Yesterday was also the birthday of Jonathan Richman, famed
leader of the Modern Lovers, who is 63 this year. Richman’s existence came to
my notice because John Cale covered today’s song on his 1975 album Helen of Troy. The version of the Modern
Lovers who created this track, and who worked with Cale as producer to create
demos in 1972, was already history by then. Jonathan Richman continues to this
day, and his band is sometimes called the Modern Lovers, but it’s not the band
on the original album, which included Jerry Harrison, later of Talking Heads,
and David Robinson, later of The Cars.
So, though I knew this song, I knew it in Cale’s very insistent
and much more abrasive version, with a vocal brusquer and edgier. Didn’t get
around to hearing Richman’s take on it till much later—this century. That’s when
I came across a used CD of The Modern
Lovers album (which was first released in 1976), with bonus tracks, and picked it up and immediately took a
liking to the laconic vocal stylings of Jonathan Richman.
There’s a very
quirky, kid-like quality to Richman’s writing and singing—even more so after
this album. Cale gave to the tracks he worked on that quality that Richman
sought—comparable to the three-chord simplicity of many Velvet Underground
tracks, but with a sonic richness that comes from the way the parts are brought
together. It feels tense and neurotic, because, we might say, when a grown-up person sounds so kid-like—I’m avoiding “childlike”
because, though some of his later songs are that, the songs on The Modern Lovers have more of a tough kid edge—we may say that he’s
a bit “off.” Richman maintains a pose
that makes these songs seem like the worldview of someone about 15 or 16,
poised on the big vertiginous plunge into getting a driver’s license (like the
song “Roadrunner”) and cruising, wishing the girls he wants to impress “could
not resist his stare.”
The talent, ascribed to Picasso, that girls can’t
resist his stare is perfect as a dream for that still underage but no longer a child view
of things. Inarticulate, awkward, just wanting that the very manifestation of
desire and presence would tip the scales in his favor. To try to pick up girls and
not get called an asshole—is there any quality more desirable? Any greater
proof of manliness or savoir faire or whatever the magic open sesame might be that gets women to “turn the color of an avocado” at one’s mere approach? The song is made even more charming by the
little asides: “Pablo Picasso never got called an asshole / Not like you” or “Not
in New York.”
Which is a cool way of bringing together the savvy of the
artist—Picasso—and the savvy of New York, where the art scene does thrive and
where, we imagine, any real artist would immediately be appreciated and, of
course, get laid all he wants. To put things even more in perspective, Richman
(but not Cale) points out that Picasso was “only 5 foot 3.” That fact and the
notion that Picasso drives an Eldorado, a Cadillac and the status car of the cruising burgher, are
funny bits that characterize the singer and his idea of what makes a man a man.
The song’s groove has the relentless feel of the horny guy
doggedly stalking his babe of choice even as she continues to elude him. Or
maybe he’ll manage to make her, and “Be not a schmuck / Be not obnoxious / Be
not bell bottom bummer or an asshole.” It seems unlikely, but there’s always
another chance. This is nerd rock, even more so than that of Talking Heads,
which, come to think of it, Lou Reed’s Velvet’s music could have been if Lou
hadn’t been so determined to sample the Wild Side. Think of a song like “Lisa
Says” with its “why am I so shy” musings, or even how awkward the smack buyer
feels in “Waiting for My Man,” or the jibes at losers of the singer of “Pablo
Picasso” variety in “Run Run Run.” One imagines that Richman may well have seen
himself in the purveyor of “The Gift,” Waldo Jeffers.
Anyway, it’s springtime, time for flowers and bugs and birds
to return, and time for guys to try to pick up girls and get called assholes.
OK, this is it.
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