You're watching Repo Man and you hear a third generation punk band from LA singing about how "some people like to pick up girls and get called 'asshole'...this never happened to Pablo Picasso". You're driving home and the college radio station plays a John Cale song that turns out to be a very different interpretation of the same song. You're listening to a Sex Pistols bootleg of the first tune they ever recorded. They're trashing a song called "Road Runner", obviously unfamiliar with the places named in the lyrics- places like the Stop and Shop and Route 128. You rent a video called Kingpin and there's this quirky little group playing in the background of a bowling alley scene. What do these incidents all have in common? A native son of Massachusetts named Jonathan Richman.

Original Modern Lovers: Jonathan Richman ,Ernie Brooks, David Robinson, John Felice, and Jerry Harrison.

Jonathan called me recently from Mexico, where he was attending a performace of Caperucita Roja (Little Red Riding Hood) by his daughter's dramatic troupe. He was going to be busy for a week "working on the film" so he'd have to do the interview I'd asked for after that. "The film" is called Something About Mary and features Matt Dillon and Cameron Dias and is the second Jonathan has worked on with the same sibling directors- New England's Farrally Brothers. This time his part is much larger, however. (EDITOR'S UPDATE, 10/98: the film, of course, is now out, and a huge box office hit). He also just finished an album at Electric Ladyland with Ric Ocasek (formerly of the Cars) producing, ex-Bad Brain Darryl on bass and Tommy Larkins on drums. Jonathan has come a long way since Natick, and many musical miles since the original Modern Lovers.

The roots of the Modern Lovers lie just off Route 9 in Natick, Massachusetts. It was in this quiet suburban town that two teenage neighbors named Jonathan Richman and John Felice got together to start their own band in the summer of 1970. Felice told Trouser Press that he'd begun playing guitar at age 13: "That was a couple of years before I joined the Modern Lovers. He (Richman) took off to New York, then to Europe and spent some time there, and when he came back he wanted to start the band up in Boston." Jonathan had already begun forging a local presence by commuting into Cambridge to play solo gigs on the Cambridge Commons, performing songs that he had written himself. Like most teenagers Jonathan craved attention, and the Common performances were an ideal way to get it. Playing his tunes in public was far more effective than an earlier method he tried- as Jonathan related to me in a 1988 conversation: "I was hanging out at the Cafe Pamplona, doing my best to look sad and artistic so that girls would notice me". And so he became a songwriter "as soon as I could put two chords together". Luckily for him and happily for the music world he had a rare gift for putting those few chords together in a way uniquely his own. Ah, to have been a fly upon that lawn.

Late one night,after producing a recording session for the band I was in at the time (the Bones), the late, great Stefan "Swine" Lovelace (remembered for his production work on the first two Willie "Loco" Alexander singles) shared stories about these early days. "The Commons was like Hippie Central in the late 60's. The Harvard campus was still pretty radical- the Harvard Square riots had happened where students had smashed shop windows up and down Mass. Ave, everyone was smoking pot and dropping acid, Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsburg were folk heroes. Bands were playing these extended instrumental breaks with long guitar solos, And there in the midst of all these stoned love child types is Jonathan, Mr.I'm Straight, singing about how he doesn't do drugs! And all these flower children wanna-be's who are tripping their socks off and sleeping outside in mud in the Commons are saying 'this guy is really weird'!" Swine took a long puff from a Djarum and released a cloud of clove-scented smoke, laughing. "He might as well have been from another planet".

Whatever planet he was from, with the Commons experience under his belt Jonathan was officially a singer/songwriter. Then one day Jonathan heard a band that had a sound like no other he had heard. It was made by a band from New York called the Velvet Underground. Jonathan decided he needed to talk to these guys, so he up and moved to New York City. He was eighteen years old. This had to be a wonderous time. He met Andy Warhol, visited the Factory, and hung out with the creme de la creme of NY rock including his heroes in the Velvets. After that year Jonathan travelled to Israel and it was there that he realized he needed to start a rock and roll band. He wrote to fifteen year old John Felice asking him if he was interested in playing in it. When he returned to the States Jonathan grabbed Felice and together they took a bus to New York to pick up a Fender Vibrolux that JoJo had bought and left there. "The fact that we slept outdoors in Central Park and didn't get killed tells you that it was 1970 and not a day later", he says.

