by Greil Marcus
AS RICHMAN
As Richman finally recorded it, “Road Runner” was the most obvious song in the world, and the strangest. He surfaced around 1970, performing as someone you’d never notice if he weren’t standing on a stage making you watch; his themes were traditional (cars, girls, the radio), but with an overlay of moment-to-moment, quotidian realism that made the traditional odd. He sang about standing in line at the bank, falling in love with the teller (or maybe just feeling sorry for her, trying to decide if he’d rather be the teller or the person waiting for her to raise her eyes and not see who she was looking at). He sang about hating hippies, because they wore attitudes like shades, so complete in their smugness, so complete they never noticed anything, because they cut themselves off from everything that was good and alive and wonderful about the modern world.
Richman’s music did not sound quite sane. When I went to see him play in 1972, his band—the Modern Lovers, which is what he’s always called whatever band he’s played with—was on stage; nothing was happening. For some reason I noticed a pudgy boy with short hair wandering through the sparse crowd, dressed in blue jeans and a white t-shirt on which was printed, in pencil, “I LOVE MY LIFE.” Then he climbed up and played the most shattering guitar I’d ever heard. “I think this is great,” said the person next to me. “Or is it terrible?”
“I didn’t start singing or playing till I was 15 and heard the Velvet Underground,” Richman said years later. “They made an atmosphere, and I knew then that I could make one too!” He got sanction: Richman signed with Warner Bros., which had hired John Cale, late of the Velvet Underground, as a staff producer, and it was Cale who was assigned to produce Jonathan Richman—Adam went into the studio with God.
The album they made was not released, and the band dissolved. “Road Runner” was just hearsay until 1975, when Richman assembled a few new Modern Lovers in Berkeley and recorded the song one last time; the tune saw the light of day on an otherwise forgettable sampler of local bands, and from then on it was a classic. Nothing could have been more unassuming: just bass, snare drum, and strummed guitar for the start, it sounded like a combination of a 1954 Sun Records tuneup and a 1967 Velvet Underground demo. Like Rod Stewart’s “Every Picture Tells a Story”—a cataclysm, and for most of its seven minutes no more than drums, bass, and acoustic guitar—“Road Runner” said that the power of rock ’n’ roll was all in its leaps from one moment to the next, in the impossibility of the transitions.
“One, two, three, four, five, six.” One-two / One-two-three-four is the traditional rock kickoff; in 1976 and 1977, with punk flying, a flat “One-two-three-four” would be the punk signpost. The punk rejection of the opening “One-two” meant that punk was ready to dispense with any warmup, with history; Richman’s addition of “five-six” meant that he wasn’t ready, that he was taking a deep breath, that he was gearing up for a charge no one had made before.
“Road runner, road runner / Going faster miles an hour / Gonna drive by the Stop ’n’ Shop/With the radio on.” Choking on pleasure, on a teenager’s nostalgia for the previous day, Richman proceeded to turn wish into fact. He did drive past the Stop ’n’ Shop; but first, to make sure, he walked past the Stop ’n’ Shop, and concluded that he liked driving past the Stop ’n’ Shop much better than walking past the Stop ’n’ Shop, because he could have the radio on.
From there Richman drove into delight, then into reverie. He “felt in touch with the modern world”; he “felt in love with the modern world.” He “felt like a road runner.” He left Boston, headed out on Route 128: there were no limits. He punched the radio and heard 1956; “It was patient in the bushes, next to ’57!”
The band hammered down, James Brown–style, and then Richman pulled back like Jerry Lee Lewis in the middle of “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”—the message first shouted now whispered, reflective, spooky. He was on Route 128. It was cold, dark, he smelled the pine trees, he heard them as he rushed by with the radio on, he caught a glimpse of neon that was colder still—the modern world he was looking for. The band roared back, and Richman talked to the band about what he was seeing. “Now, what do you think about that, you guys?” “RADIO ON,” they answered him, and that was what he wanted to hear: “Good! We got the AM—” “RADIO ON,” the band said. “I think we got the power, got the magic now—” “RADIO ON.” “We got the feelin’ of the modern world—” “RADIO ON.” “We got the feelin’ of the modern sound—” “RADIO ON.”
