Rod Stewart - Every Picture Tells A Story
Rod the Mod finds his solo footing, headed for stardom, with the Faces in his wake.
6:00 AM GMT 22/06/2011
Features Disc of the day
The Modern Lovers
The Modern Lovers
(Beserkley, 1976)
Jojo's still-stunning proto-punk grooves of straight-edge enlightenment.
In Los Angeles for work recently with fellow MOJO scribe and good pal Peter Relic, driving in a loaned BMW across the flummox of interstate intersections from Eagle Rock to East Hollywood to pay a visit on Mr. David Axelrod, I found myself profoundly affected by an album I thought I'd grown tired of years before. It probably had something to do with the aural and visual assault of L.A.'s abject upgrade society: kids in boob tubes, grown-ups in romper suits and that dreadful creeping-dread sense that technological progress coupled with intellectual regress would bring the death of us all, but suddenly the brave genius of Richman's short-hair, straight-as-a-die philosophy knocked me sideways. To fall in love with the then-unhip Velvet Underground in 1971 was cool enough, but to want to develop the Velvets' urban cheapness, motoring riffs and Cale drones at a time when everyone was going either agrarian acoustic or heavy denim, and then to swap Lou Reed's sneery junkie nihilism for a strange clean-living positivity was a masterstroke.
Revelling in such unhip concepts as museums, tenderness, old people, short hair and suburbia, Richman went out as far on the nerd limb as he possibly could, while seemingly still singing from the heart. It may have been as much of a stance as the "free love" "weed liberation" crew, or the "smash it up" punk gang who would follow in his wake, but the difference is/was that it took far more guts for a 22- year-old '70s kid to defend something as "uncool" as parents or health food than it did to stand by the wall, sneering at everything, just a few years later. To dwell on it further is to delude oneself into imagining a world where every teenager gets to hear The Modern Lovers and makes their life just a little bit better: where depressed self-harmers realise that "I can see through this bitterness and sadness / And so I won't die / Someday I'll be dignified and old" and every impressionable kid hanging out with the bedroom stoners can at least think "If these guys, if they're really so great / Tell me, why can't they at least take this place / And take it straight?"
Yes, I'm middle-aged, I'm worried about the future for our kids and I'm probably still a bit jet-lagged but right now The Modern Lovers has brightened the corners of this bankrupt world. So, I'd like to ask you all to join in and sing: "Hey kids / I said hey kids / I say someday we'll be dignified and old! That's right / I said some day we'll be dignified / Someday we'll be dignified and old!" And, like Jonathan, I'd like to hear the kids sing back.
Andrew Male
Posted by Ross_Bennett at 6:00 AM GMT 09/10/2009
Further Listening
The Velvet underground - Loaded (Cotillion, 1970)
The Pastels - Up For A Bit With... (Big Time, 1987)
Talking Heads - 77 (Sire, 1977)
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