John and Jonathan practiced and soon realized it was time they looked for other members. Jonathan went to a record store in Kenmore Square and started to fill out a three-by-five index card to stick on the bulletin board. He had written "Rock band looking for..." and was spelling out D-R-U-M-M-E-R when a guy with a shag haircut came up to him and asked had he ever thought of starting a band? The chap with the modern coiff was David Robinson and he became the first Modern Lovers drummer. Along with David came Rolf Andersen,a bass player, as well as a Slingerland drum kit and a basement rehearsal space. Rolf was considered an interim member from the get go, and before long there were personnel changes. Two film students from Harvard University by the names of Jerry Harrison and Ernie Brooks decided to make a film about the Modern Lovers. They attended a three-piece gig during one of the not-infrequent periods when John Felice had quit the band and filmed it. After interviewing Jonathan for the film ("I think I told then something like 'I'm the best, everyone else stinks'") the would-be Fellinis offered to join the band, and a new bass player and keyboard player were had.

Just after John Felice had told the band he was going to quit and write his own songs David Geffen came to see the band and signed them for management. This initiated the chain of events that eventually resulted in the sessions for the first album. Produced by Velvet Underground luminary John Cale this first LP is absolutely brilliant. Future Talking Heads keyboardist Jerry Harrison's soaring, sometimes whimsical (Old World), sometimes reverent (Hospital) organ lines provided perfect accompaniment to Jonathan's guitar sounds, which at times recalled Lou Reed's fuzzbox driven lead work with the Velvets (Pablo Picasso) and at other times anticipated the stark chordal power of Punk bands such as the Ramones and the Sex Pistols (Road Runner). Drummer David Robinson, who later played with DMZ and found fame with the Cars, laid down a hypnotic groove with bass player Ernie Brooks - later of the Necessaries. Brooks provides a rock-solid lowest common denominator bottom end much like a raggae bassist, while still managing to inject a pop fluidity as when he lifts the "Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet" bass line for "Astral Plane". As great as the first album is, you still have to wonder "what if": what if John Felice hadn't left the band at the crucial period just before this album was made? What further dimensions would have been reached if John's harder-edged approach had been part of the already intriguing interplay between musical styles on the first record? Considering that the first Real Kids album is also one of the great rock records I myself can live with the loss- better two fantastic albums, each led by a single dominating personality, than one collaborative compromise.For me the real "what if" in regards to the first Modern Lovers LP surrounds an incident that Jonathan related to me back in 1986.

My great friend Dave "Bone" Pedersen had started a country rock band called the Jolly Ranchers that I was playing with and recording at Fort Apache. I was gushing to Jonathan about all this great music that Dave Bone was turning me on to that I'd never heard before: guys like Merle Haggard, Lefty Frizzell, Buck Owens and George Jones. My favorite, I said, was the Flying Burrito Brothers, a band led by this amazing writer named Gram Parsons. I was surprised when Jonathan said "yeah, he was great-you know I knew Gram. We hung out when I was in California". He went on to explain how they'd met through Phil Kaufmann, Jojo's road manager during his Beserkley Records period. Kaufmann, who had worked for the Rolling Stones, was handling just two clients at that time: Jonathan and Gram (after Parsons's death it was Kaufmann, aided by one of the Byrds roadies, who honored a pact by "kidnapping" his body and cremating it in the desert). Kauffman, according to Jonathan, "ran an Executive Nanny Service- that's what he called it...he'd worked for guys like the Stones 'cuz at the time he was the only guy who get Keith and Mick into the van...y'know, 'come on Keith, come on Mick, time to get in the van and go now', right?". When Jonathan talks about Phil, who now resides in Nashville, it is with undisguised admiration, and not a little friendly irony: "Phil has occassional health problems because he is the kind of larger-than-life rock personality...stuff like gout." When I reply "oh, yeah, those sort of weird obsolete illnesses you read about in Dickens, huh?", Jonathan adds "...right, see guys like that get biblical diseases- rivers of blood, frogs falling out of the sky- you can't go into the hospital for this stuff, what do you do to get treated for, like, Mt. Sinai falling on you, or a plague of raining frogs? He's been out there doing this rock and roll Pirate stuff for all these years...so, there's also Pirate diseases, too, for these legendary rock guys... Long John Silver disease, Parrot-on-the-Shoulder disease...". Ouch! I've had a parrot removed and it's a very painful procedure, let me tell you!

