#15 The Modern Lovers -The Modern Lovers

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    I was quite effected when Lou Reed died two or three weeks back. The depth of my emotions puzzled me. A friend of similar tastes said maybe it was because he had always been there. It might be because it was impossible to imagine rock and roll, culture and even modern life without him. He influenced things to a degree it's difficult to measure, he pushed things on, changed people who went on to change other people resonated throughout cultures and it all made things better. All those words, thoughts and ideas impressed themselves on me, made me understand and appreciate and love the world in a deeper, more profound way. Thanks Lou!

 

 

One person he and his band changed was Jonathan Richman. Brian Eno famously commented that the Velvets album only sold 30,000 copies but that  "everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band." Jonathan was one of the very first who did so. He had attended the Velvets reasonably regular Boston Tea Party dates in the late 60s and got to know the band.

'At the age when identity is a problem, some people join rock'n'roll bands and perform for other people who share the same difficulties.' Lou Reed

Jonathan was deeply changed by the impact of watching the Velvets play, said on this album's release 'if it weren't for Iggy and Lou Reed this record wouldn't have existed.' But like all great artists he took that influence and empowerment completely his own way. The Modern Lovers as much as any record before or since is about the absolute central importance of individualism and the individual statement. Jonathan went on from here to make a series of records, alone and with various assemblies of The Modern Lovers that are absolutely, unmistakeably his voice.

'Jonathan had picked up on the beauty that the Velvet's were driving at both in words and in the pure sound of their music. A sound and even a look that was stripped down, stark yet powerful and dignified, as he would later explain in his tribute song to their influence, "Velvet Underground." He studied how the Velvet's used simple sounds and rhythm to build excitement and to communicate complex emotions. How through just two guitars, bass and drums and the occasional organ they were able to create a huge moving sound (see Jonathan's breakdown of the Velvet's different equipment from year to year and how it effected their sound in the Malanga/Bockris Uptight book for more evidence of how deeply he studied their sound). Jonathan took from the Velvet Underground this idea of capturing in song a feeling of clarity or transcendence and communicating it so clearly and directly that the audience would be forced to acknowledge it, forced to feel something, if only uncomfortable. And both bands encountered derision, condescension and spite for daring to examine and report on life so honestly courtesy of some of the self-appointed intelligentsia of the burgeoning counter culture. It was anything but cool.'

 

Modern Lovers - compare the hair!

Ahead of his time and probably his band

 

'Feted and fated, The Modern Lovers coulda been contenders. Their demo sessions were produced by John Cale and Kim Fowley, they were courted by major labels such as A&M and Warner Bros. and counted Gram Parsons as a friend. Their line up included idiosyncratic singer/guitarist/songwriter Jonathan Richman and future Talking Head keyboardist Jerry Harrison, yet they imploded before releasing an album. When this eponymous collection of remixed demos was released in 1976 its guileless simplicity saw it adopted by the nascent punk movement.'

 

That's a great potted history of the early incarnation of the group. Like most of the great American pioneer bands that paved the way for punk and the CBGBs scene, (the Velvets, MC5, Stooges, The New York Dolls), theirs was a story of thwarted, unrealised ambition and ability. It's extraordinary to listen to this album imagining how out of place it must have sounded in 1972 when  it was initially recorded. All of the bands fellow travellers, the groups mentioned above plus Roxy, Bowie and the more inventive British bands, remarkable as they all were, fitted in some ways within the confines of glam. The rest of the Modern Lovers had the hair to vaguely do so but Richman was not about to conform to anyone else's script.

 

His was a very specific manifesto. '(Pere Ubu's) Peter Laughner later recalled that as soon as he could play guitar, Richman would stalk through the parks of Cambridge, declaiming his songs to anyone within earshot, yelling things like 'I'm not a hippie! I'm not stoned!'

 

 

There were things that Modern Lovers shared with contemporaries though. It's interesting to listen to music from this era again and notice how nostalgic it is. Mott the Hoople, New York Dolls, Bowie, Roxy all look back to some golden age even though they were all to some degree cutting edge artists when they made their key releases. Almost all of Richman's career output does the same but to an even greater extent and he heads right back to the birth of rock and roll and most particularly doo wop. When it was all in its purest, most distilled, essential form.

