s too strong a word. I do actually think it’s newspaper fascism, they’re using the same tactics that other people once used to destroy other people. We don’t have a response short of attacking people from the stage, which I think is pathetic and puny—’cause what do you get to, 3,000 people a night? And it seems petty.

“What could we do? If we were to reply in kind, what we’d actually do would be to make this long diatribe against the NME on the back of one of our records, or at the end of an A-side, this huge little speech—and of course tue’c/be immediately comdemned as being fascist for doing something like that. But that’s our medium, and that’s the medium we should reply in. So we don’t that, and we wouldn’t. So we don’t have a response, we just have to sit and hang in there. We’ll never evade them.

“The way I see it is: if they come to a gig, they’re going to give us a bad review, if they get a record they’re going to give us a bad review. So why give them a record, why suffer the pain of getting a bad review? If they want us to give them free tickets, I mean what divine right says they have to have that free ticket? If they want to come, we’re not going to stop them—because we’re not Nazis. But if we have to buy the paper to read our bad reviews, they should have to buy the tickets to give us the bad reviews.

“And that is a pathetic and small thing— but it’s gotten to the point where I don’t want them to talk about us, I don’t want them to review us, I don’t want them to acknowledge our presence. I want them to ignore us.

“It’s silly that everyone talks about it. I think that people now realize that it’s an actual thing between them and us, for some reason. I think it’s gone out of the realms of any credibility on their side. I think that people now just largely ignore them when it comes to us.

"Ultimately, America will fall. ••Rnh Geldof"

“I personally don’t believe in that nonsense that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, because there is, especially when it’s so intense. I was talking to a journalist in Germany who told me he once was going up to Scotland with Joe Jackson on a train, when Jackson read the review of his second album. And at the end of the review said, ‘The album stinks Joe. And so do you.’

“And I just can’t handle that sort of thing, I don’t know what that’s about or why. Why do you attack somebody who’s never done anything to you particularly; for what particular reason? So Joe Jackson just said to him, ‘They’re trying to destroy me. And they probably will.’ And of course, to a large extent, I think, Joe Jackson’s career is dead. And in England I think that that’s largely quite a contributing factor, a campaign against him by a section of the press. Because he isn’t particularly strong.

“I mean we could maybe be deemed strong enough to ride out a storm like that, but it’s art intolerable fuckin’ affair, I think. I personally think we have grounds for going to the Press Council...

In fact, Geldof’s preoccupation with the press predominates the rest of our discussion. “I refuse to read them any more,” he says on the one hand—and on the other, can rattle off which paper said what and when. I’m inclined to classify it the typical love/hate relationship generated by any public figure who’s controversial: Geldof wouldn’t know what the press was saying if he wasn’t interested, and the press wouldn’t even be writing about him if they weren’t. But he doesn’t see it that way.

“Last year, when it was happening, I let it get to me in such a way that I’d never, ever, do it again. And it’s gotten to the point where—as you can see—I am loathe to talk about anything, and of course, that’s exactly what they intended, and it’s a good thing. But you have to ask yourself: Is it a good thing to stifle somebody opening his mouth and saying anything that-comes into his mind? And I don’t say things to just say them, whether they agree with me or not, so it has had that particular effect. Now, more or less, I won’t do anything, because I know that—particularly in the printed media—that I’ll be paraphrased, and if they don’t like me I’ll be made to look like an idiot, and if they do like me I’ll be made into a paragon of virtue, and both are idiotic. ”

Again the conversation veers toward the NME—and for a man who apparently hates it so, he’s certainly willing to give the paper as much free publicity as possible. I ask if he thinks the situation had affected the band’s recent output, the songs he himself has written. No, he says.

“It hasn’t affected my whole outlook on music. It’s like that old Ricky Nelson thing: ‘You can’t please everyone, so you gotta please yourself.’ It took him 25 years to learn that; it took me four. It’s made us turn inward once again and say ‘Well, the only people that we have to live up to is ourselves.’ And if we do something that is clever for us to do—I’m not saying it’s the cleverest thing in the world, the most brilliantly innovative thing in the world—and if it’s innovative, clever and difficult for us to do, and we manage to conquer that and come' out on the other side, having done something that we’re satisfied with, then that’s enough.

