(Credits: Far Out / Guus Krol)
Wed 26 November 2025 2:00, UK
While it was a moderate radio hit when he first released it in 1982, reaching number 86 in the UK and number 63 in America, Todd Rundgren’s sing-along pop nugget ‘Bang the Drum All Day’ has lived many subsequent lives as a go-to “jock jam”, ie, a song played in sports stadiums to get the crowd revved up.
It’s also been licensed in numerous TV adverts, probably bringing more steady cash into Rundgren’s coffers than all of the new records he’s released over the same time period.
Part of the reason so many baseball, football, and ice hockey teams adopted ‘Bang the Drum All Day’ as a celebratory needle drop, besides its catchy keyboard line, is its seemingly basic, uncontroversial lyrical sentiment: “I don’t want to work / I want to bang on the drum all day.” This made it the sort of flip-side of the coin to another stadium anthem, Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s ‘Takin’ Care of Business’ from 1973. Rather than celebrating the handling of one’s work, ‘Bang the Drum’ acknowledged that nobody in the collapsing Rust Belt of Reagan’s America actually enjoyed their nine-to-five.
“It’s monolithic,” Rundgren said of the song in 1983, “because while you don’t want to work, you don’t want to play either. It’s about getting completely fixated on one thing; hypnotised, almost. It’s about me, about everybody in general.”
And thus, it became the song the Cincinnati Bengals played when they scored a touchdown, and probably the song that most random Americans would know from the vast Todd Rundgren back catalogue; a similar case to Randy Newman and ‘I Love LA’.
Todd Rundgren in shades. (Credits: Todd Rundgren)
The only real shame in all of this is that Rundgren, while hardly known as a jock-jam artist to begin with, had already written a far better and more epic sports-adjacent anthem a full decade before ‘Bang the Drum’. The song, called ‘Just One Victory’, was the closing track on his 1972 album A Wizard, a True Star, of those unique rock records in which it sounds like you’re hearing 48 musicians, but it’s basically just one insane perfectionist playing every instrument and handling the entire production. This was Rundgren at his most ambitious and experimental and polarising, and it’s probably why ‘Just One Victory’ never became a hit; just a fan favourite among Todd devotees.
To be fair, ‘Just One Victory’ also doesn’t have quite as much stadium usage flexibility as ‘Bang the Drum All Day’. While the latter can be played in any inning of a baseball game or any quarter of a basketball game, ‘Just One Victory’ was born to be a pre-game anthem – a rousing pep talk to the home team mixed with a plea to the sports gods to bring a just and satisfying result upon the land: “Somehow, someday / We need just one victory and we’re on our way / We’re prayin’ for it all day and fightin’ for it all night / Give us just one victory, it will be all right.”
Compared to the oafish repetitiveness of ‘Bang the Drum’, ‘Just One Victory’ finds Rundgren dipping into his Philly soul roots to create a huge sweeping expanse of a song, several songs in one, really, as his voice and message grow in confidence with each verse that this moment will, indeed, end in glory: “We’ve been waiting so long / We’ve been waiting for the sun to rise and shine / Shining still to give us the will.”
He might be talking about something political, or something spiritual, but the whole thing is way too non-specifically ra-ra and soul-stirring not to have been adopted by every long-suffering sports fan over the past 50 years. No matter how much reality is telling you otherwise, or how many decades of sporting futility might suggest more of the same, there’s always that silly dream that your team might just be one victory away from changing the whole story. This song is the soundtrack of that irrational thought process.
Judge for yourself. Did the wrong Todd Rundgren song become a sports anthem?
Related Topics