 

That's not so evident yet on this record. The Velvet Underground are surely there as its guiding influence. The guitars rattle, the drums thump and the organ drones much like a primitive, little brother version of Loaded. They're a pretty fine garage band. But within that framework it's Richman's voice, personality and lyrics that make the record so distinctive and give it such an edge.

 

This is one of my favourite record sleeves in my collection. The cover design is simple and iconic. The writing on the back cartoony American pop art lettering framing the classic image of the band posted above. Blue, black and white. The vinyl sleeve unlike almost all of the other records in my collection is plain yellow (is that a Berserkley records characteristic?) rather than the dull white of virtually every other album. Then there's the classic Bersekley logo on the record itself. Classically beautiful American Rock and Roll. So I think we're just about ready to go. Count us in Jonathan...

 

'Roadrunner is one of the most magical songs in existence. It is a song about what it means to be young, and behind the wheel of an automobile, with the radio on and the night and the highway stretched out before you. It is a paean to the modern world, to the urban landscape, to the Plymouth Roadrunner car, to roadside restaurants, neon lights, suburbia, the highway, the darkness, pine trees and supermarkets. As Greil Marcus put it in his book Lipstick Traces: "Roadrunner was the most obvious song in the world, and the strangest."'

 

It may be a mixed blessing to open your first record by making your absolute, definitive statement. It's difficult to think of anybody who did this as notably as Richman. He had plenty of other glorious moments but this is the song he will be remembered for by those who were not devotees. It's strange to imagine what it must have been like for him year in year out with the catcalls for 'Roadrunner' between songs every night at gigs. He never seemed to complain, at least to my knowledge. That's no slur whatsoever on his back catalogue. Roadrunner is one of the finest moments in all of Rock and Roll. It's as good as anything else by anyone.

 

 I have a memory of it. A party that I put on in halls with a few of my friends in my first year at university. We booked a hall and rented an oil bubble machine in some naïve attempt to replicate the Exploding Plastic Inevitable experience. We got people dancing with some classic soul tracks. Tried to keep the momentum going slightly less successfully with R.E.M and Husker Du. But Roadrunner worked. I particularly remember one guy who hadn't danced previously moving onto the floor and dancing away in his own space for its duration. Roadrunner will do this every time if the people you're with have the remotest sense.

 

 

I feel alone. I feel alive. I feel a love.

 

 Writing this blog can be an absolute joy. It gives you the licence to delve and dream, do a little research and work out why you love the things you've loved for so many years instinctively, without conscious thought, without really knowing why. The briefest internet exploration on the subject of Roadrunner this morning unearthed a host of things I was unaware of which located and fleshed this wonderful song out into physical territory. 

 

Richman wrote the song by 1970 and began performing it in public when he was just 19.

 

'In Tim Mitchell's biography There's Something About Jonathan, Richman's former next-door neighbour and founder member of the Modern Lovers, John Felice, recalls the excitement of driving that route with his buddy: "We used to get in the car and we would just drive up and down Route 128 and the turnpike. We'd come up over a hill and he'd see the radio towers, the beacons flashing, and he would get almost teary-eyed ... He'd see all this beauty in things where other people just wouldn't see it. We'd drive past an electric plant, a big power plant, with all kinds of electric wire and generators, and he'd get all choked up, he'd almost start crying. He found a lot of beauty in those things, and that was something he taught me. There was a real stark beauty to them and he put it into words in his songs."

 

 

 

It's a geographical love song

 

Richman, here, as almost always throughout his career, writes about his passions, on this album almost from his diaries. There's a simplicity to the lyrical momentum that keeps it barrelling forward. It is what it describes, a youthful, youth-filled drive down Route 128. It's geographically locked in its time and space. It's been called the first punk song by Richard Linklater, (though you'd have to ask 'what about the Stooges?'). I don't think this is doing it any favours. Not many 'punk' songs approach it. John Lydon, might always be labelled 'the' punk, but in my eyes is a really admirable, uncontainable figure. He has said it's his favourite song which raises him higher still in my estimation.

 

Read through the lyrics. It's such a pared down wonderful expression of experience, emotion and landscape. He's got the radio on as the tyres eat up a road enclosed in nature and modern moonlight. He's establishing a new kind of poetry. A mythology.

