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The Fools
The Fools were a very popular Boston band in the late 1970s and early 80s. Their biggest hit was It's a Night For Beautiful Girls.
The band performed in all the nightclubs in greater Boston. In 1979, they often performed the song Psycho Chicken, a parody of "Psycho Killer" by The Talking Heads. The lead singer would choke a rubber chicken during the performance and dance around the stage. Such performances were highly energetic and very amusing.
Before 1978, the drinking age was 18, and the clubs were often full of underage kids during all-ages shows. Enforcement of the drinking age was lax due to culture of the time, and The Fools performances were like a giant block party or a neighborhood July 4th celebration.
This author saw The Fools in 1979, warmed up by The Rings, at the old Harbor House motel in Lynn, Massachusetts. I also saw The Fools warm up for Blondie in early 1980. The Harbor House concert is still in my top 10 performance list, and I have seen many, many bands such as Aerosmith, Alanis Morissette, Alice Cooper, Buffalo Tom, Bush, Cult, Everclear, Garbage, Gin Blossoms, Hole, Lemonheads, Lenny Kravitz, Letters to Cleo, Live, Mighty Mighty Bostones, Queen, Radiohead, Rancid, Rolling Stones, Smashing Pumpkins, Styx, Tanya Donnelly, Tubes, Who, and Weezer. The following is a description of the band from Wikipedia:
Happy Birthday!
Started in 1975 in Ipswich, Massachusetts, the Fools were originally "The Rhythm A's". In 1979 the The Fools released "Psycho Chicken," an X-rated parody of The Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer," and it was an immediate hit on Boston radio stations. The group followed it up with another local hit, "It's a Night for Beautiful Girls." EMI signed the band and sent them on a U.S. tour with The Knack. They then recorded their debut album, Sold Out. The album Sold Out carries a theme of economic and emotional strife quite relevant and uncanningly appropriate for today's living. However, the music always and never fails to make you think and feel that everything will be okay. ["Mutual of Omaha" was a song about a man considering suicide because he couldn't pay his bills. "Life Sucks and Then You Die" was a very amusing song.]
In the 1980s, the band released their second album Heavy Mental and toured the US with Van Halen. The band broke with EMI and then wrote and released their most successful album, World Dance Party, an independent release.
The band continues to tour to this day, though they never repeated the success they had with World Dance Party.
