Author: Spitz, Marc
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“The Modern Lovers were kind of this call back,” Kent says of the band’s neat fit into the back-to-basics context that so bewitched these English kids. “At the time, Richman was very much out on his own.” McLaren’s assembled players, who would soon be christened the Sex Pistols, had no idea what Richman looked like or even what he was singing about half the time (“Put down your cigarette and drop out of B.U.!,” he sang on “Modern World.” What’s B.U.?, they must have wondered), but the Kent tape quickly became something they could all agree on. It was tough, but there were melodies and that sneer that had so bewitched Cale. Matlock was an unashamed fan of the Kinks and girl groups like the Shirelles and the Ronettes. He clashed with the group’s new lead singer, Johnny Rotten, who only allowed hardcore dub, select prog rock like Van Der Graaf Generator, and yet another proto-Punk icon, Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band, into the mix. But “Roadrunner” passed the test with both, and it was easy enough to learn: a few chords and a chorus that was basically the title repeated and repeated. “We didn’t know what it meant,” Matlock says. “Some kind of car? It just sounded different.” The Pistols still managed to screw it up. And yet “Roadrunner” stood out as one of the few romantic notions in the band’s set: the idea of driving with the top down didn’t exactly jibe with songs like “Bodies” and “Holidays in the Sun.” The band had dismissed such sentiment as hedonistic and socially irresponsible given the urban decay and day-to-day peril of life in late-’70s London. Somehow Richman’s sweetness made it through, and the song—the one that Richman was warned would dog him his entire career—was about to show up in his life again. With an insurgency he was unwittingly helping to fuel now under way, Richman himself was out in Santa Monica making street music with a bunch of winos.
“He actually wanted to record with the winos playing with rolled-up newspapers, beating on the ground. I told him he was a little far afield,” Kaufman says.
Richman soon headed north and moved into the Berserkley offices, where a “comeback” plan was proposed. Richman had continued to write songs in the intervening years, but when he played them for Kaufman and his small staff, it was a shock. The melodies were sweet street-corner doo-wop and bare-bones-folk inspired and spare, produced so the listener could hear every strum. His lyrics were no longer about girls or hip boys in cities: Richman sang instead of creatures from outer space (“Here Come the Martian Martians”) and what kind of ice cream they liked.
But Richman had not lost his mind like Pink Floyd’s founder Syd Barrett. This wasn’t outsider art, like Frank Zappa’s deranged protégé Wild Man Fischer. Here was, the songwriter insisted, his true, musical self at work. The puzzlement only seemed to strengthen Richman’s resolve. “I know he comes off as an extremist,” Kaufman says, “but he’s more of a contrarian. If you tell him the world is round, he’ll find the flat spot.” Richman signed to Berserkley and was promised autonomy. As a gesture of gratitude, perhaps, he agreed to record a new version of “Roadrunner” as a showcase single for the label. It was the obvious track to introduce him to the world—always had been.
Kaufman was in London for a record-industry convention in 1976 when he first realized that the old Modern Lovers were being embraced by a new generation of Punk kids despite the album never having been officially released. “I was sick and asleep in the hotel and there were messages being pushed under the door about the number of orders.” The new “Roadrunner” single, slower and thicker than the original but still a rush, had become a radio hit and was on its way into the British pop Top Ten, just as the Sex Pistols were routinely starting to make the front pages of the UK tabloids.
“Nothing even resembled ‘Roadrunner’ on the radio,” Kaufman says. “It appealed to the disenfranchised. When I met Johnny Rotten he told me the Modern Lovers was the only record he listened to. He recited the lyrics to me. I was impressed.”
Richman and his new Modern Lovers played a show to promote the release of his album at New York City’s prestigious Town Hall, which drew and instantly perplexed the city’s rock elite who’d so prided themselves on being hip to the unreleased Warner Bros. album. “The older, dippier Richman seemed to have succumbed to terminal cutesy poo,” the legendary Lester Bangs groaned in his review for the N.M.E. The New York Rocker’s Lisa Persky mused, “His unpretentiousness is almost a pretension.” The warning out of New York was completely unheeded in London. There, after nearly a half decade, Richman was finally a rock star, completely on his own terms.
