Modern Lovers, “I’m Straight” (1973)

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This curiosity was not part of the original Modern Lovers album by Jonathan Richman & co., home of “Roadrunner.” Most of that now-classic LP was produced by John Cale in 1971 and 1972. “I’m Straight” comes from sessions in 1973 organized, overseen, and/or produced by the notorious Kim Fowley. It has been appended as a bonus track on reissues of the album since the Rhino release in 1986. In many ways the song hasn’t aged well. The term “straight” now refers more often to sexual orientation or secondarily an inclination toward the conventional. A third sense is honesty. The sense of it as drug-free, which Richman is on about here, has faded since the ‘70s; “clean” and “sober” are more the favored terms now. Richman was still accessing an aggressive persona derived in part no doubt from his heroes the Velvet Underground. But his own variations are all him. The singer in this song is so shy he keeps hanging up before completing a phone call to a woman he wants. But it’s a kind of calculated assault too because he knows she already has a boyfriend—Hippie Johnny by name—and he won’t respect it. “He’s always stoned, he’s never straight,” is his point. If I had to guess, the drug in question here is most likely cannabis—marijuana, weed, tea, whatever. That’s what “stoned” (and “dope”) usually referred to, at least in my circles in 1973. The singer is surprisingly aggressive: “Now look, I like him too, I like / Hippie Johnny / But I'm straight / And I want to take his place.” His voice is deep, growling. It sounds like the microphone is inside his mouth. And it is full-on unapologetic in its judgment of the stoner lifestyle. At the time, that put the singer arguably rowing against the current. Call him an iconoclast. Sometimes I object to the situation it describes, stealing girlfriends and the preening rejection of weed. It’s certainly unusual, but that can be said about much of Richman’s catalog.

5. Jonathan Richman, "That Summer Feeling" (1983)

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I like how Jonathan Richman comes at us like a kind of wide-eyed innocent, an outright naif even, charming and boyish and silly. But let him close and the game becomes more evident. Perhaps nowhere more so than in "That Summer Feeling," from the 1983 album Jonathan Sings! The whole album is worth tracking down. The song that opens it is a kind of nursery inversion of Alice Cooper's "School's Out," seemingly all about the free and easy pleasures of the warm season, with a lot of free and easy sing-songy rhymes to move it along: "When the cool of the pond makes you drop down on it / When the smell of the lawn makes you flop down on it / When the teenage car gets the cop down on it." But this is no nostalgia trip. This is about the kinds of things you live with all your life, propelled against your will through time, the pain and regrets and longing that inevitably accrue. He's serious and he makes it plain as sunshine: "But if you wait until you're older / A sad resentment will smolder one day / And then this summer feeling will come haunt you / Then that summer feeling will come taunt you / That summer feeling will hurt you / Later in your life." Who is Jonathan Richman and what does he want? What is he telling us? I'm still not entirely sure, and I'm not convinced he could even articulate it himself. But he's working on the deep levels when he's at his best, and just like that summer feeling, if you listen close enough, he's going to haunt you the rest of your life.

8. Modern Lovers, "Pablo Picasso" (1972)

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Before Jonathan Richman became the spritely endearing saint we have known today and for the past many decades he was some kind of a rock 'n' roll demon, the genuine article. Most of the surviving evidence exists on the essential album The Modern Lovers. It's true that the rock 'n' roll is still strong with him, and always has been, as I witnessed again for myself just a couple weeks ago. He was playing an acoustic guitar as usual and accompanied only by Tommy Larkins on a lovely shambolic drumkit, traveling the land with a compelling polyglot message of inner peace and childlike fun. "Pablo Picasso," by contrast, is raw, frustrated, and gripping, with Frankenstein rhythms and a corkscrew electric guitar that drills for the brainstem. I love it insanely. I love it to pieces. Arguably it fits with his series of latter songs about artists such as Vermeer, Van Gogh, and Walter Johnson, but not really: "Well some people try to pick up girls / And get called assholes / This never happened to Pablo Picasso." That's the gist. "Well he was only five foot three / But girls could not resist his stare / Pablo Picasso never got called an asshole / Not in New York." It's laugh-out-loud funny once you realize what he's doing and I never get tired of it as I never get tired of anything else on that great album. A few years ago, again with Larkins, I saw him do a version of it, but he's made it more "family-friendly" now, clipping off the swear word entirely, which I think is a bit unfortunate. But Jonathan Richman gets to do what Jonathan Richman wants to do. Those are the rules around here and the least any of us can do is comply.

Note: Countdown to wrap up next month (finally—I promise!) in order to enable me the opportunity for holiday cheering und so weiter.

