“I Don’t Like Mondays” is a song by the Boomtown Rats. It is also a partial quote from Brenda Spencer, who at 16 became America’s first school shooter. A lot of our upcoming songs are based on folk songs. With a folk song, we don’t know when or where the song was written and trying to trace its origins can be tricky. We know exactly where and when this song came into being, and the story is not a happy one.
The Story of Brenda
I have delved far deeper into this story than I had originally planned. And scholarly articles, documentaries, pages and pages of handwritten notes later, I am not quite sure where to start. Let’s start with Brenda.
Brenda Spencer was from a possibly troubled home in San Diego. She has given conflicting reports over the years that have included incest, rape, and other forms of physical abuse. There is even the possibility of a head injury that could have resulted in brain damage. This could have been the cause of her epilepsy, for which she takes medication in prison. There is evidence of psychopathicbehavior on her part. Her mother seems quite willing to blame her ex-husband, Brenda’s father, for everything, while the father doesn’t really want to talk. But he has visited his daughter in prison almost every Saturday for all these years.
What is incontrovertible fact is that on Christmas morning in 1978, Brenda was given a 22-guage rifle and 500 rounds by her father. A little over a month later, on 29 January 1979, Brenda used that rifle to open fire on the elementary school across the street. She shot approximately 36 times at a range of 150 feet, injuring 8 children and a police officer, and killing the school’s principal and the janitor as they tried to get others to safety.
There followed a six-and-a-half-hour standoff that involved 100 officers, 30 patrol units, and 20 SWAT officers. The police negotiator in the documentary inexplicably claimed that he worked hard on driving her nuts. While she was barricaded in her home, she spoke on the phone with a local reporter. He asked the obvious question: “Tell me why?” Her answer was the now infamous: “I don’t like Mondays. This livens up the day.” She surrendered peacefully.
At 16, Brenda was tried as an adult. She took a plea bargain and pled guilty to two counts of murder and assault with a deadly weapon. While her youth kept the death sentence off the table, she was given the sentence of 25 years to life. She has spent (as of 2018) the last 39 years in jail and is now 55 years old. She has been up for parole several times and has given a different story of how and why the shooting happened each time. Her next parole hearing will be in 2019.
The Story of the Song
Now, to the song. Bob Geldof was the lead singer of an Irish punk rock band called the Boomtown Rats. The Rats had had a few hits in the UK but were not that well-known in the US. Geldof had been talking with Steve Jobs about doing something at Apple. He was doing a radio interview in Atlanta when he saw the story about Brenda’s school shooting come over the telex machine. As he was driving back to his hotel, the line 'Silicon chip inside her head had switched to overload’ came to him. And when he got to the hotel, he wrote the song. As Bob Geldof said in an interview, “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.” The lyrics are:
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 sure
Oh, oh, oh 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 sixteen ain't that peachy keen
Now, it ain't so neat to admit defeat
They can see no reasons
'Cause there are no reasons
What reason do you need oh, woah
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
Down, down
Shoot it all 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 tackles
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, die
Oh, oh, oh and 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 sure
Tell me why
I don't like Mondays
Tell me why
I don't like Mondays
Tell me why
I don't like, I don't like, I don't like Mondays
Tell me why
I don't like, I don't like, (tell me why) I don't like Mondays
Tell me why
I don't like Mondays
I want to shoot, the whole day down.
Sir Bob Geldof(he was knighted in 1986) has gone on to work tirelessly against world hunger. He organized Band Aid and Live Aid. He was named a Man of Peacein 2005.
I’ll be posting some versions of this song every day on my Minnich MusicFacebook page, so visit there to hear them! If you have any stories about I Don’t Like Mondays, or favorite versions, let me know in the comments section—I’d love to hear from you.
I’ll be posting roughly once a week with a new song. I’m trying to make the songs seasonal, but I can make exceptions. So, if there’s a song that you’d like some background on, or questions about what it means, let me know.
Thanks for reading! Until next time!
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