Once Phil Kauffman had introduced the two future legends, Gram and Jojo had hit it off right away. Gram had seemed to be lonely in that way celebrities can often be- surrounded by new "friends, basking in the limelight, their success only places their personal isolation in more stark relief. Short term relief found in drugs, booze and the zipless fuck only make the long term crisis more acute.Parsons was being lionized at the time as one of the originators of country rock, a "new" genre being explored by acts such as the Band, the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt. Although Gram had attended Harvard and spent considerable time in the music industry he remained in many ways a simple, sincere country boy. The fast life of LA, with its' wild parties, free flowing booze and easy availability of drugs for an up-and-coming young star was taking its toll on Parsons- a toll reflected in songs like "Sin City". It's easy to see how Jonathan, drug free and without pretense or rock star artifice, would be attractive to Gram. If it seemed to Jonathan that Gram was drowning, it may have seemed to Gram that Jonathan was a piece of solid ground amidst the human flotsam and jetsam of the LA music industry. After expressing mutual admiration for one another's work, they discussed the possibility of Gram playing on Jonathan's upcoming record! The idea of what the first Modern Lovers album would sound like with John Felice playing on it is interesting; the idea of what it would have sounded like with Gram Parsons playing on it is beyond intriguing, a musical tease of parallel dimension proportion. In my own musical career I tried to create - and fell far short of - a sound that matches the one I hear in my head when I think about this "what if". Anything I could imagine is a far cry no doubt from what could have been had Gram lived. On their last meeting Jonathan and Gram played miniature golf together. On the impossibly green carpets of synthetic grass, amidst miniature cement windmills, they once again discussed Gram playing on the upcoming record. Jonathan was encouraged to see that Gram seemed to have turned a corner and gained the resolve to kick drugs and booze, to clean up his act and "live right". The next day- September 17, 1973, Gram was found unconscious in room 8 of the Joshua Tree Inn by a traveling companion- a gal from Boston who'd known Gram from his International Submarine Band days at Harvard. He was taken to the hospital but never recovered.

