High-rise housing complexes, another facet of urban renewal, changed the face of American cities the Modern Lovers find this architecture bleak, and on “Hospital,” Jonathan Richman admits to being “scared once or twice” while visiting a girlfriend in her “modern” building. The Federal Highway Act of 1956, signed when the suburban-raised singer was five, decimated urban neighborhoods and hastened the flight of the upwardly mobile on “Roadrunner,” the Modern Lovers sing about the joys of driving on Route 128 at night: “Welcome to the spirit of 1956,” sings Richman. The world was changing, and Jonathan Richman’s loss of innocence was pressed up against its shifting aesthetics and politics. On his earliest songs, the push-pull between Richman’s sentiments and the aggressiveness of his sound expressed an anxiety that underlay the rock ‘n’ roll culture of the Seventies. Sixty-seven years old and 21 albums into his career, Richman’s oeuvre sounds like a ticker tape of an artist’s soul expanding during the second half of the twentieth century. Asked, earlier this year, about his letter-to-the-editor, Richman replied, “Well, since that letter, I’ve seen how much of that arrogance I myself still had.

Fascinatingly, his career is an unusually detailed log of a singer growing, questioning his own behavior and opinions, and learning more about the world. Richman’s perspective sounds both naïve and fully formed, middle-class and deranged. Among the topics Richman covers in his early work: a love for the 1950s a conviction that women, if only they were sensible, would want to sleep with him rather than with their hippie boyfriends a belief in the unhealthiness of drugs and the healthiness of health food a closeness with his parents a realization that caring for someone is more desirable than promiscuous sex. If Richman’s angsty, beseeching voice make him one of punk’s essential forebears, his lyrical content distinguishes him in rock history. Creem, in fact, came up with the term “punk rock” in 1971, but it was not a genre Richman had heard of when he recorded his debut. The Lovers’ songs were melodically simple and heavily distorted, a style that linked them not only to The Velvet Underground, but also to the Stooges and the New York Dolls, artists that would get credit-like the Lovers would, in years to come-for playing punk rock before the genre became a recognizable phenomenon later in the decade. Richman was not interested in complex harmonies-not yet. The Modern Lovers bore little similarity to clean, doo-wop bands like the Four Seasons. Today, Valli’s band is best known as the basis for Jersey Boys, and Richman’s defense of the singer must have seemed, to the editors of Creem, like a joke in line with their editorial style. I don’t think rock ‘n’ roll needs “masculine arrogance.” Why be snide about them? I always sigh when I hear “Candy Girl” and “Marlena.” You call them “featherweights.” They’re heavyweights to me.Īnd by the way, what’s wrong with a man singing “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow”? Can’t a man want to be friends for a long time instead of just for a night, too? The title of his letter: “Masculine Arrogance Blows.” Richman’s reasoning reflects the mingling of iconoclasm and wisdom that would direct him his entire career: he wanted to defend a decidedly non-countercultural, non-hip icon of a past era, Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, whose work Creem had appraised negatively in a recent issue. John Cale, legendary member of the Velvet Underground, was producing the Lovers’ debut album for Warner Brothers when their singer decided to write a letter to Creem.

With its signature hopscotch of irony and humor, Creem synthesized the Lovers’ sound: “More than a little like a teenage Velvet Underground.” The magazine called one of their songs, “a guaranteed hit single” and another, “possibly the next national anthem.” Creem’s kidding aside, by most metrics, the Modern Lovers were in a good place in 1973. It had recently run a short, positive notice about Richman’s band, the Modern Lovers, whose fast, angry guitar music had given them a reputation in their native Boston. The Detroit magazine, which started in 1969 when both New Journalism and the archetype of the music critic were solidifying in the consciousness of American counterculture, was an iconic purveyor of rock ‘n’ roll criticism and culture. In 1973, a 22-year-old named Jonathan Richman wrote a letter to the editor of Creem.

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