by Spitz, Marc
“Max goes into a world where his temper is at first rewarded, but then he realizes that it’s going to consume him, and he wants to go home,” Hodgman says. “Sendak understood that children are angry and hate the world around them in a way that very few children’s books acknowledged, and most parents didn’t acknowledge.”
Max indeed returns home—he most likely never really left—and enjoys its comforts, whereas Sendak himself suffered for his vision for much of his career. Many of Sendak’s books were banned, for decades even—the most obvious example being In the Night Kitchen, featuring a little boy in various states of utterly sexless undress and in the midst of a dream. Sendak was openly gay, and subject to all the suspicions and prejudices that went with that identity during his lifetime; whether this is a fair trade for his output’s now permanent status as Twee talismans is anyone’s guess. Most likely not worth the pain, but it’s probable that the pain was part of what makes them so.
If Sendak had a predecessor, it’s Norton Juster and Julies Feiffer’s 1961 novel The Phantom Tollbooth. Its hero, Milo, is the prototype for Max, but his nihilism is even more refined. He “doesn’t know what to do with himself, not just sometimes but always.” Milo makes Holden Caulfield look like a Boy Scout, and, like all the other discontented princes, he heads out, this time to Dictionopolis, another over-the-rainbow locale and metaphor for a new, postwar utopia that the young and searching seemed to require. Oz, Dictionopolis, Shangri La (which the Kinks sang about, albeit ironically), Brigadoon, Atlantis (the subject of a great Donovan epic) . . . seldom is a Twee hero happy where he or she stands, especially if that place is a school or an unfeeling home.
And if Sendak had a female counterpart—the queen of Twee Tribe youth-lit to his king—it was Judy Blume. Blume’s books were aimed at slightly older children, but her stories were filled with characters that did not have the option of fantasy flight. They remained in an almost prison cell of adolescence, reduced to having talks with God and their own bodies, which also seemed at times like prisons. Her books tackled the realities of being a lonely, disenfranchised, and above all angry teen. In 1970’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, Margaret, waiting for puberty to arrive, resorts to a kind of desperate prayer. (“Please help me grow God. You know where.”) In 1975’s Forever . . . , Blume, who looked more like a suburban housewife than a Punk, almost dared bookstores and libraries to attack her with the release of such a sexually frank and often hilarious tale (in which the male object of affection, Michael, has christened his penis “Ralph”). “There he was on top of me and I felt Ralph hard against my thigh,” says the book’s narrator, Katherine. In the 1970s, Forever . . . was a kind of Tropic of Cancer or Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a paperback hidden in book bags, underlined (the sex parts, of course), and traded in shadows among preteens and teens.
These authors were both subversive and incredibly popular, selling millions of copies of their books. Sendak even paired with singer-songwriter Carole King, then a superstar, to collaborate on the hit album and TV special Really Rosie, another must-own for any pained ’70s kid looking to be enchanted without being insulted.
“I’m Really Rosie,” King sings on the soundtrack, “and I’m Rosie Real.” These were not the bullshitters of the past. “You better believe me!” she sings, the same way Johnny Rotten added “We mean it, man!” to a verse of “God Save the Queen.”
King’s multimillion-selling Tapestry album (1971), accomplished and often achingly beautiful as it is, came, ironically, at the forefront of the era of big-rock and superstar-singer-songwriter music that virtually required a Sex Pistols reactionary attack on laid-back, unchallenging fashion and values.
“I remember believing very definitively that there needed to be a kind of rehaul by ’76, ’77,” says the veteran music writer Paul Morley. “It was clear it was a racist and sexist—and narrow-minded—society, unartistic if you like, and there had to be a cleansing. But by ’77, ’78, a lot of these [Punk] characters seemed to have fallen by the wayside.”
The thing about Punk was that, like Max’s trip to the Island of the Wild Things, it didn’t last very long. “Punk had lost an ideological battle,” Morley says. Its principles were simply too rigid to sustain. There were those who did not want to dismiss everything that went before and be Stalinist about their music, their dress, and their culture. Some claimed 1977 was “year zero,” while others secretly missed the Beatles and the Stones and mourned the death of the King that year.