Richman never said much. He didn’t dress flashy. He wore his brown, curly hair neatly trimmed. He never once attempted to increase his standing with the worshipful Punks by donning a bondage bracelet or spiking his hair. You’d never imagine that across the ocean, the kids in London (and Manchester and Liverpool) who were “inventing” Punk rock were enthralled with this man.
Richman and the new Lovers recorded (in quick, no-frills DIY style with Richman at the controls) a second album for Berserkley, this one entitled, with equal simplicity, Rock n’ Roll with the Modern Lovers. When released in ’77, it yielded an even bigger British chart single, the instrumental “Egyptian Reggae”: a typically spare, strummed riff, a clip-clop beat, and an occasional gong hit for panache. A full tour was booked, with stays in luxury hotels and high-end travel—and, as expected, the Punks queued up to buy tickets. But they had no idea what they were in for.
As the Euro tour began to roll out, once the house lights dimmed, the crowds braced, as they always did at Punk shows, for volume, and lots of it. But the Modern Lovers played softly. “I was playing a B-15 amp, probably turned up to like three,” bassist Asa Brebner says. “It was more like going to see a play.”
Richman’s stage costume consisted of a white shirt knotted at the front, dark trousers, curly hair, and a pencil-thin, Little Richard–style mustache. He looked odd. And before long, like sharks in bloody water, the hecklers came, emboldened, sometimes challenged, by Richman’s obstinate refusal to signal to the crowd with a wink that this was a joke. He couldn’t, because it wasn’t. Still, he had not lost his ability as master of ceremonies, and even when it was contentious, the star engaged directly. “There were definitely people in the audience who were more than ready to say fuck-you to this shit,” the bassist recalls. “People were expecting to hear that first album. We got stuff thrown at us. It was really scary.”
Brebner recalls, “This one guy started screaming and Jonathan looked at him and said, ‘You’re very angry for such a young man. Did your mommy forget to change you?’ The guy just shut the fuck up.”
“Halfway through the gig, he won that audience over,” journalist Kent says.
Richman is a Twee Tribe saint because he opened up the clenched Punk rock heart, and by example demonstrated that it was okay to be both tender and appreciative of the sound of the “Old World”—whether it was the 1960s or even earlier, well beyond the jug band and ukulele ditties and the skiffle and Chicago blues favored by that decade’s troubadours. He said what he meant (whether people believed it or not), and did not follow fashion at the time that “anti-fashion” itself was in vogue. Take the example of Shane MacGowan, himself a legend now, but at the time a dentally challeged, scrawny follower of the Punk movement and erstwhile leader of a couple of also-ran bands like the Nipple Erectors—the Nips for short—and the Chainsaws. Bored with Punk’s limitations, he remembered the songs he heard as a child, the powerful Irish ballads, dirges, and celebratory sing-alongs, and determined that they were even more pure than the three chords every Punk kid in London now knew too well. “What I wanted to do was go back beyond rock and roll, before rock and roll,” he writes in A Drink with Shane MacGowan, a sort of interview as memoir, “and do Irish music but do it for a pop audience because I think Irish music is very like rock and roll, it’s one of the musics that influenced rock and roll, it’s one of the musics that makes up rock and roll. A lot of Irish songs are rock and roll songs.” One didn’t have to be Van Morrison to embrace the Celtic in a post-Ri
chman world. The perennial and the emotional were now up for grabs.
In the Midwest of America, the teen Punks who would form the indispensable Twee Tribe combo the Violent Femmes in the 1980s were feeling the same Punk fatigue. “[Femmes drummer] Victor [DeLorenzo] and I were playing a lot of other stuff,” says bassist Brian Ritchie. “Jazz, folk, what is now called ‘world music,’ and we loved the freedom and mobility of acoustic music and busking.” Later, both the Pogues and the Femmes would plug in, but both essential bands began quiet, the volume coming from the heart like the “new” Jonathan Richman. As these teens turned twenty and began forming bands, an entire world would open up—musically, culturally, and politically. Some call it post-Punk, but what it really stood for was the freedom to be you.