 

'Said hello to the spirit of 1956
Patient in the bushes next to '57
The highway is your girlfriend as you go by so quick
Suburban trees, suburban speed
And it smells like heaven(thunder)
And I say roadrunner once
Roadrunner twice
I'm in love with rock & roll and I'll be out all night
Roadrunner
That's right'

What can I possibly add to that? Isn't it clear? It's talking about and establishing a kind of freedom. There's a very beautiful Guardian article where the writer visits Route 128 and tries to reclaim the song and post it up there with Bob Dylan's Highway 61, Chuck Berry's Route 66 and Bruce Springsteen's New Jersey as essential landmarks embedded into America's psychic highway.

 

 For me the glow of Richman's vision diminishes all of the others because it's the most real. The most suburban. That's where I'm from. It's the idea I can identify with most.  He's just a teenage boy who wants a girlfriend and is imagining her out there somewhere in the night. In the meantime he has this vivid, utterly real communing with 50,000 watts of power with nature and neon 'when it's cold outside'. It's an epiphany. He's caught and lost within an essential rolling moment.

 

 

Read Laura Barton's article above for the full backstory of the glorious romance of this song. I could go on and on but her article's so good that she says pretty most of what I'd try to say and she's travelled down Route 128 in pilgrimage so I'm completely trumped. 'Bye bye' to the open road and hello to the Astral Plane.

 

'These two gentlemen from Boston kept turning up and saying 'this is Jonathan Richman'. I had no idea that Jonathan and I had met many years before. But what was interesting about the tapes that were presented was that they were very, very slender. They were not aggressive. They were very weak. There was a definitive weakness about the music. And this weakness kept on developing and developing until it was (Richman interjects 'full fledged anaemia' Cale smiles). It's a prime example of how you turn weakness into strength.' John Cale interviewed with Richman on Australian television in the '70s.

 

Jonathan Richman seems to me to have no clear forebears in Rock history. I can think of no such vulnerable figures who precede him, Certainly not Lou Reed who was a much tougher proposition. But Richman is the precursor, the icon of a raft of willowy, sensitive wallflowers who followed over the next fifteen years. Pete Shelley (ok not willowy), Vic Godard, Jilted John, Feargal Sharkey, Julian Cope, Robert Forster, Edwyn Collins and yes, the inevitable end of the line as so often Morrissey. All interestingly (with the exception of Forster), British. America's clear heirs to Richman were The Talking Heads who took Jerry Harrison amongst much else from the original Modern Lovers. It's difficult to conceive of David Byrne without Jonathan.

 

 'Tonight I'm all alone in my room
I'll go insane, if you won't sleep with me
I'll still be with you
I'm gonna meet you on the astral plane
The astral plane for dark at night
The astral plane or I'll go insane.'

 

 

Initially I wondered whether this is a hymn to the power of the imagination or the glory of onanism. Perhaps my mind's rather grubby. In fact having done a bit of research I've discovered I was doing Jonathon an enormous disservice and should hang my head. It's genuinely about psychic projection through the subconscious. In any case Astral Plane transcends such tawdry concerns to rattle along merrily for just around three minutes making a virtue from what sounds to me like flat rejection. It has the bass line of Nuggets garage bands, the organ hum and drone of a woozy Doors.

 

Musically, it seems slightly more conventional now than it would have done at the time. It's Richman's warble that really stays in the mind. Was anybody else willing to be so gangly and awkward, so self consciously flat in terms of vocal delivery to get their message across? He maintains single notes droned remarkably across entire lines. It's almost a self-conscious reverse take on The Doors Soul Kitchen where Morrison leaves no doubt that he is getting the girl in every sense.

 

Richman's lyrics prefigure so much that lies ahead. It's quite difficult to see him for how he must have appeared in 1972 given the inspiration he offered to others who came after. Not just the tall, jerky adolescent figure draped around microphone stands where he pretty much set the template for so much that followed but also the self consciousness of the writing. The wit of it. The irony of knowing that you're a ninety eight pound weakling and making it your winning, selling point.

 

 

 

 

Natick, Massachusetts

 

The counter-culture strangely must have been a quite comforting prospect to American students of the late 60s. The taking on of a whole set of rules and behaviour to make a stand against the parental set of values that you were in the process of rejecting. A new set of rules and behaviour ironically and ultimately just as restrictive and defining.

 

Richman, like no one else at the time except perhaps for Richard Hell and Tom Verlaine in New York was going about a process of self-construction grounded in the real. It was clearly a struggle. Partly perhaps because unlike Hell and Verlaine he hadn't made a complete break from the past. He was still there. In Boston. Richman is renowned for his positivity but he hasn't got to this place yet. These recordings often sound like angst-filled growing pains to me.