“Let’s say it’s 1977,” Nitsuh Abebe writes in his now classic Pitchfork essay “Twee as Fuck.” “You live in London. And with Punk going full-steam—in this new scene that’s abandoned sophistication and chops, this scene that insists anyone can start a band—you start thinking: Why not me? Only there’s a problem. Punks act certain ways: They’re loud and angry, or else they’re arty and clever . . . You have a schoolboy voice and you’d feel stupid spiking your hair or pulling on bondage trousers . . . and you certainly don’t see any reason to stop loving the Kinks . . . so what are you going to do?”
“People who don’t buy into the ethos of cool that goes around Punk rock—the danger element or sex or swagger—the people for whom that’s not really an important part, will always carve out another niche,” Abebe says today.
Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers were revered by the original Punks of ’76 and ’77, but Richman wasn’t buying it either. When the singer-songwriter first heard William Blake’s “The Lamb,” recited by a fellow guest during the taping of a British talk show in 1978, he was so overcome with emotion, he teared up on camera. The host asked Richman if being considered naïve or simplistic ever bothered him. “The Lamb” seemed to validate Richman’s controversial and already semimythical retreat from the hard cynicism and greed of the newly massive music business of the Fleetwood Mac–Frampton 1970s. “If that makes me simplistic, then I’m one [of the simple people],” he said, gesturing toward the man off camera who’d just read the Blake. He ran a hand through his curly brown hair, shook his head, and wiped his long nose.
Raised like Theodor Geisel/Dr. Seuss in suburban Massachusetts (“See, I come from Boston,” he sings in his autobiographical hit “New England”), Richman was just a teenager when he entered the rock scene. He had heard Lou Reed sing “Sunday Morning” and “Femme Fatale” on The Velvet Underground and Nico, and something about the tough-but-gentle, street-numb-but-vulnerable music convinced him that he had to stand as close as possible to this band and take in their energy. The Velvets were another should-have-been-huge act in their own time. They had the personality and the publicity (courtesy of “manager” and “producer” Andy Warhol), plus lyrics about S&M, heroin, and death. Instead they enjoyed “cult” success among students and hipsters, with a strong fan base among the hip Boston college crowd. When they played a residency at the rock club the Boston Tea Party in early ’69, they all came out in their black turtlenecks. Richman was there.
The Tea Party’s owner, Steve Sesnick, would soon replace Andy Warhol as the band’s manager. He’d sign Richman as well, convinced that with a worthy student of the Velvets, he couldn’t lose. Both acts, however, were tricky. The Velvets were in transition. Nico and then cofounder John Cale followed Warhol out the door, replaced by the handsome, sweet-voiced Doug Yule, who instantly vied with Reed as front man. Guitarist Sterling Morrison and tomboyish drummer Maureen “Mo” Tucker remained. Minus the classically trained Cale and the chilling Nico, the Velvets were free to be sweet and simple.
It’s Tucker who sings the sweetest and the simplest of these new-direction songs, like “After Hours” and the Reed duet “I’m Sticking with You.” Both songs are Twee classics. Nasal and off-key, Tucker sounded like a small boy skipping over dead bodies, the Blossom Dearie of the gutter. According to legend, Tucker was so shy she had to sing the former track in a closed studio with only Reed for moral support. “The Velvets have changed considerably since they left Warhol’s gang,” the Village Voice wrote in 1970
while the band debuted its new lineup and sound at Max’s Kansas City, still the nucleus of the hip downtown Warhol-centric art scene. “No more demonic assault on the audience. No more ear wrenching shrieks of art. No more esoterica.”
The sweet side of this quintessentially tough, streetwise band was a revelation to the impressionable teenage Richman. He followed them to New York City, and for a short time he was one of the young, ambitious souls to hang around the Warhol Factory, running errands for Warhol’s staff and hoping to get into their de facto clubhouse Max’s Kansas City, just across from Union Square.