Chapter 4
Sixteen Again
1977–1981
In which the sweaty, angry, nervous kids in glasses and too-tight neck ties, clash with the sneering, snarling Punks in bondage leather and metal studs . . . and win! The underdogs free the young and studious pop fans to come out of the closet and declare a love for ABBA, disco, and books (if not Thatcher) and a distaste for the pogo.
That Williamsburg, Brooklyn, as we’ve established, the epicenter of Twee, would ultimately provide a home for the quintessential Indie record shop, Rough Trade, is, depending on whom you ask, either antithetical or perfect. The nine-thousand-square-foot superstore, a repurposed industrial space on once-desolate North Ninth Street still boasting metal staircases, high ceilings, and concrete floors, is a triumph in that it’s one of the few large and ambitious record stores remaining on the planet; the West Coast’s Amoeba stores also come to mind. The first Rough Trade record shop, which opened on Kensington Park Road in West London in the winter of 1976, was originally stocked in part with albums thrifted from bins by a soft-spoken space rock fan named Geoff Travis. On a trip to Canada (to visit a girlfriend in Montreal) and America (with lengthier stops in Chicago and San Francisco in ’75) Travis amassed the first bit of Rough Trade stock, mostly in U.S. thrift stores.
A homey sense of love and care can still be found in the Rough Trade Brooklyn bins, with their markered labels (’60s, ’70s, ’80s, Jazz, Country, Psychedelic, Reggae), but there are other elements that may vex the purist. There’s a sense of utter completism. You won’t miss anything here, and you won’t have to dig in crates. It’s all there, every classic “must-have” album, everything educational and indispensable. Yes, much of it is vinyl, but it still has that one-click feel to it. Where there were once zines at the London shop in the ’70s, the literary section is now lined with expensive coffee-table books. And it’s branded up the wazoo, with turntable covers, lapel badges, canvas totes, and tees. Rough Trade, the store and the record label that sprang from it, has earned the right to sell a tote bag or two: simply signing the Fall or the Smiths or the Strokes before anyone knew who they were would justify a lifelong pass to cash in one’s cred, but there’s something icky about the utter lack of politics—icky and very new Brooklyn. “We’re a partner,” says Travis over coffee during a visit to New York in the winter of 2013. “I’m thrilled it’s happening. My main concern is that it be good. That it’s a place that will turn people on to great music that they don’t know about. And I hope it’s not too expensive.” Travis seems well aware of the disconnect between the store’s humble roots and the kind of hyperbranding and mass clientele who would now not seem out of place at a bustling HMV.
Rough Trade’s name seems ironic. These are gentle, diffident, record collecting souls. Still, it’s a name that came to prominence when there were riots and strikes in London. Was it all simply a means to selling a Lee Hazlewood or Palace Brothers album to a trust funder? The young Joe Strummer would probably throw a Molotov through the window, but would he be right in doing so? He himself was a part-time Punk, after all, and quickly dropped the conceits of the movement once it ceased to be fresh. In a post-hip universe, all, not just the kids with the right gear, seem to be welcome to the Island of Misfit Toys, with its luxury hotels like the Wythe instead of squats, but first there had to be a battle, with pioneers and sacrifices.
Travis was among those in the cultural foxhole back in the day, challenging, along with his original staff (including future Swell Maps founders Niki Sudden and Epic Soundtracks), Punk’s binary nature with a crucial sense of hippie-age, utopian accessibility, its doors always open no matter what kind of trousers (or flares) one was wearing, its model being the studiously stocked but user-friendly City Lights (the legendary San Francisco literary haven founded by beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti). One didn’t need to be a beatnik to shop at City Lights, and its very stock of inspiring texts (as opposed to LPs in Rough Trade’s case) could bring numbers to the cause. The original Rough Trade was located in Ladbroke Grove, long a bastion for the counterculture. The Pink Fairies and Mick Farren’s subversive Deviants played there. There were West Indian families and heldover hippies. Performance was shot nearby in Powis Square. Jimi Hendrix breathed his last nearby as well.
