#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.

 

 

The Diary of Black Francis

By Black Francis during The Pixies' 1989 tour
Melody Maker, December 1989.

Last year, The Pixies' album Surfer Rosa won the Maker critics' poll. This year, their LP Doolittle crashed into the national Top 10 and the band played over 150 dates on their world tour. Here we present edited highlights from Black Francis' diary of the frenetic last 12 months.

BOSTON NEW YEAR'S DAY
This day hardly registers. I laze around a lot and yet I have no time for time. My last watch was 10 years ago and it played "Swan Lake" when you pressed a button. It broke and now time in watch-form is unappealing. I like calendars for pictures, especially rock photos! And girls! Ee-hah!
SOMEWHERE IN THE USA JAN 20
My honey and I cruised to California on a sleeper train. The food reeked of government subsidy, but had lots o' wine. The cabins are narrow - she slept on the bottom, I slept on the top. Hubba hubba. But it scares me sometimes. Fatty and skinny went to bed Fatty rolled over and skinny was dead. But she kicked my ass in chess.
L.A. JAN 22
Rented a car and went to Disneyland. I had been many times when I was growin' up in LA's mean streets, so I could really show her the ropes. Mass murderer Ted Bundy was killed in the electric chair that morning and Jean, my honey, showed off her endurance against electric current on the "Test Your Strength" machine. Lunched on Mexican (Mundy was rumored to have had a burrito for his last meal) and drove off into the night for Arizona.
CALIFORNIA JAN 23
We're right in the middle of fucking nowhere with no towns for miles. We're playing this trucker tape with "Convoy" on it, when suddenly on the other side of the highway, there's this black guy with hair teased up like the guy from "Eraserhead". He was riding a tricycle with bits of bright cloth and trinkets attached to the spokes and a cart at the back. He looked just like the candyman with a big grin on his face. Seemed to come from nowhere and was certainly going nowhere. What the hell was he doing there? It was one big cinematic joke. Still driving. Snowflakes on the Grand Canyon (each one is different ya know), deer photos and Jean stood on the icy edge of the canyon just for a joke.
PARIS APRIL 4
My third time in this cheese-oriented city on the last day of my European Press tour. Honey and I snapped pictures of the Louvre (featuring the I.M. PEI Pyramid) and Eiffel tower, when the camera broke. But who gives a shit....Fuckin' yellow headlights.
LONDON APRIL 16
Record "Monkey Gone To Heaven" on a top-notch TV arts program. Later that night, that guy from Sonic Youth and that guy from Pere Ubu booted our video on "Night Network" because Joey made a thumbs-up sign.
BRIGHTON APRIL 19
Our first gig and we played so fuckin' great it was unbelievable. I suppose I could have sucked, but what do crazy kids know?
CAMBRIDGE APRIL 25
Much joy after hearing "Doolittle" has entered the British National Charts at Number Eight. I've been reading "The Wicked Ways Of Malcom McLaren" and just got up to the part where The Sex Pistols' "Never Mind The Bollocks" entered the British charts at Number 11. Three places below could make me grin. John Lydon can suck my dick any time.
MANCHESTER APRIL 27
Busted my acoustic in Joey's room and sliced my strumming midgets wide open. The nurse at the delightful Manchester infirmary gaily administers a bandage, but plays real dumb when it comes to removing the fiberglass shards from my flesh. She tells me she's a girlfriend of a Stone Rose and I wonder if the indie charts have become an amoral battleground. At least I got to see a guy who had his ear bitten off in a pub fight. A boxing surgeon came to the show in Liverpool and shows me kindness.
EDINBURGH APRIL 30
Played Glasgow and Edinburgh, And I have seen, My quarry cousins in Aberdeen. Scots are tip-top, even if they do cook their pizza in a fryolater. Pizza supper? Give me a break. Head down south again.
MANCHESTER MAY 2
English pop stardom has its perks and our Mancunian tour manager gets us in to see Tom Jones and his unfeasible large testicles at the Manchester Apollo. The man is a professional, no matter who says what.
LORELEY MAY 13
German festival in the mountains in the spring on the shores of the most beautiful dead river I've ever seen. Someone in the audience throws an iron bar on stage. Later we're told it could be a German sign of affection. Hope it affects someone else next time. Lots of good bands like those Sugarcubes. The other half of the PA gets turned on when The Cure hit the stage, but what the heck. They sold the tickets and it sounds great. Afterwards, the promoter gives all the bands a rock encased in plastic that has "The Cure'" printed on it. Someone also gives me one of those reversible Morrissey tour jackets. I look rained on and trodden, yet sharp. I would duet with that guy in a second. No lie.
LANDGRAAF MAY 15
