What a great read about a great band! The Modern Lovers' Modern Lovers is one of those perfect albums. I never knew it was not really intended to be an album, but is rather a mish mash of demos. Jonathan Richman's love of Boston and feelings about himself, youth, and identity are beautifully (and rockingly) captured in this album. This book places Boston, Richman, and society at the time the album was made in context, allowing a fuller appreciation of some of the coolest tracks in American lo-fi rock history.

A great read on the underrated but fabulous Modern Lovers.  Not only that, but a great history lesson on the city of Boston in the 1960s-1980s.

Do you ever hear a song & wonder how it was not a huge hit? You think that if there were any justice in the business, or if it were actually some sort of meritocracy, that sure, this song should have been HUUUUUGE.
I think of this album as having several of them, “Roadrunner” certainly not being the least.
In some ways, this 33 1/3 series is a lot like that same phenomenon.  It’s a crazy creative idea, and you would think that it would have a certain sometimes huge popularity. But it just seems to hang on by the proverbial fingernails.
It doesn’t help, I suppose, that you really never know what to expect with any given title.
Maloney’s journey into the eponymous Modern Lovers album is as much an examination of Boston & surrounding areas in the late 1960s and early 1970s as it is an examination of the band or the album.  He reaches out and claims The Modern Lovers as being firmly about a place and time.  And really, I suppose that’s both the good and the bad about the book.
Your reaction is going to be based on where you stand on Boston.  How much do you care about the city and its history and its music scene?
There’s a certain irony to even writing about this album. After all, it seems to be a commitment to rock and roll reductionism. It’s a reaction to late 1960s rock excess and a loop back into the songs about cars and girls that had been popular some time earlier (and would again one day). Maybe the best thing to do would be to drink some beers and crank it up.
In mind imagination there’s a different book, one that’s a semi-fictional account of a band battle between The Modern Lovers and early Aerosmith. It plays out on stages and at gigs around Boston. That’s the book that I left wanting to read.

I'm not really that up on Jonathan Richman in general, but that first Modern Lovers album...I won't say 'who doesn't like it?', because as someone who dislikes the vast majority of the Beatles I've been on the wrong end of falsely presumed consensus too many times. But it's not an album you need to be into a particular style or scene to get. And of course, it's not an album, not really, which makes its inclusion in the 33 1/3 series interesting; this is the first entry I've read where the author has to explain that he's using the tracklisting of the CD reissue, not the original, because that's the version scratched into his soul and also it better fits the story he wants to tell. Fine by me, not least because it's the version I know too. Under each song's title, we get a brief and perceptive account of the track itself (though I'm perhaps less convinced than Maloney that there's a song cycle per se to be found), a stage in the rise and fall of the Modern Lovers, and a little more on the history of Boston as the sixties give way to the seventies. It's the third strand which surprised me most; I'd always had the place down as a fairly cool city, and also a fairly old one*. Maloney soon disabused me of this, talking about the aggressive redevelopment bent on destroying whole urban neighbourhoods to give suburbanites a quicker commute - "But it’s the kids that are going to destroy the fabric of society", so the city's other big project is a 'war on hippies' and alternative culture in general. In setting an album and its creators against the fractious background which in turn created them, this is not dissimilar to the Dead Kennedys 33 1/3, but it feels a little more free and less grounded; that book would never have described itself as "A story about magic and mystery and negotiating what those can mean in the modern era". On the other hand, this is perhaps more of a one man show; I got more feeling for the personality of the new mayor, or scene fixer Danny Fields, than I did for any of the Lovers who weren't Richman. Still, for all that one of his bandmates did end up in the Cars (about which again I had no idea, nor that Richman came up playing the same shows as, of all the people with whom you'd assume he had absolutely nothing in common, Aerosmith), Richman is undeniably the main point of interest here. A massively proto-punk figure in many ways, with his sense that anyone can do it regardless of conventional notions of musical skill, his desire to record the old-fashioned way with four guys playing live in a room, his refusal to pander to audience expectations and play the hits. But on the other hand, a man conflicted about the darkness of his beloved Velvet Underground, still respectful of the old way of doing things, a man who can write a song called 'Dignified and Old' and make it sound like a good thing. Which was always going to lead to a certain amount of tension: as he said himself, much later, listening back to his old records - "I’m hearing a kid who is having a bad time but a fair amount of it is his own fault". I can't vouch for how much of the information and analysis here would be new to a hardcore Richman fan, or a Boston resident, but for the rest of us, the ones for whom 'Roadrunner' and 'Pablo Picasso' are great songs but ones which kind of came from nowhere, it's a fascinating read. I just hope the finished copies are a little more tightly edited than the Netgalley ARC, which is a bit all over the place, from a mention of producer 'Joe Meeks' to a lovely little passage about the genius of scenes spoiled by the use of 'duplicity' where 'duplication' is meant.

*By US standards, obviously; I not infrequently lunch while leaning on a little-remarked wall older than any structure in the USA.