Two with TALKING HEADS, 1977-78

Interview text © 1978, 1979 by Bernie Kugel;
RBF intro © 2010 by Robert Barry Francos
Images from the Internet

The following interviews with Talking Head were originally published in Big Star magazine, issue #2, dated August 1977, and Big Star magazine, issue #3, dated August 1977. Both were conducted by Bernie Kugel, and reprinted here with his kind permission. I have left in the text the way Bernie originally had it (cleaning up some typos kinds of things). Text added by me in the present is in [brackets].

Talking Head were the first band I saw play CBGB’s, on June 20, 1975, when they were opening for the Ramones. Many years later I would discover that this was also the first night out for Talking Heads. I went there with Bernie, natch.

When David Byrne started singing back then, he moved the back of his head, the front passing the mic with a Doppler effect. The next time we saw them, he had figured out the whole move the back of the head instead thing. As I have said before, I enjoyed the band more as a trio, finding a keyboard made their sound too “New Wave,” rather than quirky. – RBF, 2010

Part I – 3 x 3: Talking Heads Talk
Big Star #2, August 1977

Since their emergence at CBGB’s in 1975, David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, and Chris Frantz, otherwise known as Talking Heads, have been a consistently entertaining pop music band bringing to mind aspects of bands like the early Modern Lovers and Velvet Underground, but basically sounding like themselves more than anyone else. With super catchy songs like “Don’t Worry About the Government,” “Psycho Killer,” “I’m Not In Love,” “Thank You For Sending Me an Angel,” and others, they present a happy melodic future for music. Recently, they’ve been quite busy with bassist Tina marrying drummer Chris, Jerry Harrison of the Modern Lovers joining the group on guitars and piano, and most importantly, finishing up their first album on Sire [Talking Heads ‘77], which should be just about ready to be released when you read this. But until that comes out, here’s a few little insights into the Heads from the Heads themselves, from a conversation I had with them in January. Jerry Harrison wasn’t in the band at the time so I didn’t speak to him, but hopefully I’ll have the chance to do that real soon for an upcoming issue. But for now, as they’re seen in the pic, here are Chris, Tina and David…

Chris Frantz

1. Do you have favorite New York groups?
Yeah, I would say my favorite New York band right now is the Ramones, other than ourselves of course. I know people might think it’s funny that we like the Ramones and all but before we’d ever even played we’d seen them; in fact, the first night I moved to New York City I went to hear the Ramones, I think they were just beginning. I liked them even though they were really terrible then. They’ve cleaned up their act considerably since then. I think they’re great. Television, of course, is good.

2. What prompted you to write to Crawdaddy [magazine] (concerning an article severely putting down the Ramones)?
Well, you know I’d never even written a letter to a magazine before, that was the first and only one I’ve written so far. I just thought it was a really mean record review. I understand that writers can write whatever they want and all that, but it made me angry what this fellow said. I hate to say it but Crawdaddy’s a kind of dry rag, but maybe it’s picking up now that they’ve got us in there; maybe they’re getting better.

3. Do you have favorite movies?
To tell you the truth, I just went to see three movies. David goes to the movies pretty frequently and Tina does also, but I don’t go so much ‘cause I get nervous sitting in the chair for that long, or I get indigestion. But I did go see Carrie and I liked that a lot, and I liked King Kong a lot, and I liked Rocky a lot. When we were in school, we used to have to see movies all the time. They were sort of required in art school. We got a very heavy dose of the “art film,” or at least I did when I was there, and as a result, I have a tendency to go to things like Rocky rather than Cousin Cousine. I avoid those kinds of movies nowadays.

Tina Weymouth

1. What’s it feel like playing live now compared to the early days?
The crowds are really big now, compared to the early days. And where the crowds used to just look at us and say “jeez, they’re so weird” and think that we were very arty and stuff like dramatic and theatrical, we weren’t trying to be; I think it just happened because we wore very simple clothes and not glitter. We’d just put the lights on and leave them on and not use any colored lights or anything. But now it’s really fun. In New York, at CBGB’s, people get very excited, and some of them scream – scream so loud it actually hurts your ears on stage. And it’s louder than our amplifiers.

