"What is a week-end?"
So asked the Dowager Countess in 1917. Here's an iced-down four-pack of answers.
“Boy, the weekends just didn’t last long enough.”
That’s the unnamed narrator—he goes by “Jimmy’s daddy”—in Larry Brown’s novel A Miracle of Catfish, published in 2007, three years after Brown’s untimely death. Jimmy’s daddy’s a bit of a lout, to be sure, but his complaints are entirely sympathetic, and roll as endlessly as a cotton field at dusk:
You got up and you went to work and you came home and went to bed and you spent all week fixing Towmotors, fixing spot-weld machines, fixing baloney sandwiches, taking breaks, eating lunch, punching in, punching out, and then Friday rolled around and you got your check and drove happily to the beer store and iced down a case and then you had all Friday evening before dark to ride around or cook out and then on Saturday you could sleep late and work on your car or go fishing or ride around and go get something to eat and drink some beer and then Sunday just came down like a nine-pound hammer.
You could fish some. You could ride around a little and drink some beers. “But it was tainted with the closing-in feeling of the loss of freedom. Because after the sun went down, it came back up on Monday morning. And you had to go work five more days.” He adds, “And it sucked.”
As I remarked at Writers Read a while back, A Miracle of Catfish is unfinished yet the world Brown creates is so full, the characters so round and naturalistic, the rolling, tense, verdant Mississippi landscape so sensually rendered that the lack of a conventional resolution feels more realistic than not. Brown’s final-draft notes included at the end of the book offer a glimpse of fates and possibilities, but they’re superfluous. Loneliness, alienation, aimless driving, splintered families, beers on ice in a cooler in a truck’s floorboards, and sticky heat and human anxieties and drama: it’s all here. The world is alive, unending—as opposed to the weekends for which the scruffy characters so desperately pine.
Weekends have been anticipated, lived, praised, half-forgotten, regretted, and Monday-morning mourned for as long as men and women have been writing songs. I wrote about the lure of Saturday nights and the realties of Sunday mornings a decade or so ago for The Normal School, and I only scratched the surface of songs that look forward to or lament, sometimes within the same three minutes, the freedoms promised in the finite hours from Friday to Sunday. Here’s a handful of tunes to soundtrack your weekend.
“Here Comes the Weekend”
Dave Edmunds
Get It (1977)
Dave Edmunds co-wrote this gem with his mate Nick Lowe, the two indulging their lifelong love for the Everly Brothers. Duetting with himself, Edmund boils a week’s worth of being overworked and underpaid into two gloriously liberating minutes. (The song was first issued as a single in 1976, appearing on Get It the following year.) Sing along: Monday’s no “fun day,” Tuesday’s “a blue day,” Wednesday’s a “frenz-day,”, while Thursday’s “the worst day”—the rhymes are playful, intoxicating, bouncing merrily, if desperately, atop Edmunds’s excitable strumming guitars. I’ve always loved how the melody in each verse descends, evoking the tiring and burdensome week, until the title phrase, when it perks up. And the final, gleaming note that Edmunds plays in his typically immaculate and spirited guitar solo is a virtual wink and a grin: the weekend’s comin’!
The song’s spiked with killer lines and phrases—Two ‘til ten and then it’s Friday again, They pay me for this shift like they was givin’ a gift, an overdose of doctor’s notes, Goin’ on the sick don’t do the trick—and at the close lands ideally—
Someday I’ll be able to forget my working days
Life will be a grin because my ship is comin’ in
Everything will go my way and I won’t have to say
“Here come the weekend”
—that third line so metrically perfect as to be bulletproof. But it’s a momentary triumph. The the song’s soon over, and the weekend and the dream of deliverance will end, too.
In a 2020 post at the Everly Brothers International’s EverlyNet Facebook group, Tasso Matheas shared Edmunds’s memories of producing the Everly Brothers’ 1984 comeback album EB 84 (for which Edmunds scored the exquisite “On the Wings of a Nightingale” from his mate Paul McCartney). While compiling a list of songs to record, Edmunds thought of his, Lowe, and Carlene Carter’s tune “I’m Gonna Start Living Again (If It Kills Me).” Nearly everyone close to Edmunds “was of the opinion that this song would be perfect for the Everly Brothers,” Edmunds recalled. “While Don, Phil and myself laboriously listened to dozens of songs, I quietly slipped our effort in to the mountain of cassettes.
“When we reached the song, they listened for a minute, and without saying a word, casually tossed it into the reject pile. I soon detected that, oddly, any song sounding remotely like The Everly Brothers, would be automatically discarded by them.” Edmunds added, “Polygram, their record company, had also tried to persuaded them to record ‘Here Comes The Weekend,’ another ‘Everly type’ song Nick and I had written, which was met with a similar response.”
