#modernlovers

Jonathan Richman onstage at Eric's in Liverpool on June 13, 1978 in a breathtaking shot by Kevin Cummins.

Richman formed the Modern Lovers, a proto-punk garage rock band, in Boston, Massachusetts

Photo by Jeff Albertson

The scene is set in Cambridge 1971, where a young Jonathan Richman seeks out film student Jerry Harrison to join The Modern Lovers. A city rich in tradition, wealth, and higher education is not exactly where you would think to find these so-called “punk pioneers.” However, Massachusetts suburbia is exactly what inspired Richman’s songwriting.

While the band was said to be born out of Boston, Richman grew up in Natick, Massachusetts, a suburb just outside of the city. Amidst the post-war affluence provided by government funds to American veterans, suburbs began expanding their populations in the 1950s. This socioeconomic shift translated to the increasing cultural desire among families like Richman’s to seek a sense of safety that domestic life seemed to promise. Meanwhile the shipping and manufacturing industries that also upheld Boston’s economy for decades began to collapse in the 1970s, and as families left, young creatives moved in. Richman often alludes to his suburban upbringing in his music, simultaneously idealizing and mocking the nationalist attitudes surrounding suburbia’s mundane nature.

“That shines down on Bolyston Street And I love the USA … We'll share a modern love Under suburban rain. And me in love with the USA now. And me in love with the modern world now … Well, out on route nine Well, it's bleak and nearly dying … With me in love with the USA now”

Richman looked to escape to the city as often as he could with nothing but the local radio and a $10 guitar at home tying him to an emerging punk subculture. Richman was later drawn to clubs like The Boston Tea Party at the age of 16, where he first witnessed Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground. Obsessed with their sound, Richman eventually moved to Manhattan for 10 months to follow Warhol the band until he found his way back to Boston to start his own.  Noted as his greatest inspiration for The Modern Lovers, Richman even admits to copying The Velvet Underground along with other proto-punk and classic rock bands such as The Stooges, The Rolling Stones, and The Who.

In 1971, Richman had formed The Modern Lovers with Jerry Harrison on keys, Ernie Brooks on bass and David Robinson on drums. Inspired by the work of Lou Reed and Iggy Pop, Richman was said to have a produced a new philosophy of music for his bandmates, dependent on being confrontational with the audience and creating a sound based on the feeling they put into their music, rather than technique: “I knew I couldn't sing or play like the other guys but I didn't want to. I figured I had feeling and that was enough. I knew I was honest” (Maloney 2017).

Richman had a revolving door of members join him in The Modern Lovers as his sound and performance style evolved. Former keyboard player Jerry Harrison notes that despite his initial obsession with The Velvet Underground, Richman had a distaste for the dark energy that a lot of proto-punk bands radiated. Richman sympathized with the anti-war movement and the Cambridge Mayor’s war on hippies and began drifting from the original proto-punk sound of harsh guitars and punchy drums to softer rock.

By 1974, The Modern Lovers as known with Richman, Jerry Harrison, Ernie Brooks, and David Robinson had broken up. John Cale would later release their original demo collection in 1976 as a debut album after Richman already revived the band with all new members. The “Roadrunner” demo became revered within the punk scene, covered by icons like Joan Jett and the Sex Pistols.

The hit contained the combined inspiration of proto-punk sound and simple joys found in his monotonous suburban upbringing. The two-chord, upbeat, minimalist piece acts as an ode to driving through Massachusetts as both an appreciation and an escape. Richman’s balance between his two worlds of proto-punk influences with promotions of peaceful lightness creates a paradox – despite The Modern Lovers’ renowned influence on the punk subculture, their front man never fully encapsulates the rebellious or often ugly nature of the scene that musicians such as Iggy Pop or Darby Crash embodied. Their keyboard and bass players graduated from Harvard. Richman wrote a song about being anti-drug in the peak age of psychedelics (“I’m Straight”). Their lyrics while liberating were never crude. It seems the only essence of “live fast, die young” resides in the band’s revolving door of members, most only lasting a few years.