2. Do you have favorite historical figures or heroes of any kind you look up to?
I’m sure we do. I’m sure we have a lot, although I can’t think of any in particular right now. We like a lot of the old R&B originators. One of the reasons why we decided to take the risk and make the band even though we weren’t sure at all how we would be received and we knew it would be a lot of work, was because we were very disgusted with the art world. There was so much heroizing and the artists that we met were so inflated with themselves - not all of them but a number of them - and so full of themselves and people really looked up to them as though they were magicians, real heroes, and they thought of themselves as elitists: fine artists, and therefore very noble, and I think that kind of turned us off. It really made us decide we don’t like heroes; we don’t like any of that and we’re certainly not going to be heroes ourselves. We’re not gonna do that, we’re always gonna be normal people. We’re not gonna be pretentious and try to have people look up to us as though we’re something special. We try to stick to that pretty much. I guess we sort of got away from that kind of heroism.

3. Do you have any advice to new band starting out?
Yeah, one very important thing is to rehearse a lot before you perform because sometimes you’re a little overanxious to just get up on stage and do it. Of course, audience response is very important in the development. From the time you begin to a few months later you could sound different. But rehearse a lot beforehand so that everything’s very tight, very together, so that the first time people see you they think it’s good and you won’t get a reputation for sounding bad. You could start out terrible and then get good some months later and people will remember you as having been the way you were when you started and they’ll say, “Oh no, that band’s terrible.” So that’s the only advice I can imagine. Work very hard. Practice a lot, like the old Julliard saying goes, “Practice, practice, practice gets you into Carnegie Hall.”

David Byrne

1. What were some songs that you used to play in the early days that you don’t do now?
“I Want to Live,” “Sugar On My Tongue”… I can’t remember them all. We keep dropping more and more, and adding new ones.

2. When did you get the idea for the acoustic guitar now used on many Talking Heads songs?
I don’t know, it was always on records. You would always listen to records and you’d hear acoustic guitar and I thought, “How come nobody does that in a band?” I mean outside of folk acts and stuff. So I thought, well, I’ll give it a try. Just have to crank up the volume.

3. Did you think you’d have the success you’ve found in New York?
I always thought it was possible, but I didn’t expect it to happen this fast. I set a sort of tentative timetable and thought, “Five years before we get good enough so that people get what we do.” And it seemed to happen a little bit faster, which is very pleasing.


Part II – Talking Heads: 78
Big Star #3, Spring 1978

Since our last issue, the big Talking Heads news is that their debut album has of course been released. And, all in all, it’s a fine first album with the second side being especially strong. Definitely one of the better records of ’77, and this decade. Recently, the band has been touring all over (including a superconcert in Buffalo) and I guess it won’t be too much longer before they go into the studios and start recording songs like “The Big Country,” “Stay Hungry,” “Good Thing,” “Let’s Work,” or whatever songs will eventually become Talking Heads album number two.

We’ve been fortunate enough to talk with the band on a couple of occasions now, and it is from these conversations that we present this epic.

Chapter One: First telephone conversation with Tina Weymouth, Part One:

Bernie: Do you think this band will stay together for a long time?
Tina: Oh, I don’t see why not; I don’t see anything that’s gonna… yeah, it could last a real long time… it depends… what do you mean by that?

Bernie: Well, like in lotsa bands there are personality clashes and bands break up.
Tina: Um hum. Well, David and Chris have been together in bands for several years now and they’d know by now whether they were gonna break up or not. I guess it’s only common sense to say that sometimes knowing that different people have different ideas and start to go in different directions, then it’s just logical that the band break up or if the band is not successful, then that’s logical to break up too, because then you have to mutate and change so that you get to be some kind of collaboration that does work. That just seems to be a natural thing that happens all the time – if a band isn’t working, and you break up, then it’s a good thing.

