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Jo Jo Redux

By Gary Mairs
You know Jonathan Richman: pie-eyed guy in a
striped sailor shirt, goofy looking, did the Stubby Kaye/Nat King
Cole narrating minstrel bit in There’s Something About Mary. Sings
straight from the adenoids, accompanied by his acoustic guitar
and a snare drummer, either plaintive love songs so earnest they
can make you wince or kiddie songs that no self-respecting kid
would stomach.
He’s plied this shtick for nearly 30 years
now, and every once in a while — about half of Back in
Your Life from 1979, a few songs from 1992’s I, Jonathan,
the entirety of
the great 1983
Jonathan Sings! — he gets it just right: a new set
of songs that marries his knack for childish wordplay and lyricism
to adult
subjects. This handful of records — and his absurdly enthusiastic
stage shows — sustain a cult that will put up with his worst
(and he can make your skin crawl) to get at his utterly unique
best.
From anyone else, I’d find his act tiresome.
Who’d want to listen to anything a 52 year old who calls himself “Jo
Jo” has
to say? It’s easy to miss the courage and aggression behind his
stance, the fact that he came to his arrested development the hard
way. For years he faced off angry fans who wanted to hear his “real
music”: the demos, produced by John Cale in ’72 and released
years later as The Modern Lovers, that guaranteed him his cult,
although he refused to play them in concert at all until recently.
As often as not, they’d come in yelling for “Pablo Picasso” and
leave singing “The Ice Cream Man.”
Some history, then.
Sometime around ’69, a teenaged Jonathan heard — and
then went straight to New York to meet — the Velvet Underground.
He was self-consciously straight, in the late-’60s meaning
of the term: he loathed drugs, saw hippies as conformist cowards
and celebrated the urban landscape for its brash, tacky energy
right when the counterculture was moving towards pastoralism. By
yoking the Velvets’ static rhythms and distorted, minimalist rock
and roll to his deeply unfashionable world view, he found a way
to toughen his message and, in the process, helped to create punk
rock. If he had accompanied his early songs with the folky strumming
and doo wop harmonies of his later period, he’d be remembered now
as that wimpy singer-songwriter with short hair and the funny song
about Picasso never getting called an asshole. But with Jerry Harrison’s
snarling, smoggy organ and Richman’s two chord fuzz barrage prodded
by the taut, charging rhythm section of Ernie Brooks and David
Robinson, his music was as aggressive (“What Goes On”-
and “Sister Ray”-streamlined and kicking) as his lyrics.
And
make no mistake, The Modern Lovers’ early songs were affronts to
the hip pieties of their time. “I’m Straight” is
no longer startling as a gesture; since Jonathan invented the stance,
preppy geeks like Harrison’s later employer David Byrne have taken
it to the bank. But the performance makes it clear that there was
no irony involved. “I’m certainly not stoned,” Jonathan
sneers, dripping contempt for “Hippie Johnny,” that
trendy guy who all the girls think is deep, and his band (which
comprised three hippie Johnnies in leather pants, long hair and,
one assumes, discreet drug habits) answers back with a rush of
noise that underlines his frustration and makes the gesture feel
heroic rather than merely petty. And in the era of “Father — I
want to kill you,” what could be more subversive than a song
that sounded like the Velvet Underground at their most amphetamine-crazed
yet featured the catchy hook line, “But I still love my parents”?
(While
recording their demos in Los Angeles, Jonathan Richman befriended
Gram Parsons, a hippie Johnny for the ages. After his overdose,
The Modern Lovers played his wake. Just imagine it: Don Henley,
Linda Ronstadt, hell, maybe even Keith Richards if he wasn’t
getting his blood replaced that day, all those cocaine cowboys
gathered
to mourn the passing of the man who invented country rock then
pissed his life away just as the zeitgeist was catching up with
him. Who takes the stage? A goofy naïf named Jo Jo and his
blaring proto-punk band, spitting out, “If these guys are
really that great, why can’t they take this world, and take
it straight?” Everyone has their dream concert, the gig they’d
give anything to have attended: Ornette Coleman at the Five Spot,
Dylan at Newport. This one’s mine.)
The legend around these recordings
is that they were too far ahead of their time for release. In fact,
the Modern Lovers were the
subject of a bidding war among the major labels: “Roadrunner” was
obviously a huge hit waiting to happen. However, when the time
came to re-record the material for a real debut, Jonathan had started
his descent into infantilism. The label backed off when he agreed
to record the older tunes but wouldn’t play them live. The band
trickled away (Harrison to Talking Heads, Robinson to the Cars)
as he insisted that they turn down or turn off entirely.
The demos
sat on the shelf until Beserkley, a California independent, signed
Richman’s new, infinitely sillier version of the band. They
purchased the demos and assembled nine of them into the first version
of The Modern Lovers in 1976, just before the release of his first
record by the new band.
This first version of the record is what
made Richman’s reputation, partly due to cover versions by John
Cale and the Sex Pistols.
Perfectly paced (especially the second side, which sandwiches two
stunning ballads between the band’s three fastest rockers), it’s
flawed only in its omissions. “I’m Straight” is absent,
as are the rest of the second set of demos recorded by Kim Fowley
after the Cale sessions. Two of Fowley’s songs showed up in 1980
on a Warner Brothers sampler and then ten more (mostly badly recorded
variant versions of the Cale material) on Mohawk’s 1981 Original
Modern Lovers. When Rhino released the Beserkley album on CD in
1989, they added the three most crucial Fowley songs, including “I’m
Straight.”
The British label Castle has just reissued the
album again, this time doubling the length of the original by adding
eight tracks.
Included are the three extras from the Rhino version, the two best
cuts from Original Modern Lovers (with vastly improved sound) and
great alternate versions of “Someone I Care About,” “Modern
World” and “Roadrunner.”
This is as close to
the perfect version of the material any noncompletist could hope
for. It captures every great moment they recorded in
the studio (Rounder’s Precise Modern Lovers Order adds
some sloppy but exciting live material, including several songs
that remain
unavailable otherwise) and makes the best argument possible for
their status as one of the greatest American bands. My only complaint
is pure niggling: there’s a gently loping version of “Roadrunner” from
a Berserkley compilation that ends with an astonishing stream of
babble — Greil Marcus quotes it verbatim in Lipstick Traces — that
would have ended the album on the perfect transitional note to
his future work.
These recordings are so powerful they’ve bought
Jonathan 30 years of good will from me. He’ll clearly never
hit these heights
again, not as long as he settles for bands that won’t talk back
when he tells them to shut up and turn down. But as idiotic as
he can be, there’s something inspiring in his determination to
follow his muse, even if it leads him to sing odes to chewing
gum wrappers. I’ve seen him perform a dozen times, and I’d be there
tonight if he were playing. I always come away from his shows
a
little depressed that he hasn’t lived up to that first album
while being stunned (and a little embarrassed) by his courage:
he’s so
willing to expose himself, to say something gauche and awkward,
to make an ass of himself. Which is to say that he has, in his
doggedly idiosyncratic way, delivered on every promise The
Modern Lovers made.

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