MOT80s54: Modern Lovers ‘88

Weirdos are doing it for themselves.

Published in

Music of the 80s

8 min readFeb 12, 2022

Jonathan Richman

Jonathan Richman is genuinely singular. His approach, style, career, audience, and music — all singular, all striving for purity, all sort of funny. He’s not what anyone is ever expecting, and I’ve never seen anyone like him. I love him. Here’s a quick demonstration of the man in action (in the 90s):

The Shit

Richman is a musician and performer in his soul. From his late teen-hood on he has played music and performed, very determinedly only ever doing what he wants to do. This is why he’s not more famous, I am sure — he could never be a part of a machine, which is what it takes. He has never stopped, though. Like Johnny Cash or Duke Ellington, he plays and tours regardless of circumstances.

In a way JR is very simple to understand: he wants to play his music (basically 50s rock and roll) and perform, and he only does what he wants to do. He’s awkward but confident, forceful, and focused. There used to be a code for subtly checking if people were in a certain outsider/insider group — like being a friend of Dorothy or smoking weed (“Is he cool?”). We need one for the neurodiverse — cuz we weirdos recognize each other, but it’s only starting to be okay to just accept and be overt about it. I strongly suspect Jonathan Richman goes to David Byrne’s birthday party, if you know what I mean. Jonathan Richman is not very cool, except that he feels really cool himself, which makes him cooler than cool.

But I bet he’s a little trying.

I’m going to explore Modern Lovers ’88 — a brilliant record that is my favourite 1980s record of Richman’s. But first, to understand him you kind of need to know what his deal is.

What Is His Deal?

His career-narrative is fascinating — it’d be a great novel: he was born in the 1950s and comes of age in late 1960s Boston. He falls famously in love with the Velvet Underground’s culture-expanding music, and then starts a milestone band of his own: The Modern Lovers, who stand among the key players in pre-punk history.

They had a good reputation live and gained interest from labels, but between that period and the release of their record three full years later, Richman changes. When audiences come to see the band, it didn’t really exist anymore. Something weirder had taken its place.

Richman relays his side of what happened — and how he went from being a punk progenitor to a nylon-string strumming singer of rock and roll children’s songs — on his epic post-modern 1991 track “Monologue about Bermuda.” Listen to it below, or, for now, read this sentence:

Jonathan Richman was about being purely true to himself, and that sounded like punk rock for a minute, then that sounded like something else.

Here’s him telling it, accompanied by a slideshow somebody made. His fans are like that — dedicated AF. I once wrote a piece (in fact I just found it on the Wayback Machine!) about just this one song, in which Richman interrupts himself to have a conversation, plays another song, explains a different band, and then resumes the original song without ever breaking the spell. It is fantastic.

Richman’s stubborn personality was there through all these developments: in his drive and dedication, his primal, unpretentious* music, and the switch to a nearly opposite musical style at the peak of his fame. Famously, he faced the expectations of the annoyed audiences during the tour behind The Modern Lovers by goading them purposefully.

If they opposed one of the newer songs — say, “I’m a Little Dinosaur” — he played it again and again, determined to get them to give in to what he was doing. I’m sure the end of that story is “most of them left pretty irritated” — it’d be a tiny fraction of an audience ready for a big genre switch, and another tiny fraction who were prepared to enjoy some kids’ songs. But his personal power is on display regardless.

*Unpretentious is a strange word for it. It is unpretentious in the same way that a person who walks down the middle of a busy street in Toronto dancing in an outlandish costume of feather boas is unpretentious. I’ve heard him described as “faux-naive.”

In Action

I’ve seen his audience control in action — it is formidable. He did a tour with Vic Chesnutt (my longtime favourite artist) in 2009, and I was excited to take some friends who hadn’t seen either act play live before.

A Vic Chesnutt Aside

Chesnutt opened, solo onstage; his music requires listening — like Mary Margaret OHara’s does. One is not going to enjoy the show if one is talking through it (and neither am I, you asshole). The hipster crowd were all on their phones and/or talking loudly through his whole set, like narcissistic teenagers. I was fuming.