Bernie: You probably get asked this a lot, but are there any special problem being the girl in the band?
Tina: I don’t know; I really don’t know. I don’t know whether the problems I have are problems anybody would have or just problems a girl would have. I don’t feel any particular discrimination if that’s what you mean. That’s a question that’s been asked only a couple of times and I don’t know how to answer it except to sort of ignore it because it just doesn’t seem to be that much of a problem. I don’t think about it; the boys don’t think about it. I think they thought about it at first when they first asked me to join because they didn’t know how it would be, but they knew me very well and I guess I worked out better than some boys would, just because I have similar ideas and concepts. So it was better to have me than a boy who had a totally different direction.

Bernie: Is there any truth to what was printed in the Village Voice a few weeks back that the name Talking Heads comes from David’s neck, or something like that?
Tina: No, no, that was [Robert] Christgau going wild. I thought it was real funny because I thought it was Tom Verlaine of Television – his was the neck that everyone looked at. But I guess David does have a long neck; we’ve been teasing him, calling him “Neckrifiti” ever since, but no, that’s not how it originated. The name came from an old back issue of TV Guide when we were tyring to find a name for ourselves ‘cause while we were in rehearsal we had no name; it was only just before when we auditioned for CBGB’s we had to have a name. So we had to have a name right away, and we had a friend who was staying with us, and he was looking through the TV Guide and he wrote it on one of our numerous lists of possible names. It’s video jargon for a talk show; it’s what cameramen use when they’re talking to each other: “This afternoon, 1 PM, we have a talking head” – so it’s almost a documentary type of name. And so when we were looking at the list, it was the only name we felt had so many connotations to it, that it didn’t offend us and we liked it. It was the only name that made us all laugh and that we all liked. The name is not very important; I think what happens is that you try to find a name that is original so that when your style or whatever it is that you’re doing gets identified with the name, so Talking Heads now means something particular. It means us. Well, it still means what it did the way the cameramen use it, for TV people, but it’s not something like some sorta particular name which connotates heavy metal or anything like that. We didn’t try to find a name which would suit our music, we figured it would work the other way around. The group would define the name, not the name define the group.

Chapter Two: Post-concert party interview with David Byrne

Bernie: Are you influenced by a group like the Troggs as you have played two Troggs songs (“Love Is All Around” and “I Can’t Control Myself”) in your live sets over the past couple of years?
David: I don’t think so, I just liked those. We mainly did that one, “I Can’t Control Myself” a long time ago sort of before the whole punk thing got started. It seemed like a real sort of punky song and they were a real sort of punk group band then, and we just liked it. But then when all this punk thing started happening, we thought we better not do that. It seemed like there were plenty of other people doing that sort of material.

Bernie: You’ve fooled around with playing Ramones songs?
David: Yeah, a year ago in Boston we did “Boyfriend.” We did that a couple of times. It sounded great. That was when I used the acoustic and I just turned it all the way up so it would sound like the Ramones, but it really didn’t.

Bernie: In your [Sire] press bio it states that there was a time when you thought that Tina would be the lead singer?
David: I don’t think so. I don’t remember that; maybe it was brought up but I don’t remember that.

Bernie: Do you ever think you should use more harmonies and try for that kind of sound?
David: Jerry [Harrison] sings sometimes but maybe if we get better we could do that, but it’s a really hard thing to do and make it sound right. I don’t think we’re able to do it yet.

Bernie: What are some of your favorite recording artists presently?
David: I really like Booker T & the MGs’ records from a while ago. I really like James Brown. I really like that group Parliament and Funkadelic, and stuff like that. I like them but I don’t like KISS, although some people might think there was some sort of similarity. I got the new Randy Newman record; I liked that. I’ve been listening to a lot of foreign stuff like music from Japan and Bulgaria, and things like that.

Bernie: Do you think it’s influenced your writing?
David: Not yet.