TURN TO PAGE 61

BOOMTOWN RATS

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 29

“And I’ve never said that the Rats are the greatest band in the world. We’re n'ot, and we’re not the worst band in the world. On a good night, put us up with the best and we’ll give ’em a run for their money. On the worst nights, we’re as bad as anybody—but we’re the Boomtown Rats. That’s all we are, that’s all we ever were, that’s all we’ll ever be. And if we weren’t around, there’d be a small hole somewhere in music.”

I mention that I’d seen Geldof as Rockpile’s gig at London’s Lyceum and wonder if his showing up in the audience at a crowded concert was standard behavior.

“Yeah,” he says, “because I like rock ’n’ roll. If I want to go to a gig, then I go to a gig. But the next week in the NME I’d probably read I ‘did a lot of posing’ and was a ‘talentless creep showing off and so and so ‘with his hideously ugly girlfriend’ and ‘why doesn’t he fuck off?’ After things like that, ultimately week after week, you just want to say ‘Who’s writing this stuff?”’

Geldof goes on about the “ridiculous political nonsense” that contemporarieslike the Clash and the Sex Pistols, I assume— were flogging during the '16-11 British punk emergence, that other bands still continue to flog today.

“I could never understand these bands that, if their record companies would give them a limousine, they say ‘Nah, man. I wanna go in a Volkswagen.’ That to me is all nonsense. You’re mixing up your ideas; a limousine and a Volkswagen, both of them are cars, which of them is the most comfortable? The limousine. And I’d go for that.

“As I said in Melody Maker, I’ve always wanted fame. I never wanted to be a star, particularly—I could never give a shit. But I certainly wanted to be recognized. I wanted to be recognized as an individual; I didn’t want to be one of the lumpen masses, you know? The money aspect of it is the same as when Humphrey Bogart, when he said ‘The only reason I want money is so I can tell the producer to fuck off. ’ It’s the same.

“The way I feel about it right now is that I’m the Frank Sinatra of rock ’n’ roll—except I don’t have the Mafia to back me up,” He pauses for a second, considering what he’s just said. “I mean in terms of press, not music, you understand.”

I ask him if he’s always been able to cover his tracks so quickly. “It’s just defensiveness now,” he says. “Because I know what’s going on, I can picture it in black and white: ‘Geldof Says: “I’m The Frank Sinatra Of Rock ’N’ Roll”.’ And if you see that, you’d go ‘Jesus//’ and people would say ‘What a fuckin’ twatl’

The bus pulls back into Chicago proper . Geldof—like I said before, an interviewer’s dream—is still talking.

“I went through company things,” he says, “like the little tokens they have, ‘The Hard Report and it was brilliant, you’ve been added to 12 stations’—I couldn’t give a fuck. I couldn’t give a fuck if two thousand, hundred, million stations add us in one day. I don’t care. I’m not interested any longer.

“I went through this sense of frustration, then it became bitterness', then it became despair, and now it’s this sense where I actually...” He stops, for once searching for a word. “It’s not apathy, certainly not that. It just that I suppose in the back of my mind there’s that arrogance that’s always been written about, that says: Ultimately, America will fall. And it’ll be pure chance when it does, but I think the band is seriously too good for them not to eventually succumb to our myriad charms.

“I don’t believe,” concludes Geldof, “that North American ears stop at the 49th Parallel.”

Four points.

One: Mondo Bongo isn’t the best Boomtown Rats album ever, but no one’s ever said it had to be.

Two: The Boomtown Rats are all very nice people.

Three: The British press really hasn’t been very nice to them.

Four: “Mind you,” Johnny Fingers told me in the bus, smiling, “when I read the NME and they’re slagging other bands I enjoy it.”

All points to be taken seriously, at your leisure. ^