The Modern Lovers

CW: Self-Harm

At the present time, I own two rock band T-shirts.  One is a T-shirt for the early '90s grunge band Temple of the Dog, ordered for me from Eastern Europe as a gift by my brother.  I have never heard the band Temple of the Dog, not even "Hunger Strike".  My brother is kind of a troll.  That said, I wear the T-shirt all the time.  The T-shirt is soft and comfortable, and I love my brother dearly.

The other T-shirt is one I ordered for myself, and is for the early '70s rock band the Modern Lovers.  There is a dog window decal one sees in cars around here that kept reminding me of the Modern Lovers logo, you see, and eventually I just went off and ordered a T-shirt from Jonathan Richman's website.

It is the sort of T-shirt where, before my transition, I would receive compliments from random strangers when I would go out wearing it.  I liked this.  See, for some reason, men are socialized to interpret compliments on one's appearance pretty much exclusively as expressions of sexual desire.  Men are taught that "cute" is a synonym for "I would like to stick my erect penis in that".  Given this, I guess it's not terribly surprising that so many men put so little effort into their appearance.

T-shirts are one of the rare exceptions.  If you compliment a person's T-shirt, you see, you're not complimenting someone's appearance, but you're complimenting the idea the T-shirt expresses.  Telling someone in a Modern Lovers T-shirt "cool T-shirt" does not necessarily communicate the idea "I would like to engage in coitus with you".  It may also communicate the idea "I, too, have heard of these 'Modern Lovers' of which your clothing speaks, and I stand in solidarity with your tacit endorsement of this long-defunct rock band."  This certainly may be done with the ulterior motive of getting into someone's pants, but it's not an absolute _requirement_, which sets it apart.

The Modern Lovers are, as far as I can tell, chiefly known for two songs: Road Runner and Pablo Picasso.  Road Runner is an up-tempo rock number about the joys of driving.  Pablo Picasso is a humorous, vaguely Dylan-adjacent song about how "Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole".  They're both fairly widely covered songs.  I first heard Pablo Picasso on the soundtrack to the cult 1980s film "Repo Man".  It was first performed by John Cale, who heard it while producing some demo recordings for the band.

The myth is that everyone who saw the Velvet Underground went out to form their own band.  It's not really true.  Hell, not even everybody who _bootlegged_ the Velvet Underground went out to start their own band - most of them did, but famed Boston Velvets taper "The Professor", to the best of my knowledge, never recorded in a rock band.

The thing about the Velvets is that later in their career particularly they were sort of a super-local band.  They didn't have a national reputation.  Instead, they had several very passionate local fanbases.  One of the homes of that fanbase was Boston, Massachusetts.  This is germane because the Modern Lovers were, fundamentally, a local Boston, Massachusetts band.  "Road Runner" is a song in praise of driving cars, but it's also a song explicitly in praise of Boston, Massachusetts, and unlike "Dirty Water" wasn't recorded by an LA band.

It's a good song but I'm not a Bostonian.  The songs that strike me by the Modern Lovers are other songs.

He's hard to pick apart, Jonathan Richman.  He's not like me.  A lot of the people I listened to, back in those days - they weren't very much like me at all.  I may have more to say about that in another post.

So for instance Jonathan Richman has a song called "I'm Straight".  Readers, I am _so_ not straight.  Except, well, in the sense that Jonathan Richman means it, which is to say that he doesn't do drugs.

This was a big thing for me when I was young, the sort of "so straight I'm a weirdo" thing Rick Wakeman (who is not, in fact, a weirdo) was talking about.  It seems to me now that I avoided drugs less out of moral principle and more because I was fucked up in ways that predisposed me to _not_ become addicted to drugs.  (I did eventually develop and kick a drug addiction, but that's a story for another time.)

Successful people who didn't do drugs were role models for me.  Not all of them were good role models, but Richman, well, I still think he was decent enough as a role model, at least as opposed to Frank Zappa.  Frank Zappa didn't do drugs because they were stupid.  People who did drugs were stupid, just like people who had feelings and expressed them were stupid.

Richman danced a finer line than this.  Richman loved the modern world, loved technology, loved America and wanted to fight for his vision of it.  Richman wanted to be dignified and old some day.  Honestly a lot of the ideas he advocates in his songs, I don't agree with them.  One day I will be old, but I will never be dignified.

Richman was also lonely and was extraordinarily open and self-revelatory about his feelings.  Many of the Modern Lovers' songs reveal a man who is extremely familiar with mental illness.  If there's one message that keeps coming through in the Modern Lovers' songs, it's this: Please don't die.  For God's sake, don't die, I know life is hard, but if we both make it through, things will get better.  Jonathan Richman is singing to someone else in "Dignified and Old", he's not just saying that _he_ will be dignified and old, he's saying that some day we'll be dignified and old together.

And he turns out to have been wrong about the dignified part.  He wasn't lying, he was just wrong.  What he was right about was the importance of staying alive, how important it is for us to care for each other even when we're broken and sad.  Please, I know things are hard, but when they let you out of the (mental) hospital, please talk to me.  I miss you.

That stuff is hard for anyone to say.  You say that and you'll look like a weirdo.  Jonathan Richman looked like a weirdo.  For someone like me, for whom "not being a weirdo" wasn't an option, who could only ever pretend to be straight (poorly and at great personal cost) - for someone like me the only question was what sort of weirdo I was going to be.  Songs like "Hospital" helped me a lot in answering that question.