Returning to Boston, Richman spent his afternoons busking with his guitar, singing original songs for the Harvard, Cambridge, and MIT students who’d pass, waiting for his big break. A friend, percussionist Dave Robinson, would sometimes join him, and when they had a chance to play indoors, Harvard architecture student and keyboardist Jerry Harrison and bassist Ernie Brooks sat in. There was good band chemistry and a nifty garage-rock sound. Soon they were calling themselves the Modern Lovers as a kind of fuck-you to the old, womanizing lothario approach to rock stardom and its attendant womanizing. The Velvet Underground never sang about groupies; Reed filled his lyrics with portraits of genius junkie girls (and genius junkies who dressed like girls).
Soon, Richman’s yearning singer-songwriter confessions were rocked up. The band played parties. They played recreation halls. They got tighter and they got taped. As with the Velvets, soon fans started sharing bootlegs as if it was their personal cause to make the Modern Lovers the biggest band since the Rolling Stones.
“In about 1971, Jonathan came to the attention of everyone. A number of people in the entertainment industry tried to woo and court him,” says Matthew King Kaufman, founder of the Northern California–based independent label Berserkley Records and, soon, a key Richman supporter. Whenever the Modern Lovers performed a showcase, powerful executives like Columbia’s Clive Davis, A&M’s Jerry Moss, and Steve Paul, owner of the hip club the Scene and founder of Blue Sky Records, all came to check them out. Even John Cale, now ensconced behind a big desk in the A&R department of the newly expanding Warner Bros. record division, was interested. At the start of the big-rock era, wings of major media and entertainment companies like Warner Bros. were gobbling up the little mom-and-pop independent labels that had released many of the classic 1950s and ’60s R&B, country, and garage-band hits, and subsequently placed themselves in the position of having to find one sensation after the other to impress shareholders and justify their very hugeness.
For all his apparent shyness, Richman was a natural showman onstage, effortlessly able to connect with a crowd. He worked the mike like a game-show host, setting up each number and leading the band through them with an “All right, Modern Lovers . . .”
The songs were thrilling. There was “Pablo Picasso,” an ode to confidence and vision over physical limitations, a Punk ethic if there ever was one. And then there was “Roadrunner,” which took Bo Diddley’s “Roadrunner” into the New England suburbs, placing a lonely hero on a starry night, young and moving fast, powered by the radio. “I’m in love with rock and roll, and I’ll be out all night . . .” Richman had written the track when he was eleven and dreaming of having a car instead of a bike. There was no heavy metaphor here. It was a classic car song, as American and accessible as it got, and every one of those golden-eared idol-makers in the audience could tell it was the single.
Following one showcase, an A&R rep from Warner Bros. casually told Richman that he would have to sing “Roadrunner” at every show he played for the rest of his life. The teenager was horrified. “Jonathan couldn’t believe they actually said that, and he was going to lose all his free will,” says Kaufman.
John Cale, just shy of thirty, took a big-brotherly role with the star, which makes perfect sense when you consider how much Richman worshipped Cale’s former band. It was clear that Warner Bros. was the Modern Lovers’ first choice despite the bad juju Richman had gotten from one of their employees. Warner Bros. had absorbed smaller labels like an amoeba and had amassed a roster of superstar acts including Black Sabbath, America, Van Morrison, the Grateful Dead, the Doobie Brothers, and James Taylor. All involved expected the Modern Lovers to be next in this long line of massive stars.
The band flew out to Los Angeles to record with Cale for three days. Cale had produced the Stooges’ 1969 debut and was, via work with Nico and avant-garde classical musician Terry Riley, on his way to establishing himself as someone who could take hip street energy and heady, student-beloved expansion and capture it all, pleasingly, on a marketable track. (In 1975, he would produce Patti Smith’s debut, the Punk rock epic Horses, as well as Squeeze’s self-titled debut in ’77.)
Cale had a personal preference for Richman’s voice when it had a bit of Dylan-esque sneer to it, as it did on “She Cracked.” It fit nicely with Harrison’s aggressive electric organ, which he pulled up in the mix. “Cale would be saying, ‘Now, Jonathan, I want you to sing this in a mean way,’” Harrison has said. “And Jonathan would just look at him, you know, ‘Mean? I won’t sing mean. I don’t feel mean!’”
