The true sound of a music inadvertently built for tomorrow. After with The Velvet Underground who created the reason for their existence, The Modern Lovers were the second most future rock group that ever existed. Sometime in 1971, or thereabouts, Jonathan Richman invented the sound of the underground, ten years into the future. That dark, scuzzy rock music became the nuts and bolts for so much of the sound of the late seventies, early eighties. In their first album you can hear references to every type of indie music that came in its wake. Jonathan recreated it, in his vision of what The Velvet Underground would sound like in the seventies.I’ve heard tapes of them playing live and they sound exactly like nearly every group that came out of the north west of england 1978-80.
The Modern Lovers first LP had been recorded with Velvets bass, viola player John Cale in Los Angeles in 1972. A mass of record company interest, notably from A&M and Warner Brothers, suggested the group was about to break into the mainstream. Knowing how it all panned out it seems inconceivable that The Modern Lovers music would appear on a major label, such is the nature of the music they created.
But it sort of fell apart anyway after their visit to Bermuda (Bang! Bang! Lulu!) and Jonathan’s damascene conversion to the ways of easy listening, for the want of a better phrase brought about the end of their first incarnation.
The first lp, despite being made up of variouis sessions, is without doubt one of the greatest records any body in any world will ever hear. Groundbreaking wonder in every note from end to end. It contains all those magical ingredients that a young person looking for the next phase will actually need. That surliness, indifference, a new kind of belligerence. It stuck out like a sore thumb among the long hair, flares and extended guitar workouts of 1970’s American rock music. With its Velvet Underground darkness, it was a message from another time, with a word or two about what, perhaps, was to come.
It connected instantly with the protopunk melee here and in the USA, pushing all the anti-rock buttons required to render it one of the few vital connections between the old world and the new dystopian future. It is a masterpiece of leftfield, alternative music, head and shoulders above whatever it’s perceived competitors may have been at the time. Nothing else -despite numerous efforts over the years- sounds like it all.
Pablo Picasso is a scratchy, lo-fi piece of modern art, every bit as as valid as Pablo himself. It chugs along at a mid-pace, Richman’s drill delivery taking it neither up nor down. Just there. It features one of the band’s very best recordnigs and Cale reprises his hammering piano technique he used so well on The Stooges’ ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’. The song itself bypasses praising the great man’s epoch making, earth shattering contributions to modern art, instead it extols the prowess Picasso had as a magnet for the ladies. For this, Richman declares Pablo Picasso never got called an asshole. Not like you.
Cale himself recorded the song for his own ‘Helen Of Troy’ album, which was released in November 1975, almost a year before the Modern Lovers debut. Much later David Bowie also released a decent cover on his 2003 album Reality. Its spirit of Punk and its contribution to the future gave it, and the whole Modern Lovers album, a life that wouk not have been foreseen in the wasteland of the 1970’s.
As records go that can and will -and should, if i’m honest- illuminate a young person’s life, that debut has few peers. The timing of its its release cannot be understated, Jonanthan may have moved on to more seemingly esoteric stuff, but that LP is a celebration of how different a group can be in the face of extreme adversity and, it must be said, commercial indifference . Pablo Picasso was not an asshole. But he is dead. Jonathan is very much alive.
enjoy. x
bernie@happening-things.com 