Been listening to The Modern Lovers. It's captivating, because I read Moon's explanation that these were the seeds of punk, that the recordings represent a sort of garage-hip experiment that serve as a foundation for the anger-driven punk that came shortly after.
There's not much anger here, even in "Pablo Picasso," which I learned from the Repo Man soundtrack, mostly because the word we all know is in it was in it. I'm listening now to the Bowie version of "Pablo Picasso," which sounds rattly and haphazard after The Modern Lovers -- not because it is, but because their studio original is perfectly driven and solid.I have to say, "I'm Straight" is as heartbreaking as any given stalker song I can think of -- and let's face it, they usually are. Sort of. Hmm -- better leave that there and move on.
I did some punk earlier in this listening progress, and liked what I heard, again -- much more accessible than it had been when I was younger and trying to sort things out. The Modern Lovers sounds, again, like a treasure I wish someone had told me about before. The truth is, though, that without the perspective, I wouldn't have known what i was hearing or what to interpret. It's disaffected bludge, and not that far off some of the punk-driven rock we heard 10 and 20 years after.
But! Moon recommends that one follow it with Talking Heads '77, which i did, and then the few records later of Remain In Light, and things begin to make more sense. We can hear the conflation of art rock with punk -- what brings us to the Mars Volta, which I'll get back to shortly, and the hammer of punk mixed with the Heads' axe sounds much more meaningful. It also elevates Harrison's status in the Heads' shriek factor, because Harrison was in the Modern Lovers and, presumably, brought his rhythmic, atonal (that's not what I mean), bullethead organ (that's what I mean) from the Modern Lovers to the Heads.
Remain in Light brings Adrian Belew in, and the strange fanged will-o-the-wisps he fires into the mix start to drag the Heads, or him, into a much stranger place where things get weirder very fast, and then you get all kinds of things going rightly wrong at once. So now I get the Modern Lovers, and the Heads. It all makes sense.