The Cale tapes were electrifyingly raw, but in the pre-Punk era few at the label felt this was an asset. The sound was not dark and stoner-friendly à la Black Sabbath, or soft pop like America. It was not baroque and showy like Elton John. Hoping to push their acquisition into a more marketable direction, Kim Fowley, veteran hit maker and eccentric, self-styled rock and roll Frankenstein (best known for later assembling the proto-Punk girl group the Runaways) was also hired to fuss with the Modern Lovers. Warner Bros., once so intent on signing this sought-after band, now didn’t know what to do with them.
“They couldn’t market it,” says Kaufman. Richman was trim, good-looking in a clean-cut way, but naturally strange: was he the new David Cassidy or the new Jim Morrison? Once their West Coast sessions and shows were completed, an excited Modern Lovers returned to Boston and waited . . . and waited . . . for word from the label. Ultimately, Warner Bros. did what many giant companies do when faced with what seemed like an insurmountable and time-sucking dilemma: they ignored it. The tapes were placed on the shelf, and Richman and the band were left to wonder, “What just happened?”
This lasted eighteen months. When the label eventually informed the band that they were being dropped, it was almost a relief. Matthew King Kaufman, still a believer, was allowed to purchase the Cale tapes at a bargain-bin rate. “About ten cents on the dollar,” he says. As the band slowly came apart, Kaufman began assembling what would come to be universally known as the Modern Lovers’ self-titled debut.
Today that record is regarded as a pre-Punk classic, easily as influential as anything by the Velvet Underground. Its purple-and-gray color scheme and the band’s logo are T-shirt- and sticker-worthy icons. But it was never an “album” in the classic sense. It was essentially a demo. That’s how good this band was. Paul Nelson, the legendary music writer from Rolling Stone, provided Kaufman with a copy of the crucial track “Hospital.”
“I go to bakeries all day long,” Richman sings on that ballad, a pledge of unconditional love for a troubled scene queen. “There’s a lack of sweetness in my life.”
These bootleg Modern Lovers tapes slowly transformed Richman into the star that the industry could never make: a word-of-mouth legend. His absence only fed into the burgeoning myth. Where was Richman? Where did he go after being dropped? Bermuda? Israel?
“Jonathan changed radically during that period,” Kaufman says. “This was around the time when he was starting to want to write and sing only happy songs,” Harrison recalled to a journalist years later.
The major labels had moved on to the next big thing, but out in Berkeley, Matthew King Kaufman was inspired by the contained excitement for the band among the brighter music writers. When Kaufman invited Richman out to California for a visit in 1975, it had been nearly four years since the band had been signed by Warner Bros. Back in New York City, there were half
a dozen bands starting to coalesce around CBGB, a small, grubby club on the Bowery. Harrison had relocated to Manhattan and joined one of them. They were called Talking Heads, and their lead singer, David Byrne, was as puzzling and singular and unlikely a rock star as Richman had been, a sort of nerd with the stage presence of David Bowie or Bryan Ferry. The Ramones, Television, and Blondie were all raised on the kind of garage rock that Richman had taken and turned on its ear. Here were young bands presenting the same elemental, teen-friendly, cathartic noise as Richman. But when there’s half a dozen of them, they call it a movement. When it’s only one, it’s “unmarketable.”
Over in England, in ’75, the nascent London Punk scene was forming around McLaren and Westwood’s bondage-wear shop in the King’s Road. The store, called Sex, had an old-style 1950s jukebox in the back and a few dozen original rock and roll hits: Little Richard, Eddie Cochran, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, Gene Vincent. Aghast by the bloat of the music industry and the pretensions of artists like Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Yes (with all their elaborate concerts on ice), the kids who’d convene there turned to the birth of rock and roll for inspiration.
“We went back to what came before that,” says Pistols bassist Glen Matlock. “More rockin’. More concise.” Sixties Mod tracks from the Who and the Small Faces were acceptable. If anything from the 1970s fit in, it was the occasional Iggy or New York Dolls track, until one day the aforementioned Nick Kent, a journalist for New Musical Express (N.M.E.) and a famous rock writer in an era when rock writers had a lot of power, showed up at the store with one of the Modern Lovers cassettes from America.