SPRING 1972: Starting a band is the easy part. Writing songs, playing shows, even the day-to-day tasks like hanging up fliers and maintaining a mailing list: those are the things that come naturally. The hard part comes when it is time to move up to the next level, when the time comes to find management and a label, to make the big moves it takes to get an album out into the world and into people’s hands. When art meets commerce is where things get weird, when bankers and lawyers and the financial interests of corporations with quarterly sales quotas all come into the picture. It’s like a game where three competing teams play different sports on the same field. Or a polyamorous relationship where each member of the relationship is actually a committee and each committee member has their own agenda and a long list of potential suitors just in case this specific courtship doesn’t last. It is a very complicated, very convoluted process. And it doesn’t help when an artist insists that they know what is best for their art. The record industry is not set up to make art the priority.
The Modern Lovers are very insistent about the importance of their art, confident that their sound, their style, and their inherent coolness were vital and unique. By the spring equinox of 1972, on the strength of Lillian Roxon’s record label-scolding live review in the Daily News, the Modern Lovers are a hot commodity amongst the rock cognoscenti. That Roxon would travel hours outside of New York to the backwater of Boston to see a band nobody had heard of spoke volumes—she moves in rock’s most elite circles, covers the biggest names in the scene. That she would compare them to her beloved Velvet Underground, a band that she helped canonize via their inclusion in her Rock Encyclopedia, said even more. Roxon is New York’s top tastemaker, she essentially broke the idea that rock music should be given serious critical attentions, and record labels knew better than to ignore her enthusiastic exclamations. And even more than that, Roxon has an unfailing ear for great songs and an eye for cute boys.
The Lovers may still be playing small, self-booked shows but their audience increasingly began to include some of the music industry’s most powerful figures. Clive Davis, head of Columbia Records and one of the industry’s most powerful men, had shown up to a gig in a high school gymnasium in Cambridge. David Geffen, the industry trailblazer who had just launched the artist-friendly Asylum records, is poking around. A&M Records, the label founded by Herb Alpert and known as a bastion of creativity and commercial success, has expressed interest as well, even sending out a young A&R guy named Matthew Kaufman to meet the band. And Warner Bros. are still interested, maybe even more so now that they know their competition is interested as well. And Danny Fields, who has left Elektra records and joined up with Johnny and Edgar Winter’s manager Steve Paul, is now looking to formalize a business relationship with the band after years of friendship and free advice. The band have options and leverage, a strange thing in a music industry where unsigned artists rarely occupy a position of power.
Over the course of the 60s, music industry power had slowly moved westward. Between L.A.’s studio-pop dominance and San Francisco’s acid-fueled ascendency, California has wrested control from New York City and began to recraft youth culture in its image. Even East Coast acts like James Taylor, Bonnie Raitt, and Jonathan Edwards (of Bosstown also-rans Sugar Creek) had taken on the breezy smoothness of the Left Coast. Edwards’ “Sunshine” is cruising up the charts, it is bright, hopeful, optimistic. It lacks the unstoppable restlessness of youth and unmovable weight of age. It is a song blissfully unaware of the world around it. Laurel Canyon hegemony is at its height and country rock is king in this small hip-industry enclave.
The Lovers arrived in California on the company dime. Two companies to be exact. In a rare move for the music industry, the suits at Warner and the suits at A&M see eye to eye and agree to split costs, each label getting the chance to walk the band through the old courtship rituals but only having to pay for half the date. And the band still doesn’t have management. Kaufman has offered and Danny Fields and his new boss Steve Paul are interested but, still, no management; the band’s sense of self-importance was making it hard to hand over control of affairs to an outsider. It makes this record label ménage à trois an even more impressive feat. When the Lovers arrive in California, they are bringing a markedly different energy with them and playing by a different set of rules. Stridently minimal and forcefully propulsive, the sound the Modern Lovers make in these California studios stands in stark contrast to the prevailing sounds of the West Coast.
The Modern Lovers’ sound is diametrically opposed to the chart toppers and hit makers in A&M’s stable. The label that Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss founded to release The Tijuana Brass’ dulcet instrumental “The Lonely Bull” has become an industry juggernaut over the course of the 60s. Artists like Burt Bacharach and Liza Minnelli, Paul Williams, and The Carpenters are dominating AM radio. Rock acts like Free and Humble Pie were finding a home at progressive rock stations across the country. Joe Cocker, Cat Stevens, and Carole King are straddling both, creating a new niche of adult-oriented, rock influenced music that emphasizes the singer and the songwriter above all else. A&M are even the home of The Flying Burrito Brothers, who, with founding member and current Emmylou Harris collaborator Gram Parsons, helped make country music cool in the eyes of rock fans. When the Modern Lovers went into the studio to cut demos with Robert Apperre and Steve Mason, there was nothing like them on the label.
Warner Brothers Records’ line-up was a bit different, assembled as it were through corporate mergers and label acquisitions in addition to traditional A&R work. From 60s veterans like the Grateful Dead, Frank Zappa, and Van Morrison to young stars of the 70s like Massachusetts-bred James Taylor and the ever-so-smooth Seals and Croft: that was Warner Bros. Their roster was stacked. Figure in their knack for ushering some of rock’s heaviest acts out of obscurity—Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, and Alice Cooper all have big, new hit records out—and Warner Bros. seem like a good fit. But, most importantly, John Cale is working with Warner Bros. After two albums for Columbia—Vintage Violence and The Church of Anthrax, his collaboration with visionary composer Terry Riley—the former Velvet Underground viola player had signed with WB subsidiary Reprise Records as an artist and producer.
Both of the demo sessions are simple, mercenary affairs, quick sketches in preparation for a painting of a much grander scope. The Modern Lovers aren’t recording an album; they don’t have time to indulge in overdubs or an infinite number of takes. These recordings are fast, furious reproductions of the band as a live unit, snapshots of the living breathing thing that is the Modern Lovers, but there’s a thickness of tone and nervous energy that didn’t come through during the Intermedia sessions. The band sounds more confident, less overwhelmed by the studio environment, more comfortable battling back and forth like they do in the practice room. While the rest of Hollywood overdoses on punch-ins and studio tricks, the Modern Lovers are making rock ’n’ roll the old fashioned way, four guys in a room doing it live, straight to tape.
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