Chapter Three: Post-concert Backstage by the Elevator Interview with Jerry Harrison

Bernie: Were there a lot of old Modern Lovers songs that didn’t come out on the first Modern Lovers’ LP?
Jerry: Oh yes, another album’s worth (Some titles: “Tenderness,” “I’m Straight,” “She Takes the Pill for Me”).

Bernie: Were any real, real great ones?
Jerry: You know the song “Government Center”? We have a great version; we (original Modern Lovers) did that song. “I’m Straight” is really good.

Bernie: Do you think that stuff will ever come out?
Jerry: I doubt it. It should. I wish they made a single out of “Old World” and “She Cracked.”

Bernie: “Old World” is like my favorite song offa the album…
Jerry: Those two came out pretty well as far as the recording sounded.

Bernie: Did you immediately fit in with Talking Heads?
Jerry: Yeah. It was sort of amazing. Every time we played together it just got better and better, and just got to the point of “Well, alright, it can’t come any further doing this now and then so let’s try it.” And it’s been real good.

Bernie: Do you think you’ll be writing songs for Talking Heads?
Jerry: I hope so. You never know how compatibility will work. Songwriting is a very funny thing in a band because everyone really does enter into the way it sounds; the arrangement. And often the arrangement really starts to influence the way the song is, so it’s very hard to define what you mean by song. A lot of times it’s best for one person to come up with some sort of original conception and take it from that point. People enter in too early and it just gets confusing.

Bernie: Yeah, a lot of the songs seem drastically different from the early days…
Jerry: Yeah, that’s the case. Cos it certainly isn’t like you feel that you’re not involved in the process.

Bernie: Do you like any bands you’ve seen in New York or Europe?
Jerry: I love the Ramones, who we played with in Europe. I think they’re wonderful. I saw the Clash; I thought they were alright. I think they might turn into a real good band; they’re getting to play all the time and they have a real following, and those things are great nurturing experiences, but as far as strictly taking them for their music, it sounds like I’ve heard it all before. So I don’t know what to say, I think the politics are a little bit bullshit, at least when I talked to them. Having been through politics in the United States with the war in Vietnam, I see that they’re angry about things but they don’t have any developed ideas about them; there’s no theory behind it. But maybe I didn’t talk to the right person, so I really don’t know.

Bernie: Do you like any other bands?
Jerry: Well, I haven’t seen Television except when they first got started. They wanted Ernie [Brooks], the old bass player in the Modern Lovers to play with them when Richard Hell left. So I went with him to go see them and at that time I thought they were just dogshit. You gotta see that at that time we came out of a band who we thought could’ve gone everywhere and to just start playing with a band that was nowhere… it’s a very hard thing to go backwards, but yet maybe he shoulda done it. But at that time I didn’t really like them. I haven’t seen them now; I like their record O.K. [“Little Johnny Jewel,” Ork Records]. I didn’t like it that much when I first heard it but I’ve heard it more and it’s grown on me.

Bernie: What do you think of all the current Boston stuff?
Jerry: Well, I like the Real Kids. The Cars are real good; the original drummer from the Modern Lovers [David Robinson] plays with them. I think in general bands in Boston are still influenced by the English sound, sorta like Aerosmith, being a combination of the Yardbirds and Stones. They’re friends of mine; I like them. I don’t have any idea if I would really like them… you see, the Modern Lovers and they… we were ahead of them in a way at some point. Like J. Geils had gotten up there, and then we would; and there was this band called the Sidewinders, they used to live in my apartment. Ernie used to play with them… So anyway, we were sort of the next group, the next group of bands that were gonna make it, so I feel this real allegiance to Aerosmith. Even if they played the worst shit in the world, I’d still stand by them and I do think they’ve developed more of their own sound, and they have something. I don’t think they’re the most amazing band in the world or the most original…

Bernie: Why did the original Lovers break up?
Jerry: Just personalities.

Bernie: What do you think of Jonathan’s current stuff?
Jerry: I’m not wild about it. I mean, I think it’s sort of interesting, but it’s not exciting to me. That’s really why I didn’t want to continue, because it was all his personality. If you really like his personality, then that’s great. I don’t think his personality is that great.