The "Pinkpop" festival. The Pixies mingle with the stars - R.E.M. watch our show from the side of the stage and have dinner with us. Then The Pixies give their lungs a break from that harsh English hash and pump some good ol' green bud. Sometimes Dutch socialism frickin' rules.
MARATHON MAY 17
Vacation on Marathonas beach with plenty of Germans. We rent mopeds and erode the countryside with rubber burning pop - a wheeling American noise. Kim falls off three times and is finally run off the road.
ATHENS MAY 19
Joey and I decide to visit the Acropolis. We end up in a sidewalk cafe, drinking their delicious wine. Tried to get a cab, but no one taught us Greek taxi etiquette. You don't stand in the street flagging, they just try and run you over. You scream where you're going through the window as they drive past and if they happen to be going that way, they nod and you can jump in while the cab's still moving. Several bloody and unsuccessful attempts at this and we decide it's back to bed.
BELGRADE MAY 20
Saw some tanks. The venue we play has no stage, just gaffa tape separating The Pixies from the Slavs.
ZAGREB MAY 21
Strange. Bought strawberries off a gypsy. Cheap, too.
LJUBLJANA MAY 23
Met several dozen members of Laibach.
BOLOGNA MAY 27
Ted Mico came down for the some rock interview stuff. Did one show and canceled the rest because the organization was so f***ing out of control. We got showed some muscle and drove to Nice real fast. In Nice they drill a hole down a baguette and stick a hot dog in it. Frickin' great.
BARCELONA JUNE 3
Disappointment. After years of waiting, Spanish tapas is no big fuckin' deal. Wrote my first song ever "one the road". I'm such a professional. I have dreams of recording it in Berlin at Hansa, just like David Bowie (pronounced Bowee). Gil Norton, the hepcat that produced "Doolittle", is at the gig and promises to fly in for the sessions. It's gonna be great. Hot.
PARIS JUNE 5
The rock shows are before dinner. All the guys wear cowboy boots. All the headlights are still yellow.
BERLIN JUNE 20
My brother Errol shows up for our German tour. And, with my cousin Mark, the guitar roadie, it's a f***in' Thompson family reunion! Oh yeah, we laid down that hot track. It's still hot.
STOCKHOLM JUNE 26
It was great, blah, blah, blah. Unfortunately, due to logistics, we had to cancel the talented Swedish band The Nomads. The Swedish rock press got very sensitive about it and tore us apart. Whoopdeedoo. I flipped 'em the bird.
BELGIUM JULY 2
The Tourhout festival. I could talk about all the stars I met, or the fact we went on stage at 10.30 in the morning, but I saw Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds for the first time today and I never liked music so much. Joey and I went for a pizza afterwards. Cave and Harvey joined us. Then we took in a movie in Brussels and I was creamin' my drawers.
LONDON JULY 9
Flew home to Boston. Just. I decided I hated flying. It was a terrible flight. I only feel safe on Lufthansa.
BOSTON JULY 20
Supposed to fly to Seattle to meet up with the Very Happy Mondays and start the American "Fuck Or Fight" tour. My honey and I then hear about the United Airlines crash on the car radio. Got out of the car, into the pay phone, rung the manager and told him flying is history. I cancel Seattle and take a Greyhound to San Francisco. All goes well past Chicago. Then I ate a bad ham and cheese sandwich in Nevada and shat water the rest of the way. I nearly die of gastric somethingorother and get asphyxiated by the blue, perfumed toilet disinfectant they use in the toilets.
SAN DIEGO JULY 26
Forgot my passport or driving license or ID and can't prove I'm over 21, so the ex-Angels security staff at the door won't let me in. They say they understand I'm 24 and headlining tonight, but I still can't get in. Finally, reason arrives, but I'm still the only person who's ever been barred from their own gig.
LOS ANGELES JULY 27
After the show, I get to meet David Bowie (pronounced Bowee) and fuckin' loved it. I was so completely impressed and continue to tell all my acquaintances about the historic meeting. We had our own corner of the room and everything. Talked about shit you wouldn't believe. We also had corona beer.
TORONTO AUGUST 28
Was this the gig where we played to 50 Cure-heads and Robert Smith in the wings? No, that was another Toronto. Arrived at the gig to find there were no security barriers in the place and the stage was only about six inches off the ground. The crowd just kept pressing forward, getting closer and closer to us. Right in front me, there was one really shifty guy who kept getting really hyper. One guy next to him told him to calm down, so he punched the shit out him. He was six feet away from me and counting, staring at me with pupils as big as the moon. He kept darting his hand inside his coat. I kept thinking he was going to whip out a gun. The crowd started to pull on the overhead sprinkler system in order to catch The Pixies on stage. Wires came down, water came down and everything sparked. I walked off halfway through. A while ago, my grandmother tried to give me a pair of drumsticks (I used to be a drummer) owned by a cousin who was a jazz drummer. He died in the famous Boston Coconut Grove fire in the forties along with 500 other people. Those Canadians are rowdy. They don't even realize that they're part of the United States.
