I come home from dance class around 8pm and it’s already dark. It hasn’t been lately, but tonight the fog helped accelerate the official pending end of long summer days. I stash my bike in the back area behind my building and walk up the narrow wooden steps to my apartment and I can see the neighbors through their rear kitchen window.
My next-door neighbors are millionaires, mildly famous notables in the educational reality television world, and the kitchen of the much-bought-and-renovated house they live in is all silvery steel and marble and sparkle. There’s one of those big steel hose attachments in the sink, like the one that spouted water so hot it burned my hands when I washed dishes as a young busser in a restaurant in the Marina a couple decades ago. Through the small square window above the neighbors’ sink I see a woman with brown hair and an indiscernable face manipulating the hose like a snake tamer would, dancing with plateware in the light of the shine from a polished countertop espresso machine. She speaks to someone unseen and her mouth moving is part of her dance.
When I open the back door to my apartment, sound leaks through. Max is already here, waiting for me after work to eat dinner and watch a movie. He’s put a record on, choosing one from the large stack next to the stereo I keep lined up for future writing fodder and cranking it up louder than I usually do. Overhead the music is murky with complexity: funny sounds, guitar lines made with electronic assistance, and low, singsong vocals.
Max and I enter into a chorus of “Hello?” “Hello!” echoing down my long hallway from the living room where he is to the back of the kitchen, where I am. Unused to the acoustics of my apartment, Max isn’t able to determine where the sound of my voice is originating in the mix beneath the blaring stereo. I see him silhouetted in the frame of the hallways doors: beneath the soft yellow light from the lamp by the couch he looks solid, and his white shirt glows orange like his hair. He goes to the bay window in the living room on the streetside of the apartment, opens the window to the quiet blue night, and looks outside. “Hello?”
For two seconds I am in this moment between windows. The neighbor dances with the silver stainless steel and my sweetheart in yellow warmth searches for me on the street below and I am watching everyone and hearing, over everything, the sonic space-time wonk of Brian Eno and Robert Fripp and some of their buddies playing in the dress-up box and declaring: I’ll take your wall of sound, your riches and your lovesongs and your occasional keyboard, and I’ll put ‘em front and center. Shine your spotlight on sound and have some fun with us, baby.
I’m not going to “review” Here Come the Warm Jets today. It’s famous, it’s on a zillion Best Albums Ever lists, and people who like rock music either like Eno or are not interested in Eno or reference Eno in order to appear to be more record-geeky than they really are or not. Find this album in your local record store or your online music sharing thingy, keep your preconceptions to a minimum, and listen to it at a very, very high volume.
I’m going to finish my coffee and think about the small moments, the minutes when albums and songs push into your life in unexpected, desired ways. The sight of my living room windows from the street below them as I approach my apartment, the lights on and yellow in the blue night fog and the window blinds turned open by the person waiting for me inside and the stereo, loud and warm.
I want to talk about sincerity. About Jonathan Richman when he stands before a crowd, small or large, and sings and talks. Some artists can’t help but be themselves, all the time.
Modern Lovers are beloved as punk-ish three-chord kids who sang about things like rock and roll, growing up, and art. Precursors to lots of “punk” and “art rock” of the 70s. Tight electric guitar riffs. Certainly tinged with New York punk influence, the Velvet Underground, New York Dolls, etc., but not quite as down about the world as those wearied CBGB kids. Yet not hippies. Suburb kids, “art rock” kids before “indie rock” was a phrase who somehow found their way to being produced by John Cale.
This album is iconic for a lot of people I know. One of the greatest all time, they say. It’s got classic punk/rock style, and folks often a bit older than me remember it from high school or from an older sibling as the epitome of cool and against-the-grain-ness. And it was, it is. It’s slick and messy in all the right ways. It’s catchy as hell. It’s rockin’ – guitars and bar chords and all – but also surprisingly mellow, with organ backings and a jaunty relaxed pace. And the lyrics, and the singing, are something altogether cleaner. The band was fronted by a deep-voiced boy named Jonathan Richman whose lyrical vision was at the same time simple and far-reaching. Astral planes, positive iterations of love, witty talking-singing style.
I didn’t get into Modern Lovers until I got into Jonathan Richman’s solo stuff — around 1998, living in New York, dating a boy who loved singer-songwriter-electric-guitar guys and also happened to be from Grass Valley, where Richman lived. When I first heard this album, I realized I had heard it many times before, probably in high school, but couldn’t place when it entered my sphere of influence. I knew Richman and Lovers superfans, but I wasn’t really one of them. I just liked his songs, when I heard them, and I got this CD, and then later the vinyl reissue, and kept them around.
As an object, this record looks like a record every punk and indie rock enthusiast should have in their foundational collection. It’s pretty hip in style and sound – stark graphic design, chord progressions that are equally minimal yet rich. And these kids on the inside cover looking like they’re trying to be tough are a classic of the punk-band-photo genre. But here’s the hitch:
They’re not angry. They still love the 50s, and they still love the old world. They don’t understand why Pablo Picasso could behave the way he behaved and still get girls. They love Massachusetts, for chrissakes.