 

 

 

Another point of joy in writing and compiling this blog is the chance to listen properly to individual tracks on albums that you've always loved as a whole but have passed you by as specific individualised songs. Such is the case with Old World. Song 3 Side 1 of The Modern Lovers. My new, very favourite song. At least for the next day or two.

 

More than pretty much all the records that I can think of at this point, Richman was aware of the adolescent transition with all it's complications that he was experiencing. He loved his parents and wasn't afraid to say so. He liked old buildings. He understood the contradictions of youth, embraced them, expressed them. Just listen to Dignified and Old (compare and contrast with 'hope I die before I get old'. Which makes more sense? They were both written by people of similar ages). Or listen to this.

 

The understanding of everything that made the Velvet Underground work is pretty ingrained in this song. The way that thought through sound and space can open up the opportunity to transmit ideas that work on a different level from the conventional. Musically the sound is pretty much a variation on the Velvet's Rock and Roll from Loaded. The sentiments are untouchable.

 

'Well I see a '50's apartment house
Bleak in the morning sun
But I still love the '50's
And I still love the old world
I wanna keep my place in the old world
Keep my place in the arcane
'Cause I still love my parents and I still love the old world
Alright'

 

Alright indeed. There's a moment halfway through the song when guitar and organ pick up the same motif and play it through together note for note. It's remarkable. Richman has been called innocent, childlike and naïve on so many occasions that you begin to despair for the art of journalism. Were these people ever children themselves and if so, why couldn't they understand the experience. If they didn't, why did they go into journalism? Just call him ahead of his time and an artist and be done with it. He actually flirted with becoming a proper artist (using paint that is), before he saw the Velvets and decided to operate in music instead. Rock and roll's gain. The art world's loss. Though to compensate he did write three great tributes to Cezanne, Picasso and Van Gogh.

 

One of them's coming up now.  The girls would turn the colour of avocado when he would drive down their street in his El Dorado.He was only five foot three but girls could not resist to stare.  Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole. Oh well be not schmuck, be not obnoxious, be not bellbottom bummer or asshole. Remember the story of Pablo Picasso.

 

 

 

There are the girls. The thing to aspire to. There are the boys. Long haired, drug smoking fools. And there is the artist. If you want to get the girl don't follow the herd. On a jerky, lolloping riff that sounds as if Waiting For The Man has been dismantled and put back together wrong, Pablo Picasso is one of rock and roll's strangest, funniest achievements. A parable.

 

Picasso was a simple artist. If he had been playing rock and roll he wouldn't have been doing long guitar solos or sculpting prog rock. He'd have left that to Dali. No, he'd have been down with Andy Warhol, The Velvet Underground and The Modern Lovers trying to make out with girls. Transposed to New York he's realised here as the ultimate hipster.

 

 

So that's Side One. It's pretty complete. It could have been longer given the great repertoire of songs the band had by now but what's there is peerless. On to Side 2.

 

'Me and Jonathan, as close as we were, you know, I was like a punk, I was a wise-ass kid. I liked to do a lot of drugs, I liked to drink, and Jonathan was like this wide-eyed, no-drugs, ate nothing but health food..' John Felice (original Modern Lover future Real Kid)

 

She Cracked is more committed to the dark alternative, underground idea of Rock and Roll than anything else Jonathan Richman ever did. At least on the surface. There's a lot of irony about the Modern Lovers take on things though. Listening to them is quite different from listening to The Velvets, Stooges, The MC5 or The Dolls.

 

But She Cracked is the most New York song on this record. So much of this album is a dialogue between New York and Boston. Richman spent some time on VU manager Steve Sesnick's living room couch in 1969. You can hear it here.

 

She was sensitive. She understood me.

She understood the European things. From 1943.

 

She Cracked is a pretty good song title. The song is just fine too. It has all the glacial tension and suspense of  proper rock and roll. It tips a hat to The Velvets and The Stooges whilst retaining an identity of its own. It crackles along, rickety on the rails like a hijacked subway train. 