Bernie: Yeah, cos it seems to me that early Modern Lovers was his personality plus a really solid band…
Jerry: Yeah… early Modern Lovers. He was a teenager who’d gone through this unhappy childhood and he’d written some incredible songs that expressed that unhappiness. We all realized that.

Chapter Four: First Telephone Conversation with Tina Weymouth, Part Two

Bernie: Do you have favorite foods?
Tina: Oh, yes. I like avocadoes an awful lot. We don’t really eat a lot of desserts, like candy or anything like that. Everybody in the band has their own tastes. David will eat anything. He likes baked beans for breakfast. He eats anything at all. Put it in front of him and he’ll eat it. We’re not very finicky eaters. We all eat just about everything. I guess that’s because we’ve all travelled a lot. Wherever you go, you eat the food that’s there, and you learn to acquire a taste for a lot of different things. The only thing I don’t like is sauerkraut. But everything else I like.

ERNIE BROOKS: A Lover Looks Back at the Roots of the Modern Lovers

Text by John Morace, intro by Robert Barry Francos
Interview © 1981; RBF intro © 2010 by FFanzeen
Images from the Internet

The following article about Boston-based bassist Ernie Brooks was originally published in FFanzeen magazine, issue #7, in 1981. It was written by John Morace.

By the time I saw the Modern Lovers in 1977, Ernie Brooks was no longer in the band. I did see him play a couple of times backing up other musicians, but never really got to know him personally, or as an individual musical entity. He certainly has had quite the career so far, as the list below will attest, as it is only partial. – RBF, 2010

Catfish Black Bassist (1969-70)
The Modern Lovers Bassist (1971-74)
Elliott Murphy Bassist (1976-)
David Johansen Bassist (1982)
Jerry Harrison Bassist (1990)
Gods and Monsters Bassist (1994-)
Gary Lucas Bassist (1994-)

[The original Modern Lovers; Jonathan Richman, Ernie Brooks, David Robinson, John Felice, Jerry Harrison]

FFanzeen: This is Ernie Brooks, formerly with Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, and is now with the Necessaries.
Ernie Brooks: Yes, and you could also add formerly with Elliot Murphy, formerly with the Love of Life Orchestra [LOLO], and formerly with what was pretty much my own band, the Flying Hearts, which included Dave van Tiegham, currently of LOLO, Larry Salzman, who now plays guitar for Peter Allen, and Arthur Russell, who’s been making disco records. The Flying Hearts played about. We played at the Ocean Club a few times… (The Ocean Club) was on Chambers Street. It was owned by Mickey Ruskin [d. 1983]. He’s a famous New York character. He was the one who started the original Max’s (Kansas City) and made it the hang-out for everybody. The back room at Max’s in the late ‘60s was where the Velvet Underground and the rest of Warhol’s super stars used to go. Plus artists, poets, scenemakers of all descriptions. Mickey was great. He was almost a patrol of the artists and musicians, letting them run up tabs. Painters could sometimes settle their bill by giving Mickey a piece of their work to hang on the wall. He runs One University Place, but it’s not the old Max’s. Anyway, the Ocean Club had a lot of Tribeca artists and musicians hanging out, just as the whole punk-New Wave thing was starting. He used to occasionally have bands play there.


FF: So you used to hang out at Max’s.
Ernie: Yeah, when I used to come down here from Boston. In fact – it was before I knew him – Jonathan (Richman) was a bus-boy at Max’s, but I think he dropped so many things on people that he got fired [laughs]. Before starting the Modern Lovers, he used to come to New York. He’d hang out with Lou Reed, sleep on his sofa, and listen to the Velvets rehearse.