Modern Lovers as the band recorded on this album didn’t really exist by the time the album was released. It’s complicated and I don’t really know the whole story, but basically: It’s 1970-ish. Jonathan Richman is really into the Velvet Underground. In Boston, he gets together some friends, students, to play music and they get really popular as a live band, make some recordings, including with John Cale, and then break up. (They are basically a student band, after all.) Then the record comes out, and they become even more influential (famous). Some of them by this time have moved on, to be in other great other bands that sort of sound like the Modern Lovers at times— most notably Cars (drummer David Robinson) and Talking Heads (organist/keyboarder Jerry Harrison). But Jonathan Richman keeps singing, fronting different “Modern Lovers” iterations but really just being his awkward, positive self in front of different backup groups. This all happens before 1976.
While it is likely that listeners and fans hear some grains of sarcasm in the Modern Lovers’ love for things like “the old world” and “the 50s,” Richman’s later work progressively eliminates that potential. His lyrics are entirely without layers, told as stories or observations or wishes of the person singing them. Over years he gets quirkier and quirkier, more and more pure in his approach to songwriting. Almost childlike in presence and lyrics. He scales down over decades, playing now with only an acoustic guitar and a single drum. He gets some flack for being a bit too quirky in some circles. He sings in halting Spanish and Italian, because he gets bored with English. He takes up flamenco-style guitar, gets folksier. He prefers to perform in smaller venues, bars and pubs where he does several nights instead of one big place, one big show.
Now, when I watch him, as I do once every year or so, I often almost cringe. Richman, after all these years, still disturbs what we generally assume are the sensibilities of rock and roll culture. How can someone be that nice and be making rock music? How can a songwriter be that precious, that blatantly fucking sincere about everything, and not be faking it? How can he really think positively about the world for so many decades, really not be posturing like every performer in the world, really taking things at face value and then writing insanely catchy rock songs about them? Can someone really be that simple, but still that good at guitar? Sometimes it’s just too much for this city rock girl. Too precious, too oddly childlike.
But still, I go see him. I don’t own many of his records—mostly just this one, although my sweetheart has some of the solo albums and I really like them (especially the Spanish one). Because I’d rather see this guy than dozens of the young trying-too-hard bands out there who claim him as an influence yet don’t seem to really listen to what he’s saying. What Jonathan Richman says to me is: Some artists have no choice but to be themselves. Sincerity and all. So I will keep watching him every time he shambles onto the stage at the MakeOut Room or the Knitting Factory or some house party in Grass Valley with that goofy, just-a-little-bit-off grin.
Because every time, every show, about halfway through his last set, I forget to be critical. I forget to doubt his positivity and his onstage demeanor and I remember to listen. I listen to the songs and I can hear the thoughts, out loud, of a real and complicated and highly unique person, who loves the world and sometimes gets sad and angry but really, actually, loves the world. And has mastered the style of song he writres. And still sometimes can make me, too, believe. I love the old world. I love Massachusetts. I wanna meet you on the astral plane, Jon, because wherever that is, it looks like a fucking good time.
I am learning to love the sun. I never did before. I am a child of clouded ocean breezes; there are still places where the sun makes my skin balloon, pimple, rash. There are places to sit in the shade. There are big straw hats.
I am learning to love the sun and this to my surprise did not happen in the many streetside summers of Manhattan, peeling the dirt off freshly shaven legs with an idle fingernail in the harsh relief of the air conditioned subway car and emerging like smoke from the grates in tandem with the heat. This did not happen as sun emanated from the pavement after dark like the twisted cousin of a remembered breeze. It did not happen in hot nights, cool bars, or hotter clubs. It never happened like the avant garde never happened for me, not in all those Junes learning major chords from sweaty boys.
But now I am learning to love the sun and this began in Portugal, really, chasing wildfires under pine trees far from any buildings at all. On my bicycle pushing wheels towards afternoon rivers as the only respite ahead, in the silence of no-wind and flies sucking salt from my pores, heat from my forehead, strength from my calves and we looked at the melting pavement and kept, going, up. The realization when you live outdoors that a ceiling is also shade.
I am learning to love the sun as my city grows hotter, fog held back beyond banks of heat waves in a place where heat waves never come in June. I love the sun walking on that side of the street for once, at outdoor concerts under useless umbrellas, through new tank tops and toe-peeping shoes, and with a conscious and teeth-clenched decision to just man up and embrace the splayed-out layerlessness of it.
I should learn to love the sun the way my father does, not as a bronzed natural compatibility but as the thing that makes other things grow; to help that process, you need to be in it.
I yearn to love the sun, too, there in Portugal and here in the garden, in a muscular way: unburdened by softness or damp or flesh.