 

Richman moans and grumbles throughout but maintains his distance, keeping his dysfunctional New York girl at arms length. Remaining strangely dispassionate about her fate. This is not the girlfriend that Jonathan really had in mind. He's not meant for Steve Sesnick's couch or unhinged New York girls. Boston is little more than a couple of hours away on the train at most. This after all is truly an album of suburban sensibilities from someone who doesn't really want to leave them much as he loves The Velvet Underground. A strangely beautifully dualistic song about an emotional detached relationship between different cities, mindsets and genders. 

 

'Well she cracked, I won't
She did things that I don't
She'd eat garbage, eat shit, get stoned
I stay alone, eat health food at home.'

 

From there on to another tale of feminine distress and one of the best tracks on this or pretty much any other album. Hospital. I remember Robert Forster of the Go-Betweens singing this song's praises in a Melody Maker article some time in the 80s that I sadly can't track down. This song points a finger in the direction and development of that quite remarkable band. Here's something Forster said about Richman anyway.

 

'A breakthrough was listening to Jonathan Richman and The Modern Lovers, and to an extent, Lou Reed. David Byrne from Talking Heads, who showed that you didn’t have to write about this exotic, ’60s subject matter. You could write about the street, your family. You could write about the fact that you haven’t lived an exciting life. You could write about the everyday, which people in the ’60s weren’t really doing. People in the ’60s were writing about a fantastic world, an exploding world. Bowie was writing ‘Ziggy Stardust’’ and that sort of stuff, and so when I made the realisation that I didn’t have to write ‘Ziggy Stardust’, I didn’t have to write ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’. That was a big jump to make when you’re 19, that I could write about ‘Karen’, which was all about being in a library at the University Of Queensland. When I made that jump – and it was through Jonathan Richman, it was through David Byrne – that was a big jump. That’s when I started to write songs..'

 

 

Hospital is a liberating song about the everyday and the strange, uneasy tangle of emotions that swim under its mundane surface. This is pretty much a defined, finished short story in itself. Cheever or Carver would have been more than proud. It's also a very distinct song structure. It doesn't particularly remind me of anything that's gone before. Not even The Velvets who are generally this album's shaping, guiding influence.

 

I grew up in the suburbs. Richmond, Kew, Teddington, Twickenham, Kingston, Hampton, Petersham. To me it's still the most beautiful pocket of London's hinterland. I've got a diary from when I was 17 that takes me back there. I can't bring myself to look at it very often. I would walk to and from college, to and from bus stops, with beautiful, unobtainable girls. In my imaginings though they were always about to swoon into my arms. This gave me a feeling of strength, aloofness. 

 

You can find this assured, self contained detachment in The Catcher in the Rye which was my bible for a while as with many clichéd teenage histories. I also got it from Scott Fitzgerald at the time. You can hear it in Hospital. Like with many great short stories its emotional power lies in what remains unsaid. We're never told why the girl is in hospital or what exactly her relationship with the narrator is and what if anything has gone on between them. That's how it resonates.

 

'I go to bakeries all day long
There's a lack of sweetness in my life
And there is pain inside
You can see it in my eyes'

 

You don't imagine as a teenager that the emotions you're undergoing will ever end and they're transient and probably shallow and self-regarding. This isn't meant to diminish them. It's a unique phase in life. Hospital, more than any other song on the album is a hymn to suburban  teenage experience. Other songs have Jonathan venturing into Boston or out on Route 128 or spending time in New York. This is a retreat to the streets of his youth. It's plain but profound.

 

'Now your world is beautiful
I'll take the subway to your suburb sometime
I'll seek out the things that must've been magic to your little girl mind
Now as a little girl you must've been magic
I still get jealous of your old boyfriends in the suburbs sometimes
And when I walk down your street
There'll probably be tears in my eyes'

 

Way to go Jonathan.

 

 

'As it neared midnight, the five of us headed into the Center's small theatre, which seated about 200. No sign of The Dolls yet (who stood out from their peers partly by combining glitter chic with thrift shop funk and partly by being The Dolls). Midnight arrived, largely ignored or unnoticed. I noticed Dolls lead guitarist Johnny Thunders near the stage. A support band started setting up. A short-haired guy, incongruously attired in chinos and loafers, tuned gaudy Doll Johnny's plexiglass guitar; Thunders nodded thankfully and grabbed the ax. Then a scenester took the stage and announced:

"Please welcome the Modern Lovers!"