67. Jonathan Richman & the Modern Lovers, "Affection" (1979)

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After the classic proto-punk dimensions of the first Modern Lovers album, the one with "Roadrunner," the one that John Cale produced, I used to wonder how serious Jonathan Richman was about the shtick that came on the '70s Beserkley albums that followed: Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, Rock 'n' Roll with the Modern Lovers, and Back in Your Life. I acquired all four of those albums out of a cutout bin on one memorable day. Those cutesy songs about ice cream and bugs and Martians and abominable snowmen—was it some kind of joke? Was he mocking us? These questions were answered once and for all, as far as I'm concerned, when I arrived at this song. He is not only serious, he is deadly serious, and what he's concerned about (then and even now, still, more than 30 years on) is the drought of human connection that is killing us alive. "Well, people all over the world are starvin' just for affection," he says. Sings. "Well, but to me this ain't funny. To me this is real." It's not easy to give up the distancing routines that help protect the most vulnerable parts of ourselves, and Richman himself is not immune from the temptation. As much as anything that's what he's doing in his self-consciously playful goofs, perhaps less so when he loosens up to rock 'n' roll, the facility for which remains strong in him. But the message of this song is the bedrock message he has to tell, and rarely is it distilled with such precision to its essence. "Well, there's telephones, televisions, cars, yes / And there's records and books and magazines for you / But poor affection sits there standing in the corner," Richman sings. Coleridge put it another way—"Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink"—but it amounts to the same thing.

Because Her Beauty Is Raw and Wild (2008)

In some way that I cannot entirely explain, Jonathan Richman appears to be back in my life. It started with a show he happened to play in Olympia late in 2008 (promoting this, I guess, at least inasmuch as any of his shows are ever in support of product). "Please," I thought, indulging a nostalgic fantasy, "play 'That Summer Feeling,' play 'Pablo Picasso,' and for gods sake leave your shirt on." My wishes came true! And more—the show closed on an unexpected second encore, with me out of position and halfway to the door, standing there nervously shifting from foot to foot to see if this was going to be worth hanging around for, as he played, softly, so softly you could hear people rustling in the crowd, what turned out to be the most devastating song of the evening (in an evening full with more than its share), "As My Mother Lay Lying." At that moment my own father lay lying, three months away from his death, though I couldn't know that then any more than Richman as I stood there in the dark quiet and absorbed the words, the profound impact of them deepening by the moment. Now I'm starting to catch up with what Richman has been doing these past 25 years. All I happened to notice going by were the cameos in There's Something About Mary, which I was happy to see, but otherwise he's got a good couple handfuls or more of albums I barely know. Often accompanied, as in the movie, only by drummer Tommy Larkins, whose phlegmatic presence is a nice foil to Richman, many seem to include songs explicitly celebrating one artist or another—here it's "No One Was Like Vermeer"—a number of foreign language selections (here, "Es Como El Pan" and "Le Printemps des Amoreux est Venu"), and the usual silly but often endearing foofaraw (here, "The Lovers Are Here and They're Full of Sweat"). He takes a surprisingly hard line against antidepressants and the culture of eternal happiness in "When We Refuse to Suffer," which actually gets two treatments here, and indeed also opened both of the shows I have seen in the past couple of years. He appears to be very serious about this, and there are other songs in that vein as well (more for me to research, not sure if they're brand new or from albums I don't know well). He even includes a Modern Lovers cover on this, "Old World." I still like the Modern Lovers version better, and ditto with "Pablo Picasso" for that matter, whose language is unfortunately and ridiculously cleaned up in the latter-day version. But it's nice of him to take us Modern Lovers clingers-on into consideration that way. If you want Jonathan Richman back in your life, take it from me, this is as good a place to start as any, and worth your time too. I find myself thinking, once again, that he's maybe some kind of saint on earth.

Jonathan Sings! (1983)

By the time Sire decided to take a chance on him, Jonathan Richman was pretty much the way we know him now -- the goofy ageless Gallant, who enthusiastically belts nursery rhymes bare-chested and acts, or seems to be acting, like someone flickering awfully close to mental illness. In spite of Richman's undeniable charm he hasn't come across as anything close to real for decades, except in extremely brief flashes. A music journalist I knew managed to get one of the few interviews granted anyone on the tour in support of this, and the scene he described was bizarre, with Richman repeatedly breaking down into tears at any question of his motives, no matter how gentle. So I guess you have to take him at face value. Me, I got a good deal of pleasure from his appearance in There's Something About Mary; any time he essays rock 'n' roll (as in Chuck Berry covers) it's worth pausing to appreciate; and for all the acutely winsome folderol about mean bugs and jolly Martians throughout his solo career, he's still capable of stunners like "That Summer Feeling." I mean, take a listen to that one and just try to deny that it hurts.

The Modern Lovers (1976)

"Pablo Picasso" In retrospect a spectacular confluence -- past and future sidemen and principals of the Velvet Underground, Cars, and Talking Heads, with Jonathan Richman more or less in the starring role. Recorded years before it was released, and with legend claiming Richman was such a fanatic for the Velvet Underground that he attended more of their shows than they did, one really is left wondering almost painfully what could have been. There's not much trace here of the spritely elf that Richman would become. Instead, there's this adenoidal guy who keeps knocking them out of the park: "Roadrunner," "Astral Plane," "Old World," "Pablo Picasso," "She Cracked," "Girl Friend," "Modern World." I'm not like some who kick about what came after, but I can sure see how it's like Lou Reed's solo career without the Velvet Underground. Something vital is missing -- and missed. Which is all by way of seeing this is absolutely essential.

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