Just as well. I don’t know that even Phil and Don could’ve topped Dave and Nick on this one.
“Weekend”
The Dictators
The Dictators Go Girl Crazy! (1975)
Meanwhile, as New York City was on the verge of economic collapse a gang of borough kids had their collective mind on other, far more important stuff, namely cars and girls. And the weekends in which to play with both.
The Dictators had been kicking around for a few years before they recorded their nervy, ironic, woefully misplaced debut album The Dictators Go Girl Crazy! in 1975. “We were living together in this house in Kerhonkson, New York, it was $150 a month,” Dictator founder, songwriter, and bassist Andy Shernoff recently recounted for I-94 Bar. “It was basically one pot deal, and we paid the rent. And we would play all night long.” After cobbling together fewer than a dozen songs, the band invited music critic and sometime songwriter Richard Meltzer and Blue Öyster Cult founder/producer Sandy Pearlman “to come up and listen to us. I don’t know what the fuck Sandy heard. But he said, ‘Come to New York. I’m going to get you a deal’. And he did it. He did it. I don’t know what he saw in us, you know?” A sonic brew of cartoony trash, wise guy humor, and teengenerate behavior, the album was a crass, smelly, and very funny joke told loudly to an inhospitable crowd. Co-produced by Pearlman and Murray Krugman, Go Girl Crazy! stiffed commercially, but has since gained legendary status as a proto Punk rock album.
A tongue-in-cheek ode to juvenile behavior, “Weekend” is the indecorous flip to Edmunds and Lowe’s “Here Comes the Weekend,” a portrait of bored teens whiling away endless afternoons as they sharpen their knives for the weekend. Meet Benny and Bobby, two borough punks. Benny took downers in the classroom, the principal discovered his stash, and now his mom’s “gonna get his ass.” Bobby gets wasted and ditches school entirely, giving the finger to the cafeteria lunch crowd while gobbling burgers at McDonald’s. Meanwhile Benny’s sentenced to his bedroom by his folks who don’t get him, “Dreamin’ when he’s king he’ll say / ‘Everyday is Saturday’.”
These shenanigans are celebrated by the half-grinning singer, who’s a buddy or a wannabe watching from the wings, a kid. He dreams of a weekend that’s loud with flashing rock and roll guitars, when he can cruise in his (dad’s) car and if he feels like it, and can summon the nerve, do his homework in the bar. He’s hemmed in, anxious, sees horizonless Saturdays as a time “to go a bit insane.” The song’s chorus—the kid’s personal refrain—
Set me free
I might know better when I’m older
But until then
Just give me a sopor for the weekend
—muddies things up a bit, juvee behavior the gateway drug for methaqualone, a hypno downer that might make everything a bit more bearable. That line demanding drugs is “sung” by Handsome Dick Manitoba, who was billed at the time as the band’s “secret weapon,” a fro’d mascot who schlepped the band’s gear and occasionally joined the group onstage. That’s him in full wrestling regalia on the album’s front cover. (He’d soon become the band’s full-time lead singer.)
Otherwise, Shernoff sings this teen anti-anthem, his Queens accent nailing these suburbanites’ apathy and disfunction. Have I mentioned that “Weekend” is a really funny song? Shernoff recently took to Instagram to remind us all that he writes Dictators songs—that is, music to take “seriously, but not too seriously, okay?” “Weekend” is true and affectionate, but also satire of a sort, ironic as hell, a mock heroic tale of teenagers let loose. In the last verse the singer’s weary of “social change” and wants to beat up “the kids from Spain”; we wince now at that nonsense until we remember the the singer’s a kid who idolizes drug use, truancy, and flashy rock and roll—as a lot of teenagers do, their frame of reference blinkered yet authentic. Does he grow up or down? Who knows. Lost in the sweet “la la la la”’s of the song’s fade, his adolescent anxieties blissed out on downers, he’s happy for now. Oh, weekend.
“Married for the Weekend”
Demolition Doll Rods
TLA (1999)
You can get a lot done in a weekend. Get hitched, fuck all day and night, lose all your money, and split. That’s the romantic tale told in Demolition Doll Rods’ “Married for the Weekend,” a stomping ode to impulsiveness.
Margaret Gomoll (aka, Margaret Doll Rod), Danny Kroha, and Christine (aka, Thumper) originated in the Detroit area and bashed away from the mid 1990s to the late aughts, shedding inhibitions and layers of clothing along the way. I caught the Doll Rods in 2001 at the Village Vanguard in New York City, sent by their grooves and hollers and happily distracted by Margaret’s bold, smiling sexuality; she was more or less nude by the end of the show, kicking and thrusting. The lean, stripped-down Kroha bounced across the stage like a downed wire, while the bikinied Christine, a bit dazed looking yet beatific, stood upright and pounded her drums. Their songs varied among one-to three-chord anthems, some stomping like Gary Glitter, others streaking by as lo-rent amphetamine punk. Their “concerns”? Whoever wrote this line in the band’s Wikipedia profile nailed it: “Their lyrics made frequent reference to sex, drug overdoses, drag racing, boys, girls, dogs, cats and good times.” Hell yeah.