FF: So he goes way back with them.
Ernie: Oh, yeah. It’s interesting because in a way, Jonathan is the other side of Lou Reed’s coin. I mean, Lou was always very openly into drugs and every kind of sexuality and perversity. Jonathan’s thing was that while he borrowed a lot from Lou in terms of musical style – in his guitar playing and vocal phrasing – in his lifestyle he took an opposite course. He never touched drugs as far as I know, including alcohol and cigarettes. He was against casual sex. He put girls on pedestals and worshipped them, and met them more on the astral plane than in the flesh. It’s interesting, a stance of innocence, of purity like Jonathan’s, can seem perverse when it’s taken to an extreme as it is in some of his newer songs, the ones about how beautiful everything is and how beautiful he is. I mean, something about songs like “Ice Cream Man” bothers me. He's repressing the dark side of his nature. Why is he writing all these songs for children? In a way it’s neat, so maybe it’s just a matter of taste that I like the old songs better.

FF: When did Jonathan first get a band together?
Ernie: Ah, it must have been about 1969. He started it with David Robinson as the drummer and a bass player named Rolf. Soon after, John Felice, a long-time neighbor and friend, joined as a second guitarist. He was in and out of the band for years, finally leaving to start his own group, the Real Kids. Jerry (Harrison) and I joined the group a couple of months after it started; I think it was 1971. It’s hard to remember. It was when Jerry and I were in our senior year at Harvard.

FF: How did Jerry Harrison hook up with Talking Heads?
Ernie: There were the three of them, and I ran into Chris (Franz) at a place called the Local near the Bottom Line (in NYC). Mickey Ruskin ran that place, too. Well, we started talking and they were considering adding a keyboard player at that point. I was with Elliott (Murphy) and Jerry wasn’t really doing anything besides going to architecture school. So they sort of got together. That’s when he started commuting to New York to try and work it out… and jamming and it worked out, so they got together.

FF: So the Modern Lovers played around Boston.
Ernie: Yeah, we used to play at all the college dances, and all the so-called mixers. We could always get a job once; then they found out what we were really like [laughs]. We had a great song called “The Mixer.” It was like “Hey girls, do you notice the smell?” Things like that. It pointed out to the people at the mixer all the ridiculous things about a mixer, which was like a lot of guys and girls standing around pretending that they were having a good time.

FF: How many songs did you have? About nine of them made it onto the Modern Lovers album.
Ernie: We had lots. We recorded some stuff with Kim Fowley, which I assume is the stuff they might release. That was about another 10 songs. Plus, I have some, and David Robinson has some tapes. Two songs, “I’m Straight” and “Government Center” have been released on a Warners' discount LP called Troublemakers.

FF: How did David Robinson hook up with the Cars?
Ernie: I don’t know exactly, but I do remember the bass player and Ric Ocasck were around Cambridge for a long time. I had met them before. They had a band called Milkwood, a folk-rock band. I remember when the Cars were getting together. It was funny, David said this was the last band he was ever going to join. He was so fed up, he’d been in so many bands.

FF: And it worked.
Ernie: It worked; it worked incredibly. They have been one of the most successful bands in the last couple of years. Their albums are just… You see, they’ve made a perfect combination of somewhat New Wave, somewhat quirky lyrics with really simple, basic pop formulas, in terms of their hooks. They’ve taken their hooks and they’ve twisted them just enough and put in a bizarre synthesizer like here, a bizarre word or two there. It’s a perfect combination.

FF: Do you think it’s contrived, or is it just what they feel like doing?
Ernie: It’s not… Yeah, I think it’s contrived. But in a good sense. I think it’s really well-crafted. I really respect it. It doesn’t move me a lot. But I love the way it sounds. It has an incredible sound.

FF: One thing about rock music that’s different from other kinds of expression is that for it to be successful it has to generate an audience to pay to support it because of all the expenses involved in touring, equipment, and albums. That, of course, has an influence on the music.
Ernie: It’s always a compromise. But at least in rock’n’roll, there is something very honest about the fact that you’re doing what you’re doing; nothing else. In a certain sense, it’s very ironic because on the one hand rock’n’roll is the most commercial, most compromised of arts, and on the other it’s the most honest and has the most integrity of the modern art forms because it’s so direct. You’re there in front of your audience. Either you turn them on or you don’t; you’re not supported by state grants. You’re not kissing the ass of some humanities foundation so you can get a grant and go off into a cabin in the woods and write poetry. You’re not involved in the university system, making friends with a professor so he’ll make you a teaching assistant so you can survive to write your novel. Ya know, that’s what I like about rock’n’roll.