LOS ANGELES SEPT 8
Supported The Cure at Dodger stadium. Played to scattered enclaves of Cure-heads eating Dodger dogs and pancakes melting in the sun.
DETROIT SEPT 16
This was the club where I walked off (again) because I was getting electrocuted. Everyone thinks I'm a wimp and even my own bad hate me. Oh well, I guess I'll flip 'em the bird.
CLEVELAND SEPT 22
Rudeness is dawning. I used to be so polite. Now it's, "Who the fuck are you and what are you doing within a mile of my dressing room, man?" It's probably due to the fact that the combined IQ of the bozos backstage is below room temperature.
WASHINGTON DC OCT 2
I used to think that I didn't matter what a Pixies audience was like as long as there was an audience. Now I'm changing my mind. There's so many bozos, their lameness irritates me. The stage diving is atrocious. It takes them about five minutes to get to the stage and then they do a little jig and then fall back into the crowd. The Yugoslavs were better at stage-diving and there wasn't even a stage.
NEW ORLEANS OCT 14
I went to the French quarter and had cajun red beans and rice. Whoopee ding. Stopped by the Hard Rock Cafe and showed 'em my tour laminate for a little VIP treatment. I got my own corner table and I let everyone look at my pop genius penis. They got a neon sign outside this place that declares: NO DRUGS NO NUKES! I fuckin' love that shit.
BATON ROUGE OCT 19
The security for the gig is manned by off-duty cops. They got big flashlights that make you see. One guy had a hook instead of a hand and wore black leather chaps and a cowboy hat. They also had crowd control zappers that inflict voltage and once again I had to stop the show after some poor slob got heavy therapy. How can I control these kids and protect 'em from the fuzz? I just wanna get all excited about rockin' responsibility and make conscious videos, too. Well, frickin' barely conscious.
AUSTIN OCT 22
After the show, we drive in our solid silver tour bus 20 hours to San Diego. It's a no-stopper and I spend all night playing "Super Mario Bros" computer games. I'm yelling a lot more these days. After four hours, I realize there's nothing more boring than a bunch of guys sitting around talking about pussy. After 16 hours I swear that if I ever tour again, I do not want to speak to a soul. I'll show up just like Chuck Berry, five minutes before showtime., walk on and walk off, because I just don't give a shit. Being in a tour bus means never being in the same place and always being in the same place at the same time. One more gripe and here it is: England is part of Europe.
SEATTLE NOV 2
This place is really Liverpooly. But with more heroin. David's dream has finally come true. Groupies are starting to appear backstage. I read in a science magazine that global warming is affecting our hormones. What a relief! At last there's a scientific explanation for his increasing obsession with schoolgirls.
VANCOUVER NOV 3
The nearest Canadian city is 1,000 miles away. The place is full of lumberjacks and whores and pizza and porno shops. It's snowy and full of the excitement of a big city in the big woods. Drive all night to Salt Lake City, Utah. The entire band and crew smuggle drugs (again) to my fatherly displeasure, but at least now I can get baked.
SALT LAKE CITY NOV 6
Dave and I smoke a big doobie and take a tour of the Mormon tabernacle. A good time, honest. They were really polite and showed us this huge cathedral hall with a giant statue of Jesus that spoke. Then they began to get really friendly and invited us down to the basement to see some more "videos". We ran. David told me he once rode a unicycle through a Mormon church during a service. The gig is in a supermarket that they painted black. We went to the Salt Lake and made a video documentary on the famous brine shrimp, the lone inhabitant of these waters. Sea monkeys or fish food? What's going on?
BOSTON NOV 21
Two big shows in one big night. Parents and cousins all turn up. Joey smashes his guitar to celebrate his new sponsorship deal with Gibson. Damages his hand more than the guitar. Ted Mico pops up and I haven't seen him since San Diego. The two of us drive down to New York City with my honey. I gave him the story. He gave me the flu.
NEW YORK NOV 22
A boring last show. We play like farts. JFK is on my mind. Who did it? Ironically, Billy Joel's video for "We Didn't Start The Fire" comes out About this time and settles me somehow. Jean and I spend snowy Thanksgiving alone together in New York at Victor's Cuban Restaurant. It's an important holiday for stuffing. We head home and my legs are all nervous and excited about thinking about rock in the Nineties. If they don't like my indie rockin' ruckus, I'll flip 'em the bird.
B.F.

