You did it. You wrote the songs. You went to open mics. You harvested band members. You finally found a bassist. You got the band together. You KEPT the band together. You sent out emails with cell phone recordings of practice to book gigs. You played to people’s backs in a bar, to ten people huddled in a bookstore, to literally one drunk dude sitting on a pool table. You played a party in your friend’s basement. You played a farmers’ market where people told you to turn down. You played more Sunday afternoon slots than you would care to admit. You played a gig where the microphone shocked your lip every time you touched it. You played a gig where your amp blew up when you turned it on. You played a bill with a crust punk band, a Scorpions tribute band, and a wannabe new Dylan. You played a “headlining set” where everyone left after the opener finished. You played a show where you definitely got blown off the stage by the opener, like absolutely creamed. You kept practicing. You kept writing. You found your sound. Six months. Nine months. Twelve months. You played a Friday night to a packed bar. You played a theater show with functioning monitors lining the stage. You played a show with a sound guy who wasn’t drunk or high or an incredible asshole. You played on a bill that actually made sense. You played a show where people knew the choruses of your songs. You got an article written about you in the local alternative newspaper. The writer said you had a “neo-retro sound” whatever that means. You got so other bands and venues asked YOU to play. You got the group off the ground. Welcome to cruising altitude. You NEED to record the album. You should ALWAYS record the album.
Here’s what happens next: Your bassist goes broke and leaves town. Your drummer gets sick of your singer’s shit and quits, taking the band’s keyboard with him. Your guitarist has a meltdown on stage. He turns up his amp to 10, smashes his guitar, and stomps off stage. Your bassist steals all of your gear and leaves town to fund his coke habit. Your singer sleeps with the rhythm section. It goes poorly. They leave. They’re ace now. The singer and guitarist have increasingly different opinions about the direction of the band. When they split, so does the band. Your drummer’s side project becomes her main gig, and now she doesn’t have enough time for you. You stall out. Momentum slows. Gigs dry up. You stop writing new material. You stop practicing. A plane without thrust can’t remain at cruising altitude. It either glides to a soft landing or blows up in a giant fireball, but it ceases to be a functional plane.
Here’s what happens next: If you didn’t record the album: nothing. You join another band, start a new one, or get into the production side of things. Maybe you give up on music altogether. It takes up a lot of time and there’s a lot of good TV. Maybe you have a kid. People seem to like doing that. The band goes from something you do to something you remember doing. It gets reduced from a living, evolving organism to a memory and a couple minutes of cell phone videos on a social media site for you to look at when you’re drunk and feeling nostalgic.
But if you recorded the album, who knows?
This week’s album, The Modern Lovers’ self-titled, is one of the most famous “lost” records. Recorded in 1972, it didn’t see release until four years later, after its mastermind had begun creating much different sounding music, and other bandmates had joined groups like the Talking Heads and The Cars. It would be inspirational for the first wave of punk rockers, who still wanted music they could be inspired by even if they wanted to burn everything else to the ground, and spawned two immortal classics “Roadrunner” and “Pablo Picasso.” It would later turn up on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time (for whatever that’s worth). The album, which was never supposed to be released, ended up being a big deal.
In the late 60s, Bostonian Johnathan Richman immersed himself in the proto-punk music of The Stooges and The Velvet Underground, going so far as to sleep on the couch of the Velvet’s manager during a nine-month stay in NYC. But Richman wasn’t a literate, streetwise jerk like the Velvet’s Lou Reed, he was a sweet, wide-eyed suburban kid, who wrote songs about trying to get girls to notice him, loving rock & roll while still loving his parents, and how Pablo Picasso was probably an asshole for being such a stickman. While Iggy Pop and Reed shot heroin and speed, respectively, Richman sang about how he doesn’t do drugs because they seem boring, but whatever, you do you. In an era when rock stars were fucked-up sex gods, Richman was an utter dork and softie. And he knew it. So to armor his squishy underbelly, he surrounded himself with tough-sounding garage rock, beating emo to the punch by about 15 years.
The Modern Lovers debut is the best album of Richman’s long career (and he’s still going). It’s also the only one I find compelling. In the early 1970s, after the Lovers recorded these songs, Richman went to Bermuda and became absolutely enraptured by quiet island sounds. And then it became his thing. The guy who wrote one of the best odes to rock & roll (“Roadrunner”) turned into basically Raffi for adults, nylon string guitar and all. Of course that creative lefthand killed his rock band, but, fortunately, they had already RECORDED THE ALBUM.
A lot of really wonderful bands disappear into the ether when they break up, but, if they had recorded the album, they could’ve lived again.