FF: But some people are contrary to that opinion, such as the Copeland brothers on IRS, who are distributed by AM. They say that the size of the act depends upon how much A&M likes them and not the act itself.
Ernie: I think that’s partly true in the sense that a group can be hyped by a record label and the record label can put a lot of money into advertising and promotion and stuff like that, but unless the goods are there and people like it, it’s still not gonna sell. Kids can only be hyped to a certain extent. Not to say that kids always have good taste. There are some really good groups that are really big, but you can have groups like Styx and Foreigner, who I find really boring. But you understand that they are competent. Copeland, I think, likes to paint himself as the adversary of the big record labels.

FF: Getting back to Jonathan Richman, I notice that some of the songs are about people who are intellectually recognized; Pablo Picasso or Cézanne, for instance. The way he treats them is very different from the way most people treat them. He is very casual about them.
Ernie: Yeah, in a way it was a self-conscious thing, to take Pablo Picasso and describe him in very weird terms. Ya know: “Pablo Picasso would walk down the street / And girls would turn the color of an avocado / And girls could not resist his stare / And Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole” [See video below – RBF, 2010]. But I think he really believed that. He used to think these guys had some real incredible magical quality. Obviously, he never met Picasso, but I think he sort of got his vision of him walking down a street and this is his description of him. I the case of Cézanne, he used to go to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts a lot, and he was really into that.

FF: It think that’s very different from rock people, outside of Factory people like Andy Warhol and John Cale, who were into all kinds of art forms.
Ernie: It’s true, and that’s where Jonathan’s work was really seminal, in a way, for a lot of the art-rock bands like Talking Heads. They deal with issues, artistic or literary. It opened up the concept of a rock’n’roll song as being able to deal with a whole range of issues that it never dealt with before. Of course, a lot of people did that; Dylan certainly did, and the Velvet Underground. Jonathan was just another person who helped open it up.

FF: How did John Cale get involved in producing the album?
Ernie: Well, the Velvet Underground was sort of looked up to by the band. And Cale had produced albums, like the Nico album and the first Stooges album, which were really important.

FF: Or the Patti Smith album.
Ernie: Yeah, but this was long before that. The first Stooges album was in ’69. Iggy’s been around for along time. He was someone who totally gave himself to an audience, even to the point of hurting himself. He’d jump into the crowd, offer his body to the crowd. He’s great; he’s one of the best.

FF: I remember reading about a Velvet’s show at Farleigh Dickinson (University) – one of their multimedia presentations – and people just freaked. They started throwing bottles at the stage.
Ernie: Sure, I remember in the Modern Lovers, we played with Lee Michaels and Tower of Power in San Bernardino, in California, in this huge arena. A real redneck town. People driving their El Caminos up and down the street outside. People went crazy. There was just this angry roar from the crowd and all of a sudden this stuff started coming up on the stage; bottles, cans, all sort of trash.

FF: That must have felt great.
Ernie: Yeah, right. Warner Bros. had also brought all their people out to see us, their great new group. It was great.

FF: Was that John Cale’s doing?
Ernie: Yeah, he was an A&R man, and a producer for Warner’s. But that didn’t last long.