Chesnutt sang, especially toward the end of his life, like a bird in a tree in a desert. He held notes when he felt like holding them as long as it felt good. He took his time. He had been exploring a lovely wordless falsetto and was enjoying it that night. Strumming on his acoustic guitar — his strum hand worked when it wanted to, and he played haltingly a lot of the time — he was not only hard to hear over the yapping crowd, but must have been keenly aware that he was performing for people who couldn’t care less. It was brutal — the crowd had paid to be in this quiet listening venue and then acted like they were at a county fair waiting for Rick Springfield to play that hit. And so he gave up after a while, said something like “Alright, fuck it,” and tried to leave the stage. But he was in his wheelchair, and the stage had stairs, so he had to sit up there for some time before his people came to carry him down.

It was shameful, and I guarantee you the idiots who were talking while he sang juiced miles of cred by claiming to have been there “just three months ago!” when they learned Chesnutt had taken his own life. I saw him on the sidewalk after, and apologized for the crowd. (Happily, he returned to Toronto a month later, with a large, sensitive, powerful band — Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra, mostly — and that was a majestic, triumphant show. Unhappily, he still died that Christmas.)

Back to This Hipster Asshole Show

When Jonathan Richman came out, he knew what had happened. He’s a louder act, and had his drummer Tommy Larkins with him, so he could be heard. But the first thing he did was take the mic stands off to the side. Then started playing, and the crowd kept talking, so he played quieter, and asked Larkins to pull it back, and he walked right to the front of the stage — still singing and playing — and stared at the audience. He smiled the whole time, but it was crystal clear: if they wanted a show, they would need to shut up and lean in. And they did. It was a very interesting thing to watch. He didn’t scold anybody or wait. He just turned it down and made it clear he was waiting.

He is a powerful personality.

Post-Modern Lovers

His willful self-determination is abundantly evident on record: his post-Modern Loversrecords are fucking weird — annoying even. There are things I like among the songs, but that is largely because they are funny: “Government Center”’s earnest cartoon delivery, and “I’m a Little Airplane”’s silly rock and roll. But his performance of sincerity — which I believe to be genuine — is bonkers. He has the energy of a hippie cultist or a Hare Krishna, and his taste is bizarre. It is courageous the way a shitty performance at a bar mitzvah or an open stage is courageous: you shouldn’t shit on it, but you’re not having a blast while it’s happening. In my cranky opinion, Richman takes about ten years to hit a stride with it.

Modern Lovers ‘88

He hits that stride with Modern Lovers ’88. Check:

He sings about dancing, parties, girls, and being out at night — and that’s about it! He still sings about that stuff today, 30 years later. On ’88, he’s learned to play a saxophone like he plays the guitar — for the riff, for the rhythm, propulsively — and brings it in for “California Desert Party.”

He sings a brilliant song about a utopia, “New Kind of Neighbourhood.” You’ll find it, he explains, if you look for “the little flags” and talk to people on the way. People there dance on the lawn, and nobody stares “like something’s wrong.” In Richman’s utopia, they have dancing parties late at night.

The rest of the record is solid rock’n’roll. It doesn’t veer off into bizarreness as his albums can (go explore — you’ll see). All told, as much as I love him, there are really only one or two records a decade I like a lot — but those are brilliant.

For the decades that follow Modern Lovers ’88, he’ll keep singing those couple of songs (missing the old days, parties, love, hot nights). He’ll sing them in Spanish, he’ll sing them country-style, he’ll “pop” them up. He’ll sing for children, and he’ll sing (recently) in Ojibwe. He’ll sing them in a tree — see his appearance in There’s Something About Mary. He’ll put out whatever he wants, thank you very much, and he hopes you like it. Full stop.

Live in Concert

If you get a chance to see him play live, you have to go. It’s a bizarre show, but in the most wonderful sense of that word. He is profoundly present, but like a fully present alien. He plays essentially as a duo with his longtime drummer Larkins, and their interplay is musically perfect. Richman has no shame, in the best way (and the most embarrassing way), and strives to be swept away by what he’s doing at every moment. He vamps, he uses his face like Chaplin did, and he will often put his guitar down mid-song so he can show off his more complicated dance moves. His audience, often, are equally weird, excited, and present. Here — watch this performance from his DVD Meet Me in the Plaza, and you’ll get the picture.

Jonathan Richman demands that you loosen up. Don’t be uptight — go see him, prepared to surrender. If you can’t do that, Modern Lovers 88 is a great place to jump in.

Thanks for reading. If you like this, please share it.

peace out

jep

Other recommended Richman albums, in case you want to dive in:

Modern Lovers (1976)

I Jonathan (1992)

I’m So Confused (1998)

This video is adorable. I’d never seen it til now.