THE MODERN LOVERS: “Roadrunner”

(The Modern Lovers LP, Beserkely Records, 1976)

Nowhere felt further from Massachusetts than a sorry, post-industrial Hudson Valley city with a boarded-up downtown, racially segregated neighborhoods, an urban deer herd, and high-rise projects overlooking a PCB-clogged river—not because I’d never found these things in my Massachusetts, but because they felt so familiar I could itemize every slight difference and vex myself with it. The me-against-the-world vibe and enthusiastic declarations of “Roadrunner” offered some solace those first few months I found myself dislocated, as did its Farfisa organ and bass chug. “I’m in love with Massachusetts,” Jonathan Richman proclaims, and though my feelings about that state remained bewildering, maybe this song did “[help] me from being lonely late at night,” a little. Still, Massachusetts is, crucially, only one beloved thing among many beloved things that Richman cites: “the neon when it’s cold outside,” “the highway when it’s late at night,” “modern moonlight,” “[Route] 128 when it’s dark outside,” “the radio on,” “rock and roll,” and all the other passions that allow youth to think it’s “got the world.” (The power one feels when one’s world exists solely as private property!) Listening at a distance, I couldn’t help but hear these lines through the locus of my longing, but also couldn’t help thinking about all the sensible conditions to these loves—not just neon, but neon when it’s cold outside. Desire is endlessly specific, and endlessly inexplicable: so much so that, when fortune posed us the option, Sarah and I packed our house and returned to the particulars of the Massachusetts we imagined rather than remain amid the particulars of the Poughkeepsie we endured. “Bye bye!” Richman drawls at the end of the song. Like the Modern Lovers, we escaped via car, under night’s anonymity, to some new frontier of “suburban trees, suburban speed.”