Had Gram stuck around he might have found that it wasn't so easy playing in a band with Jonathan. In a 1994 conversation Jonathan told me how frustrated the first album version of the Modern Lovers got with him, and in doing so explained why he was happier using musician's like drummer Mike Cardabasio or vocalist Ned Claflin from the Baltimores. "See, it's funny to me how after we were popular they started describing us as a Boston band, 'cuz in a way we never fit in. I mean, we definitely weren't part of the whole Rat thing- we never even played at the Rat back then! I never wanted to play at a club unless they really wanted to hear our music, and in the 70's nobody in the 'cool rock' crowd did." Jojo laughed as he described one particularly frustrating incident for his bandmates. "At the time we were broke, we hadn't played for much money in a while. And we got a show at Sir Morgan's Cove in Worcester that was going to pay $300 or $350 dollars. We showed up in the afternoon and we played our first set, and I looked around the place and we were not what these people wanted to hear. The crowd wanted hard rock- Led Zeppelin and stuff played VERY loud. And I said to the manager 'you know what? This was a mistake, these people don't want to hear us, we'll break down now and you don't have to pay us for the rest of the night'." Now that three hundred dollars was a LOT of money for us, especially at that time. So everyone freaked out, they couldn't believe I was doing that and they were NOT at all happy. They said "Let's just play and take the money, Jonathan!" But after I went up to the manager and said this just wasn't working he said "Thanks!", he appreciated the honesty. The band was MAD! They hated playing with me when things like that happened. That's one of the reasons by '78 or '79 that I didn't want to use a band anymore, because I couldn't say 'I feel like playing this next song alone' if that was what felt right for that night. 'Cuz the bass player had dragged his 200 pound Sunn Super Colliseum or whatever to the show and the drummer had moved all his drums and so they wanted to use them, but to me that wasn't a good enough reason. When I want to play alone now I can, I can just"- he imitates using his hands to make a 'quiet down' gesture -"and the drummer lays back. Or I can change the key, modulate, anything that feels right." In the interview I did with Jonathan on July 2, 1998 he offers a somewhat different spin on this story, and downplays the reasons for the break-up of the original Modern Lovers: "we just weren't seeing eye to eye any more". Jonathan seems to assiduously avoid any sort of negative comments, no matter how ancient the history may be, and in fairness to him he told me many of the items quoted here in relaxed moments between two friends. The interview tells things in his own words verbatim, with his full knowledge that the answers would be printed. Take the link below to check it out when you finish this article.

Jonathan Richman and Asa Brebner. A fine guitarist and songwriter in his own right, Asa played bass during the Modern Lovers Live! period, returning to the band on several ocassions, both as a guitarist and a bass player.

In a fine article on Jonathan (see link at bottom) Trouser Press sums it up nicely:"a radical trailblazer, precociously exploring minimalist rock years before such behavior became popular (or even acceptable)...Over the course of his recordings, however, Richman's predilection for childlike whimsy replaced the angst-ridden emotionalism of his first songs, and he eventually lost his flock by refusing to remain the same character he had been a decade earlier." Like a man returning after many years to his home town to see old friends- only to find they have grown apart, the "angst-ridden" teenage Jonathan had grown up, while his "flock" had stayed behind and remained the same. The Modern Lovers intimated in the first record that they were picking up where the Velvet Underground left off. The rock press were ready to crown them the Next Big Thing. Fans flocked to the Modern Lovers banner. And then the second album- written by a much less insecure Jonathan - came out. And...confusion reigned.

The second album was released right after the first, and thoroughly baffled the legion of fans that were recruited by the first record. The reason for this confusion was simple: the short space between releases hid the fact that almost five years had passed between the making of the first record and its release, followed quickly by the release of the second. The Warner deal of 1972 had fallen through and the tapes of the first record had sat in the vaults until Beserkley obtained the rights to release it in 1976. The second album, Rock and Roll With... was released promptly after it was recorded in 1977. Those were five years of big changes for Jonathan. I guess it made a lot more sense if you were close enough to the picture to see how happy JoJo was doing what he wanted and deconstructing the rock icon that he was being turned into. Trouser press noted 'many people took this as a sign of artistic inconsistency, and were put off by such silliness as "Abominable Snowman in the Market" and "Hey There Little Insect" '. While there were others who read this a purer form of rebellion- refusing to sell out to the prefab image of a rock "rebel" - they were outnumbered. These were tough times for Jonathan in some ways. Shows could be really frustrating, with new converts to the black album screaming for "Road Runner" and other tunes that Jonathan now regarded as behind him. The more they demanded these songs, the less they showed up in the set. This was no accident. Jonathan had turned a blind eye towards the Next Big Thing myth being thrust upon him, and he had things to say that were important to him NOW. He had written the songs on the first record as a teenager. Now he was a man, and had other things to say. When we talked about these issues he made complete sense, but then it hadn't taken me long to see that there was no artifice in Jonathan's music; if he sang it, he meant it, and if it didn't mean something to him he wouldn't sing it. Period. It was like he was stripping away the assembly line ingredients for 70's rock- "angst-ridden" lyrics, excessive volume, self-absorbed lead guitar solos, screamed vocals, barely veiled or obvious sexual metaphor -to reveal the chassis beneath it all: Chuck Berry, doo-wop, pure tones and a backbeat. And it still rocked! I think of the second album songs as far from silliness. I see them as a message hurled like a gauntlet at the bloated, coiffed, million watt, laser show beast rock had become: "this is all you need to rock".