FF: Who did the record finally come out with? Not Warner’s.
Ernie: Beserkley Records, a small label that has been through every conceivable distributorship. It’s run by this genial madman named Matthew Kaufman. He was the guy who wanted to manage the Lovers when the original band was still intact. And he had the idea, even back then, of starting his own label. And Jonathan always really liked this guy. After the band broke up, he started managing Jonathan and issued a Beserkley Chartbusters record with a few songs of Jonathan’s on it. Then he had the idea of putting out an album of the original Modern Lovers, which was just a demo tape we made for Warner Bros. He came to us and asked if he could buy the tapes from Warner Bros. No one else was really interested in them then, so we said OK – which I realize now was probably stupid. If we had waited and held on to them we could have made some real money off the tapes, I suppose. I’ve never gotten any royalties… When I get rich enough to afford a lawyer, I’ll sue them.

FF: How did the band break up?
Ernie: Well, it was philosophical differences about the music; Jonathan wanted to go in a more acoustic direction. He started thinking that electricity was too weird… At various points he decided he didn’t want any guitar. He didn’t want anything besides voice because that was the thing that was – real. Voice came from your soul and everything else was just trappings; extra. And we wanted to keep it a real rock’n’roll band. After all, David played drums, I played electric bass and Jerry played keyboards. And that’s what we wanted to do. And so we had these big arguments about that. Ya know, we were all living in this big house, just off Sunset Boulevard. It was big with a red-tiled roof; one of those Spanish palazzos. We were out there and we were totally dependent on Warner Bros. We’d have to go down to Burbank every couple of days and get some money from them. There we were, all these hardcore Easterners in LA, and I sort of loved it in a way, but it was also disorienting and crazy. Too many beautiful mindless people out there. We were all just crammed together in this house and had nothing else to do but get on each other’s nerves. It did make me realize the importance of just being together as a band. When you have to deal with the record company, when you have to deal with the business part of rock’n’roll, you really have to be together or you can be destroyed very quickly. That was really one of the problems. If we’d had a manager that we could have trusted, that would have made a big difference. Warner Bros., already worried by what they'd heard about Jonathan’s changing musical ideas, would call our house every day to talk to him. They really freaked out when he told them, “Yeah, we’ll make a record, but when we go on tour - if we go on tour – we won’t play any of the songs on it.” As his ideas about the sound of the band changed, he also changed his mind about the songs we were recording, decided most of them weren’t valid anymore.

FF: They must have loved that.
Ernie: Oh, yeah. That’s just what a record company wants to hear when it’s spending a lot of money on a band. Again, if only we had a manager at that time to mediate between ourselves, and between us and the record company.

FF: Where did the name Modern Lovers come from?
Ernie: That was Jonathan’s invention. The idea was to do modern love songs. Almost all of the songs that we did, in one way or another, involve girls and are about relationships that always involved, somehow, with the modern world of suburbs, shopping centers, beltways – a bleak but often beautiful landscape. That was part of it. Also, Jonathan always had the idea of being, along with the rest of us in the band, a “modern lover,” a modern romantic believing, as the song says, “I don’t want a girl to fool around with / I don’t want someone just to ball / I want someone I care about / Or I want nothing at all” [“Someone I Care About” – Ed.]. Of course, that wasn’t a modern idea, but expressed in a rock song and combined with the image of the group, it was at least different.

FF: Did Jonathan find what he wanted?
Ernie: I don’t know. Maybe he has. Maybe that’s why his new songs seem happier. This ties in with and half-contradicts what I said earlier: maybe the old adolescent pain and sexual frustration are resolved; maybe he has really exorcised the darker side of his character. Maybe I like the older songs better because I’m still adolescent at heart or maybe it’s true that repressed sexual energy sparks the best art [yawns].

FF: I notice all the songs on the first album are really simple, or repetitive. Even I can play “Roadrunner” on guitar.
Ernie: Sure, it’s two chords: A and D.

FF: Why was he doing that?
Ernie: Well, it was partly the fact that he picked up a guitar and didn’t know how to play it and he just started doing what he could do. And also, he believed there was a virtue in simplicity. Again, that’s certainly something the punk thing picked up on, because the whole idea, in a way, of New Wave was that technique didn’t matter. That it was the emotion and the feeling. If you did something with confidence you could do it. That’s always a part of rock’n’roll. What really mattered was the emotion, not the technique.