#14 Pixies - Surfer Rosa

Pixies really came out of nowhere in 1988. And not before time! There was a need for a full on, unhinged Rock and Roll band at this point in the late eighties when frankly things were a bit dull in white guitar music and they fitted the bill entirely. I vividly recall the sensations if not the detail of a moment in that year, late summer it seems to me (in fact having checked it was probably early), at the top of my parent's house with the windows wide open. It was not a good time in my life. I was very ill, but I don't remember that about the instant. All I recall is putting this on, One of the first times I'd played it. Side One, Track One, cranking up the volume and letting the waves of sound wash through me and beyond. Out into our suburban back garden.

     

 

It was deeply American music. It came from the loins of Iggy Pop and Lou Reed. David Bowie was probably thereabouts too but mostly it spoke to me of Mid -West towns that I'd never go to, of college bars, diners, raw teenage lust and dreams of driving to Mexico to get wasted. It was an idea not a reality to me in the time and place I was in, just as I think it was an idea not a reality to the band themselves, but it was a thrilling one.

 

Something was reborn in music that had lain dormant for a while. Pixies were seizing the promise and raw excitement of Iggy and the Stooges, The Gun Club, The Replacements, Black Flag, Husker Du and Sonic Youth and taking them someplace new. No one knew it at this point but they were preparing the ground for Nirvana and all that followed.

 

I wasn't the only one who was excited. The Melody Maker I remember were very, very excited. John Peel too. I remember him starting one show with Surfer Rosa's opening two tracks, Bone Machine and Break My Body. They very much bled into one another.

 

 

Pixies had the right formula and the right ingredients. No song ever outstayed it's welcome. No song ever broke the winning template they established very early on. They had Kim Deal. It's impossible to overstate the importance of Kim Deal. Without her they had no sexual allure. At least not one that would have appealed as it did. With her they had it. They had a rocksolid drummer in Dave Lovering and an inventive guitarist Joey Santiago who gave them the authentic hispanic edge they needed and blasted out rolling waves of wild, vicious unrelenting sound that somehow stayed within that template too. And they had Black Francis who provided the guiding vision.