The guitar tuner took center stage, a hale young fellow in a yellow dress shirt with a turned-up collar: Jonathan Richman, lead singer. His band, comprised of keyboardist Jerry Harrison, bassist Ernie Brooks, guitarist John Felice, and drummer David Robinson, looked rather ordinary in shag ‘dos and jeans, except John Felice, who wore a silver glitter suit that clashed with his buck teeth and Clark Kent glasses. 
 

They lunged into a dramatic opening chord, quelled by Jonathan's spread arms.

"Ladies and gentlemen!" he proclaimed in a congested, juvenile voice. "We don't want just a girl to ball!"

Another big chord and: "We're the Modern Lovers from Boston, Massachusetts! We don't want a girl to just ball--we want a girl we can care about!" ' 

 

I'm coming to realise now as I listen through to the album properly, maybe for the first time, that there is no filler, nothing that needs to be thrown away. Someone I Care About was previously a song I hardly noticed, the upbeat one between Hospital and Girlfriend (which is probably needed). It's not just that. It's another great moment in itself. Its sentiments have a touching sincerity.

 

'Well I don't want some cocaine sniffing triumph in the bar
Well I don't want a triumph in the car
I don't want to make a rich girl crawl
What I want is a girl that I care about
Or I want no one at all
Alright'

Alright indeed!

 

'Jonathan had a message that went against the grain of the times. To me he captured a certain kind of teen frustration practically better than anything that's ever been written.' Jerry Harrison.

 

Every song on this album is a statement. Heartfelt statements that go utterly against the accepted version of events already set in stone by hippie counterculture. Dignity, being straight, rejection of drug culture, dressing straight, beauty, sincerity, love for the past, love for parents, love for the idea of being in love, even love for America. In many ways it's unprecedented. Out of step even with the bands most obvious antecedents The Velvets and The Stooges.

 

Jonathan's projected vision of what will happen to bands and scenes. Drawn for Vibration magazine in relation to an article he wrote for them about The Velvet Underground in 1967.

 

'To me Rock and Roll was about stuff that was natural anyway. It wasn't about drugs and space. It was about sex and boyfriends and girlfriends and stuff. See I used to walk to The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. And I used to go to the room where they would keep the paintings by Cezanne see. Not cos I could understand anything about the paintings of Cezanne. That was where all the girls from B.U. would hang out. B.U. Boston University. They had the big suede boots coming up to here and they had the Gauloise cigarettes. And they had the long hair and the brown suede jacket. Ooh and I was very impressed. So I just hung around there. And I figured boy if I had a girlfriend then I could understand these paintings. I could see right through them.' Jonathan Richman

 

 

Girlfriend is everything stripped down to its absolute essence. The Modern Lovers first album is forever seen as prefiguring and laying down the paving stones for punk. This way of reading things makes no sense when listening to this particular song. It's surely one of the key songs on this record and points the way towards where Richman veered off the road away from electrified noise towards his own way of doing things. All you need in your teenage years is one true relationship to help you focus and understand the world. Richman wrote this song, probably before he had one of his own  and the band delivered it beautifully. It's a gorgeous, fragile object. One of two great pop songs about Paul Cezanne. Here's the other.

 

 

The last track Modern World is a great opening or closing song to any album. In many ways it sounds conventional in terms of rock and roll lineage, at least musically, in a way most of the other songs on the album don't entirely. It runs along the same tracks as MC5 and Stones songs of round about the same time. Jonathan in the meantime is intoning his well worn mantra like a man with an eternal head cold who knows he's right. 'the modern world is not so bad. Not like the students say. Drop out of B.U. Stop all this weak stuff. Put down your cigarette and share the modern world....with me!' Who can really argue with that?

 

 

Richman parted from this way of thinking pretty much directly after these demos were recorded though there were more tentative tracks recorded by Kim Fowley the following year which stand up on their own behalf. They disbanded shortly afterwards and the rest of the group splintered towards Talking Heads, The Cars, Real Kids and David Johansson as backing players and pretty much established the bedrock of American New Wave in the late Seventies.

 

Richman meanwhile gave birth to and followed his own vision inviting clichéd journalistic and audience responses, mentioning childlike naievity and innocence at each and every turn. I can't do justice to this part of his career here. I need to explore it more myself. The set of recordings he made with the first incarnation of The Modern Lovers are pretty much unique in all of Rock and Roll in terms of what they say and do. I direct you towards them wholeheartedly. They exist in their own space.