The Fools

The Fools, a Boston outfit whose boisterous stage antics carried the Tubes’ comedic edge into the new-wave era, scored a minor novelty success in the early 1980s on par with their New York counterparts Blotto. The band formed in 1975 and captured local airplay attention in 1979 with “Psycho Chicken,” a send-up of Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer.” Long a staple of their concerts, the track originally contained strong language; the radio edit replaced every expletive with a chicken cluck, a substitution the 45’s label explicitly advertised. EMI promptly signed the group and pushed the single nationwide in 1980. Later that year a comparatively straight-faced follow-up, “It’s a Night for Beautiful Girls,” appeared alongside the debut album Sold Out, which excluded “Psycho Chicken” from its main sequence yet included the song on a bonus white-vinyl 45 tucked inside the jacket. A stint supporting the Knack preceded the 1981 release of Heavy Mental, an album promoted by opening dates for Van Halen.

The band shifted to the independent PVC label in 1985 for World Dance Party. Among its singles were a cover of “Doo Wah Diddy” and the title track; when the latter surfaced as a 12-inch, “Psycho Chicken” returned to circulation on the B-side. Rhino later acknowledged the group in 1994 by placing “It’s a Night for Beautiful Girls” on Just Can't Get Enough: New Wave Hits of the 80's, Vol. 3, although the Fools otherwise remained a regional act with a cult audience through the rest of the decade. The 2001 EP Coors Light Six Pack inaugurated a fresh round of recordings that included the adults-only Rated XXX and the album 10, which opened with the aptly titled “Time Will Not Erase Us.” While the band sustained its regular Boston-area gigs, EMI paired the first two albums on a single CD in 2009; the “two-fer” contained only the 12-inch version of Sold Out and omitted both the clucked and original sides of the “Psycho Chicken” bonus 45.