Listen to a rare early recording of Modern Lovers’ ‘Roadrunner’ from 1971
The Modern Lovers were proto-punks who didn’t care all that much for the label that soon graced the scene. Nevertheless, their expressionist styles that cherished individualism more so than polished virtuosity heralded a new chapter of rock ‘n’ roll, but it would’ve gone nowhere if it wasn’t for the simple human feeling behind it.
That’s where Jonathan Richman and his gang thought the term punk misses the point—it intellectualises the ethos too much, and glosses over the expressionism behind the art. As Iggy Pop once proclaimed, “Well, I’ll tell you about ‘punk rock’. Punk rock is a word used by dilettantes, and heartless manipulators, about music that takes up the energies, and the bodies, and the hearts and the souls and the time and the minds, of young men, who give what they have to it, and give everything they have to it.”
Richman, being Richman, obviously wasn’t as fervent in his analysis, but when fellow musician Andrew Bird asked him for his thoughts, he replied: “We all just thought we were rock bands.” Continuing of the earlier upstarts, “there was no what you’d call punk. And if there was, nobody was flattered by the term. A punk was a guy in a street gang who took a cheap shot. A punk was not Muhammad Ali.”
Adding: “At the time it was just a strange category that I noticed when I was over in European that we didn’t have in the States. I really cared more selfishly than that. I just wanted to express myself in front of the audience and I wanted to have rock music happen.”
Thus, it was his view that the rough and tumble timbre to the music of the Modern Lovers was not designed to ruffle feathers as punk implies, but rather to express a message with as much fidelity as possible. If that meant ‘Roadrunner’ sounds scratchy then so be it, it gave kids a kick in a place where polished anthems seemed out of place. It was 1971 and the flower power dream had become decrepit, why wouldn’t the music sound fractured?
However, that didn’t mean the music didn’t have to be pretty. The Modern Lovers offered up beauteous beats with a veneer that would last. As Serge Gainsbourg asserted, “Ugliness is in a way superior to beauty because it lasts.” The Modern Lovers offered up a timeless helping of both.