“I was never a hard liner,” Travis says, explaining how his shop became a haven to the proto-Twees who could not kick with the Stalinist Punks. “I have a wide net. I thought it was really amusing that the Punks had all these laws. I was just concerned that I move things that I see as good into a bigger arena.” Among the things he saw as good were artists like Tim Buckley, Jesse Winchester, Bobby Charles, and tons of the disco and reggae that Travis DJ’d at the local club Dingwalls. “We only sold things in the shop that we liked, which was a pretty strange, noncommercial decision.” But Rough Trade was not anti-Punk, either. “Plenty of people came in wearing bondage pants,” Travis recalls. They were simply not only Punk, at a time when the Punks were intent on smashing down all remnants of the past.
The staff was thrilled when the first Talking Heads single arrived from New York. They stocked zines like Search and Destroy out of San Francisco, as well as ZigZag and the New York Rocker. If one could stomach the volume (two massive Jamaican-style sound system speakers blared music all day, mostly reggae like Gregory Isaacs and Big Youth) you were welcome. “Basically, we opened a refuge from the real world and a place to listen to good music. Gradually people drifted in and never went away. People started coming for the things we had that nobody else had. The Velvet Underground EP with ‘I’m Sticking with You.’ The Iggy Pop bootleg—Metallic K.O. Bowie’s Live at Santa Monica Civic, the Flamin’ Groovies’s first LP.”
That lack of judgment, born from Travis’s hippie-era beginnings, has carried on for four decades. Twee Tribers and Indie kids today adore a great rap single, whether it’s from Lil Wayne, Kanye West, Azealia Banks, or Jay-Z. Over the course of its history, Indie has evolved a sophisticated filtration system and can appreciate a groove while dismissing an offending lyric. There’s no Twee Triber I know, for example, who did not respond in the summer of 2013 to Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines.” They are, at heart, and often in spite of themselves, pop fans (the aforementioned Real Housewives and Kardashians are guilty pleasures as well as sources of horror). They rarely slag off or feel personally threatened by popular art just because normal people, even their haters, like it too. Lena Dunham, for example, tweets constantly about hit network series like Scandal even while her own HBO show is considered high television art. One of the more iconic scenes in the first season of Girls depicts Dunham as she gavottes to Robyn’s Swedish pop-candy kernel “Dancing on My Own.” Twees also love reality TV, cooking shows, and the Harry Potter books—not only love them, but see the hidden depth therein. Other times, most recently in the case of Taylor Swift, some Twee can rub off on a mainstream superstar for the better.
Pop is joyful, and Punks were obliged to be older before their time because the world around them was oppressive. Take away the oppression, and what do you have?
Rough Trade, Williamsburg.
But you also have, or had, as Punk drew its last breath, a world safe for pop kids who like loud, fast, and, yes, joyful music
. Post-Punk provided a kind of waterslide back toward adolescence, eventually leading to Twee pop as we would come to know it. “Bands like the Buzzcocks were absolutely vital to this,” says journalist Paul Morley.
It was Rough Trade that distributed the Buzzcocks’ legendary debut EP, Spiral Scratch, in 1978. The shop had evolved into a sophisticated distribution system, taking on these new beyond-Punk artists on consignment and exposing them to a larger audience while protecting them from the major label system.
“What was missing in the marketplace was a proper distribution system [for the Indie world]. That was our major contribution. The major labels were a different world,” says Travis, “nothing to do with us. The Clash? Why sign to [major] CBS? That was pathetic. That was our attitude. We still loved them but . . . politically we felt their managers were old-school.” The first consignment release, from a band called the Desperate Bicycles, featured the excellent post-Punk singles “Smokescreen” and “Handlebars.” Released in the summer of 1977, great as it was, it was more powerful perhaps as an example of DIY can-do than as a commercial concern; more business model than sonic influence. Spiral Scratch, the four-song Buzzcocks EP anchored by the anthem “Boredom,” was on another level, a truly scorching collection that placed both the Buzzcocks and Rough Trade into a realm outside of Britain, gained influence in America, and introduced a gentler, smarter, unashamedly pop-loving strain of Punk or early post-Punk into the water supply. “The Spiral Scratch EP was hugely important,” Travis says.
The Buzzcocks were not anti-Punk or remotely Punk fearing. They coordinated the Sex Pistols’ famous show at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall on June 4, 1976 (a scene re-created in Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People). They simply weren’t only Punk. They knew what few people would say out loud: that the Sex Pistols wrote great pop songs.