So I am learning to love the sun slowly, by tasting it and smiling and pushing further into it, under it, these rivers of sweat as indicators of athletic light loving.
Her voice is rough and sweet at the same time. It possess many qualities of 80s hard rock, yet still sounds deeply entrenched in the 70s-ness of itself. A present pop sensibility, complete with possibly ill-advised trendiness in certain choices, mixed with an un-smoothable quality that remains slightly raw no matter how much it’s produced. Lyrical allusions to pain and prisons, love and imagination, bad reputations and dreams. Hints of power plays without overt political references. Partying hard. Janis Joplin, meet Joan Jett. Suzi Quatro’s on the turntable today.
Here’s who she is: A bass player and singer. She was in an all-girl rock band in the 70s called Fanny. She ended up moving to the UK and most of her records were released there. She got popular in Europe; not so much in the USA. She was clearly a sartorial influence on Joan Jett. This album, Your Mama Won’t Like Me, was not a hit for her, but moderate success came later. My friend Michele introduced me to Susi Quatro in Portland when I was having a girl group moment – listening only to The Runaways and The Shirelles for about a month straight. Michele just was like, hey, if you like that Joan Jett type of stuff you should check this girl out – bass player in the 70s, singer, rocker. And I did. And I danced to it. And I loved it.
I loved how it’s so seventies, complete with wakka-wakka guitar and horn section, but then the guitar gets plain old chunky-bar-chords-distorted-straight-up-punk every now and then, and Susi’s bass comes in and… yeah, it’s danceable, and it’s tough, sexy, and poppy. And a little bit funky. It’s also rather clean sounding – maybe that’s the Britishness poking through, as well as the surprisingly unsexy cover of “Fever” on the second side – for what it purports to be, a hard leather-wearin’ rock and roll record. This record is a classic pop packaging conundrum: all strung up to be one thing – hard-ish rock – but really offering listeners something much more complex by allowing the popular sonic influences and personaly of its era to seep through.
I get the impression that some folks like to like Suzi Quatro these days because she’s a bit undiscovered still to post-70s generations of American indie rockers, and because she’s sort of hip in her not-quite-awesomeness – “Everyone’s heard of Joan Jett, but have you heard of this lady rocker?” And what’s not to like—she is a rock lady in a man’s rock world, a girl bass player kickin’ out the jams successfully decades before Kim Deal stole our hearts, and you can still glimpse the real toughness in her even under all that industry packaging.
I was listening to Stevie Wonder’s Talking Book yesterday, because my friend Paula once said that album is summertime and because it was effing hot here this week and sunshine goes with Stevie. For other people it’s other albums, but for me Talking Book embodies the seventies, musically. (Keeping in mind that I was either not-alive or a baby in the seventies– for people who were actually out of diapers in that epic decade, there is certainly a richer associative thread to broad statements like that.) But Talking Book represents so many of the attitudes I associate with what I’ve learned about that era through my parents’ generation and their cultural artifacts: It’s hope, funk, politics and love in the same spot, new awakenings of selfhood and sunny afternoons and extended solos. Stevie.
And somehow Suzi is a perfect pairing for the Stevie sitting in my head, today. She’s a little tougher than he is; and granted, she’s not as political and not so simultaneously full of positivity and not one of the best singer-songwriters ever. But that guitar sound – that sorta rough melody to the choruses that seems to me a hallmark of good 70s popular rock of a certain type. With that sound pumping out my apartment windows on a hot afternoon, Stevie and Susi can be sister and brother here, in my living room, in the summertime, feeling the lightness of the lack of irony in the room.
So, don’t like Suzi Quatro because she’s a tough rock lady, or a bass player, or a coolly less-popular precursor to Joan Jett. Like Suzi Quatro because she’s got it, that seventies sound, and because she keeps it tight and says things over it like, “when you handed me the apple, I should have said no to you // I guess I bit off more than I could chew” but also just like her. It’s a bit more funk-rock than punk-rock, and accordingly it’s got a bit too much wah pedal and at times (“Paralyzed” and the final fake-folk track, “Michael”) veers almost disco in its leanings… and it’s irresistible.
So pump it out the back of the Nova in the hot parking lot and rock some cutoff denim on your ass. It’s summertime.
Also: I did not know until today that she played Leather Tuscadero, sister of Pinky, on Happy Days. Well okay, then.
This week I have so busy with work and so sleepy and so over-committed and so been wanting to write about summer songs, about “Superstition” and Stevie, but when time is under-available and when it rains in late June in California, things get out of whack. Summer and Stevie (and writing) lose out. So I’ll just say this:
Sunlight shines from this man the way only sunlight can, illuminating phrases and lives bright and dark and good and wronged and classic and chillin’ and outside and in and also, brilliantly, embodying its own cliched reputation.
And:
If I was a really amazing drummer, I would say I learned everything I ever knew about rhythm from Talking Book.
I’m still listening, I promise, but that’s all, for today.
