Fact-checking and its discontents

trivia about my Monday birthday and with whom I share it

Do you like Mondays?

Simon Crowe is the drummer of The Boomtown Rats; he and I have the same birthday: April 14. This year’s calendar is just like it was the year I was born, and our birthday falls on Monday.

I learned that we had a mutual birthdate on that day in 1979 when I went to hang out with a visiting contingent of editors from CREEM Magazine at the Sunset Marquis Hotel, where they were staying. Everyone was at the pool, including some other hotel guests, The Boomtown Rats (and yes, Johnnie Fingers was wearing pajamas). There was cake, if I recall. And beer, or rather Guinness.

Sex Pistol Sid Vicious had been dead two months by that time, and CREEM’s photo editor, Charlie Auringer told me that photographing the billboard for the movie, HEAVEN CAN WAIT, graffiti’d with Sid Vicious RIP was a stroke of genius and was going to be prominent in CREEM’s obituary for him.

By that day in April 1979, the Rats had written and been performing live a new composition, “I Don’t Like Mondays.” Earlier that year, on January 29, the then-16-year-old Brenda Spencer shot up a school in San Diego, CA. The school, Grover Cleveland Elementary was across the street from the home where she lived. (The school is now closed.)

Spencer showed no remorse (she is the one who said, “I don’t like Mondays; this livens things up”) for the shooting that killed two adults and injured eight children and a police officer. She was ultimately charged as an adult, and she pleaded guilty to “assault with a deadly weapon” and was sentenced to life, with a chance of parole after 25 years. She remains imprisoned as of this writing.

I always try to do fact-checking as I write of historic, provable events. This concert, and many others (for which I even have ticket stubs) don’t appear in the concert databases that like to claim thoroughness and authority. I rely heavily on newspapers for reviews (attesting that someone attended and documented it) and advertisements. I always say, “This is why photo contact sheets are also known as PROOF SHEETS.” But for the kind of fact-checking I am doing for my memoir, I am frustrated by the lack of reliable resources for my triple-checking. Wikipedia is not anywhere accurate enough, because “crowd sourced.”

On March 2, 1979, The Boomtown Rats played a show in Los Angeles at the Cocoanut Grove, which was a ballroom in the erstwhile Ambassador Hotel. It’s possible this show is the first time they played “I Don’t Like Mondays” for a live audience.

The recording (on YouTube, embedded below), attendees’ memories and ticket stubs, and a single advertisement in the Los Angeles Times are the only verification of that event ( there is some discussion, debate, and questioning in the “comments” section on YouTube about this date and venue)… to me, this crowd-sourced documentation is becoming more common when writing about pop culture. Because I worked at the Whisky A GoGo during this time, I recall vividly and with specificity how Dee Dee Keel (then Haddix) organized these “Whisky Presentations” shows at the Cocoanut Grove. The Fabulous Poodles also played there (on a different date; same year), and I am scouring my own ephemera and bootleggers to prove my Fab Poo point.

(If you want to jump to “I Don’t Like Mondays,” and listen to Bob Geldolf’s intro, skip to 1:23:35 in the video)

So - trivia - this is who else was born on April 14:

• Julie Christie

• Sarah Michelle Gellar

• Adrien Brody

• Christiaan Huygens (1629)

• Sir John Gielgud

• Rod Steiger

• Annie Sullivan (1866 - Helen Keller’s teacher)

• Loretta Lynn

• Frank Serpico (Al Pacino played him in a dramatic biopic)

• Pete Rose

• Richie Blackmore

• Martyn LeNoble

• my local friend, Carlos Partee