The singer in “Married for the Weekend” is wired for a good time, ready to make that commitment if only because Monday morning will conveniently erase it. She’s got one eye on the clock, one on him. She digs his high-heel boots and sense of humor, can’t shake the image of him dancing. He looks great naked. He’s with one of her friends, but screw it.
Then he knelt down right in front of me
Looked up at me and said, “Please, baby, please
Friday, Saturday, Sunday that’s all I need
I just want to get married for the weekend”
”Hotel Honeymoon!” they shriek. They spend three days in bed, he spends all of her cash—no details offered, but you can paint the picture—yet “Somehow honey I’d do it all again.” The tune ends with the age-old sound of trailing cans as the wedding car departs. (They’ll need more dough.) As Elvis Costello once sang, “You say that your love lasts forever / When you know the night is just hours.”
Fueled by wailing Link Wray guitar vibes and a genuine joie de vivre, Margaret Doll Rod belts her heart out on “Married for the Weekend.” She’s in on the joke, yet moved too about the promises a weekend can make, and sometimes even deliver. A hotel honeymoon that lasts a weekend? That’s more than some ever get in a lifetime. Turn it up.
“Wild Weekend”
Rockin’ Rebels
single (1962)
Written in 1958 by Buffalo, New York radio DJ Tom Shannon with Phil Todaro, “Wild Weekend” was originally conceived as the theme song and promotion for Shannon’s radio show (the original tune had words!) but was eventually scooped up by area band the Rebels, who issued this glorious instrumental version in 1960. The song was reissued two years later by Swan, by which point the band had changed their name to Rockin’ Rebels. Busting out of the region, “Wild Weekend” became a Top 40 hit, landing at #8 on Billboard Pop and #28 on R&B.
The band—Jim Kipler on guitar, Mick Kipler on saxophone, Tom Gorman on drums, and Paul Balon on bass—evokes Friday and Saturday nights so graphically that even without the song’s title you’d know as you crank it that you aren’t mired in mid-week blues. Moving like a tipsy, no-longer-so-shy teen at the hop, “Wild Weekend” is nearly impossible to resist, Kipler’s sax line is positively merry, Kipler’s solo transcendently sloppy—he’s sweating, his regulation tie is coming loose—and Gorman’s clumsy missed beat in the song’s fade the capper, a poignantly real moment in a song that sounds like it might fall apart with each measure. But it’s THE WEEKEND so they’ll give it the college try. Beautiful stuff.
Both “Here Comes the Weekend” and “Wild Weekend” were staples on Weasel’s Friday afternoon sets on WHFS, the Bethesda-then-Annapolis, Maryland radio station that anointed my teenage years. About a decade ago wrote about Weasel’s seminal Friday sets:
In January 2020 the BBC ran a piece by Brad Beaven about the growing trend toward four-day weeks, a move that would extend the definition, even the very notion, of the weekend. “By the end of the 19th century, there was an irresistible pull towards marking out Saturday afternoon and Sunday as the weekend,” Beaven observed. “While they had their different reasons, employers, religious groups, commercial leisure and workers all came to see Saturday afternoon as an advantageous break in the working week.” He added, “This laid the groundwork for the full 48-hour weekend as we now know it—although this was only established in the 1930s.” Hence the Dowager Countess’s puzzled query:
Decades later, the weekend was in my and millions of others’ collective DNA and there was no turning back. The Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown have upended and redefined things, for sure, yet the idea of a regimented 40-hour work week—the kind sorely lamented by Jimmy’s daddy and buddies—was already and rightly under suspicion. Yet Friday nights to Sunday evenings remain sacred, and countless have sung their praises, and aways will. (The list is ongoing.) However future generations come to define the weekend, those days will always have their soundtrack.
Should you revisit this theme it would be interesting to hear your thoughts on "Here Comes The Weekend" by The Jam. It's a sober look at what a teenage weekend promises. One of my favourite songs on the LP "This Is The Modern World".
Fun!! I only know the Edmunds and Dictators tracks, so I have some catching up to do. As the perfect Sunday morning comedown, Incan only recommend the wonderful Weekend, the band Young Marble Giants singer Alison Statton formed after the band broke up. Here’s a sample: https://youtu.be/Eu5hAiUeU4I?si=Natyz09f1Z-tC049