 

'I do my lyrics at the very, very last minute. I’m more into making music and coming up with poetic structure….The lyrics come after I make a big shape…I come up with the structure first….Music is mathematical and needs mathematical structure more than a topic. A topic will come. You take a bunch of words and put them all together, and you have a topic. [The song makes sense] because it comes from the same mind….It’s like a Dadaist approach, which is…just taking reality from many different places and throwing it together in the same pot….Like many songwriters when they’re young they start writing songs and they write a topical song which is usually a very bad song with many syllables and many words, and it’s not very entertaining. Rock n roll is all about “Tutti Frutti!” and “Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow-Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow”—“Surfin’ Bird”…that’s a good rock n’ roll song.' Frank Black 1989

 

This is a song for Carol...

 

Seeing Pixies as a piece of work makes sense of them to me. They're an exercise in controlled noise. A thought through career plan on Frank Black's part realised by his own contribution and the contribution of the other three. Not that there's no love involved, because it wouldn't work if there wasn't but it also wouldn't work without the science.

 

Pixies songs are acts of engineering and he plans, oversees and directs the process, Bob Stanley in his excellent new book 'Yeah Yeah Yeah' describes the male members of the band as looking like a bunch of plumbers, which is meant as a disparaging comment about their looks. He's on the right lines but I think they're better imagined as wearing hard hats and working on a building site.

 

 

A lot of the main American alternative pioneers were geeks. The Ramones, Television, Talking Heads, Pere Ubu,  Thurston Moore. Michael Stipe. Frank Black is a geek too. But he always found it difficult to find acceptance among the hip geeks.

 

I remember watching David Thomas of Ubu and Thurston Moore chumming up in a late night programme on British TV in the late 80s to show their disdain for Pixies video of This Monkey's Gone to Heaven just as the band were beginning to break big. They couldn't admit to liking it. Pixies were too Mid-West, too provincial, too keen to be liked to get their hipster seal of approval. They even threatened to break really big at that moment. The ultimate taboo for indie elitists. No wonder they were dismissed by a pair of avant gard icons who couldn't muster a hit single between them at any point in their careers. The main reason for the dismissal was that Santiago gave a thumbs up signal to the camera about a minute into the song.

 

After the bruising one two of Bone Machine and Break My Bones comes the obligatory one and

a half minute walloping drums, thudding bass squalling guitar and howling into a baseball glove thrash of Something Against You. Surfer Rosa does have its standout tracks and some moments which might be called filler in less capable hands. This isn't the case with Pixies though. I can't quite explain it. Sometimes you just need a momentary pause from depraved sexual practices, biblical lamentations and bestiality.

 

 

I'd like to amend that last post. I reviewed Something Against You on the internet with headphones. I've just corrected that horrific mistake and listened to it as it was meant to be heard and followed that by listening to Broken Face, another Pixies song I hadn't really listened to with ears before. Such a great exercise writing this blog.

 

 Both songs shimmy, squeal, howl and sway the way any truly great music should and does. They take Side One from three to four on to five and six in a quite seamless transition of noise, pace and sound. Then we're ready but hardly ready for five and six.

 

 

Surfer Rosa is very much about the joyous experience about having sex with someone. I've done that and hope you have. It's a nice, nice space. Surfer Rosa replicates that entirely. The great moment when you think your brain might explode through lack of imagination.

 

At the same time it's the reverse from sex. It's the objectification of it. Pretty close to pornography. Or else art. Francis Bacon stuff. Very clever, writing and playing. But Pixies were ultimately three blokes and Kim Deal and to be honest and get to the bottom of the band and how they operated, and their themes, you'd have to think about that.

 

It's ugly and clever art at the same point! No wonder Pixies didn't clean up but Kurt Cobain did with his great distillation and reversal of their soul, sound sex, looks and ideas. Much good that idea did him.

 

 

Listening to Pixies twenty five years after I listened to it first time in that attic room. Pixies haven't changed but perhaps I have. It's leaner, thinner, uglier, more real. Less sexy. Pared to the bone. Commerce. Where's your 10 dollars?

 

I didn't review the second side. I didn't review every song. Like I said. I was sick. So is the world. Pixies amongst others predicted that. They did it very, very well. I know I'm not doing them justice! But sometimes music consoles and warms. Sometimes it doesn't. Pixies are great. They just didn't do it for me this time.

 

 

 

 

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