The press focused on the eccentric aspects of Jonathan's personality, and comments like "anyone who would hurt a baby's ears sucks"- Jonathan's explanation of his anti-electric stance. The implication or outright claim was that it was all an act. JoJo's friends knew otherwise. Depending on how you looked at it Jonathan moved to Maine to get closer to the nature he seemed to be discovering anew, or to get further away from the rock scene he had never really fit into anyway. The stripped down Jonathan bands that began around this time were an extension of Jonathan's life, just as much as his stripped-down lifestyle. He was simplifying all around, jettisoning any extra baggage that wasn't completely necessary- both for living and for rocking. It was a time when Jonathan gave away almost all of his material possessions before moving to Maine.

After a rough patch with plenty of grumbling from the old fans who wanted to hear the black album ad infinitum it was a relief to see Jonathan's personal and musical decisions vindicated. I remembered reading the end-of-year reviews in 1985 and Jonathan had made many of the most influential lists. He'd been cited for Best Rock Show or Best Live Performance in the Village Voice, the Boston Globe and Rolling Stone. People were starting to get it, and the key was the live shows. It was almost impossible to attend one and not be swept up in the enthusiasm and the pure musical honesty. Even those who thought the lyrics were sophomoric and the songs were for children would end up applauding for someone who had the balls to pull this shit off onstage. Time after time I saw critics turned into converts after a single live performance. A classic example of this occurred much later on in the late 80's, at the Boston Music Awards. To read the story go the Jojo and I page.

After the watershed years of the mid-to-late 80's Jonathan hit his stride as a solo performer and has continually maintained the highest standards of showmanship. The permutations of musicians and lineup have seemed endless. He has toured alone, with just a drummer, with backup singers, with full bands and with trios. I've seen shows where he played almost nothing but sax, and one where he played one of those cheesy little white casio keyboards. In 1983, when the drummer in my own band took an emergency medical leave, he even sat in on skins with the Bones for four unforgettable gigs. He has recorded with a country band, with the drummer from the Ventures', and with most of the same lineups he's toured with. His albums include songs in Italian, Spanish and French, a ditty worthy of any sea cap'n and the epic poetry of "I Eat with Gusto, Damn, You Bet". Four record labels have failed to break his spirit, and his criterion for a good label is still the one that does the least intrusive marketing on his behalf. As he slides into his thirtieth year of rocking he's got more energy than the average teenager.

Drummer Michael Cardabassio is one of the players, like Asa and Curly, who have made repeat appearances on Jonathan's tours and recordings over the years.

Jonathan is a true original. I think of him as the Jimmy Stewart of Rock and Roll. I'm proud to call him friend and proud as a Bostonian that he's a local son. Last month as of this writing he called to say that he and drummer Tommy Larkin were in South Miami, acting in Something About Mary, a film directed by the same Farrelly Brothers who featured JoJo in the movie Kingpin. His "co-workers" include Matt Dillon and Camerron Dias. Today (May 13, 1998) I got a postcard from Jonathan showing Times Square, NYC, saying that he's making his second record for Vapor with ex-Cars singer/guitarist Ric Ocasek producing. More power to you, Jonathan, and God Speed!