100 Best Albums Of All Time

01 Roadrunner

02 Astral Plane

03 Old World

04 Pablo Picasso

05 She Cracked

06 Hospital

07 Someone I Care About

08 Girlfriend

09 Modern World

Few albums have taken five years to go from studio to the record store, but then few record companies would know what to make of Jonathan Richman. Growing up in Boston on a diet of the Stooges and, in particular, the Velvet Underground, Richman ran away to New York as a teenager to join the bohemian version of the circus, hanging around Warhol’s Factory. On moving back to Boston in 1970 he formed the first version of the Modern Lovers – with keyboard player Jerry Harrison (later of Talking Heads), drummer David Robinson (later of the Cars) and bassist Ernie Brooks – to play his quirky, dry, dark songs.

Richman took the sound of the Velvet Underground – an arid, almost monotonous rhythm, with simple chords and deadpan delivery – and married it with lyrics that were self-consciously prosaic, almost Warholian in their celebration of the ordinary objects of modern urban life. By 1971 the Modern Lovers were playing gigs with the New York Dolls and other underground acts and causing a stir. Warner Bros. put them in the studio with Velvet Underground alumnus John Cale and A&M had demos Produced by Robert Appere and Alan Mason. A deal with Warner Bros. was struck but soon after the band was dropped by the label. They then disbanded and Richman changed musical direction. The recordings were shelved and quietly became the stuff of legend. That is until 1976, when independent label Berserkly released The Modern Lovers and a cult sprang up around it.

Some of the songs like ‘She Cracked’ and ‘Hospital’ clearly show the Velvet Underground influence, taking subjects that pop music had formerly avoided and singing about them, such as the case of a girl in an asylum. Elsewhere Richman plays the innocent naïf, singing lyrics more suited to the bobby sox years of the late 1950s but with the sinister monochromatic Velvets’ style backing of the Modern Lovers.

Although Richman would largely repudiate this album it did sketch out his persona as a virginal man looking for pure love in a sinful world. ‘I think that whole form of love is outmoded because it really isn’t love,’ he said. ‘When I say “Modern Love”, I mean the time when you don’t have to force the issue, when you don’t have to prove anything to yourself. When you think you’re all right. When you don’t need sex to feel all right.’ As Ian Birch wrote in 1977, ‘He is the vulnerable boy scout from the suburbs who somehow maintains a perpetual sense of wonder and fractured innocence, translating mundane experiences into screwball or chilling surrealism: Doris Day mated with Iggy Pop.’

The two best-known Modern Lovers songs are ‘Pablo Picasso’ and ‘Roadrunner’. The first, co-written with John Cale, observes that when Picasso walked down the street he was not ‘called an asshole’ but was delivered with a dark, arch tone. ‘Roadrunner’ is one of the great rock & roll driving songs of all time and was a minor hit in the UK and was subsequently covered by the Sex Pistols. Essentially it’s the story of a teenage Richman cruising around Boston listening to the radio, high on regular life.

‘We used to get in the car and just drive up and down Route 128 and the Turnpike,’ recalled his friend John Felice. ‘We’d come up over a hill and he’d see the radio towers, the beacons flashing, and he would get almost teary-eyed. He’d see all this beauty in things where other people just wouldn’t see it.’

The music of ‘Roadrunner’ was clearly based on the Velvet epic ‘Sister Ray’, although Richman reduced the number of chords from three to two and fused it with a little of the VU’s ‘What Goes On’. According to Cale, his suggestion of adding backing vocals was met with displeasure as they reeked of ‘production values’. Perhaps appropriately the songs were recorded in a studio owned by a local church. ‘Little old ladies with blue hair were sitting in the front office doing tapes of hymns and the Bible while we were inside thrashing out these things.’