Richman took one more deep breath—and every time I listen to this performance, I smile at what comes next. Every phrase of the song that’s come before, the most conventional narrative of an experience millions of people have had in any seamless teenage night, is broken down and recreated. Every phrase is reduced to single words, each word shuffled out of its phrase, verse and chorus broken into a shamanistic incantation, the chorus, left whole, fighting to keep up with the versifier’s incomprehensible rhythm and somehow succeeding, even though by now the words are barely words at all, just Burma Shave signs flashing by too fast to read. There is a sudden increase in pressure:
The sound, of the modern radio, feelin’ when it’s late RADIO ON at night we got the sound of the modern lonely when it’s cold outside RADIO ON got the sound of Massachusetts when it’s blue and white RADIO ON cause out on Route 128 on the dark and lonely RADIO ON I feel alone in the cold and lonely RADIO ON I feel uh I feel alone in the cold and lonely RADIO ON I feel uh I feel alone in the cold and neon RADIO ON I feel alive I feel a love I feel alive RADIO ON I feel a rockin’ modern love I feel a rockin’ modern live RADIO ON I feel a rockin’ modern neon sound modern Boston town RADIO ON a modern sound modern neon modern miles around RADIO ON I say a road runner once a road runner twice RADIO ON ah ah very nice road runner gonna go home now yea RADIO ON road runner go home oh yes road runner go home—
In an act of pure violence, he breaks the pace. Returning to a conventional rock signature, it’s the violence of waking from a dream: “Here we go, now / We’re gonna drive him home, you guys / Here we go—” And the band hammers down again, twice three times, twice four times:
That’s right!
Again!
Bye Bye!
THE SEX PISTOLS
The Sex Pistols never went that far. Johnny Rotten ran through the tune as if it were a crack in the pavement waiting to break his mother’s back: he stepped on it and kept going. He called back to the band: “Do we know any other fucking songs we can do?”
JOHNNY B.GOODE
“Johnny B. Goode” had the best beginning in rock ’n’ roll, but the Sex Pistols couldn’t play it. “Road Runner” had the best ending, and the Sex Pistols didn’t have to play it—all they had to do was swallow it. What Jonathan Richman did with words, the Sex Pistols did with sound.
They found a corrosive momentum in the given rhythm that exploded all expectations, making everything that came before, be it the Velvet Underground’s 1967 “Heroin,” the Stooges’ 1969 “No Fun,” the New York Dolls’ 1974 “Human Being,” even Captain Beefheart’s 1969 Trout Mask Replica, even “Road Runner,” seem rational: planned and executed. The Sex Pistols’ sound was irrational—as a sound, it seemed to make no sense at all, to make nothing, only to destroy, and this is why it was a new sound, and why it drew a line between itself and everything that came before it, just as Elvis Presley did in 1954 and the Beatles did in 1963, though nothing could be easier, or more impossible, than to erase those lines with a blur of footnotes.
A lot of people—fans of Chuck Berry, the Beatles, James Taylor, the Velvet Underground, Led Zeppelin, the Who, Rod Stewart, or the Rolling Stones—didn’t think this was music at all, or even rock ’n’ roll; a smaller number of people thought it was the most exciting thing they’d ever heard. “It was the first taste of rock & roll excitement I ever got,” Paul Westerberg of the Replacements said in 1986—ten years after, it was still a story worth telling. “The Sex Pistols made you feel like you knew them, that they weren�
��t above you. It was obvious that they didn’t know what they were doing and they didn’t care. I was a much better guitar player years ago. I’d sit there and learn the scales, the whole bit. I learned all the slide solos from the Allman Brothers’ At Fillmore East. I’d put the record on and turn it down to 16 rpm so I could transpose the solos. But then the Sex Pistols came along and said, ‘You don’t need nothin’. Just play it.’ ” And what Westerberg said, so said countless other people—describing what they were now allowed to play and what they were now allowed to hear.
The music business was not destroyed. Society did not fall, and a new world did not come into being. If, as Dave Marsh wrote, punk was “an attempt to eliminate the hierarchy that ran rock—ultimately, to eliminate hierarchy, period,” it did neither. You could still turn on the radio with the assurance that, on most stations, you would hear “Behind Blue Eyes,” “Stairway to Heaven,” and “Maggie May”—with the radio terrorized backward by punk, you could hear these songs more often than ever before. But over the next few years, far more than fifteen thousand groups of people made records. They made a blind bet that someone might be interested in what they sounded like or what they had to say, that they themselves might be interested. Some were bent on fame and money, and some were not; some wanted most of all a chance to announce themselves, or anyway to change the world.
Tiny independent labels, most no more than a post-office box and a typed letterhead, sprouted like mushrooms. “Suddenly,” read the liner notes to Streets, the first collection of U.K. punk singles, “we could do anything.” It was a surge of new voices unprecedented in the geopolitics of popular culture—a surge of voices that, for a time, made a weird phrase like “the geopolitics of popular culture” seem like a natural fact.
THE ADVERTS
The Adverts’ “One Chord Wonders” takes place right on the verge of the punk moment. The Sex Pistols have cleared the ground—burned it up. There’s nothing left but the city standing as if nothing has happened, a patch of smoking dirt in the middle of the city, in the middle of that a lettered piece of wood that in the haze looks as much like a for-rent sign as a condemnation notice: you can’t tell if it reads “FREE STREET” or “FIRE SALE.”
The people circling the empty space don’t know what to do next. They don’t know what to say; everything they’re used to talking about has been parodied into stupidity as the old words rise in their mouths. Their mouths are full of bile: they’re drawn to the void, but they hold back. “Rozanov’s definition of nihilism is the best,” situationist Raoul Vaneigem had said in 1967 in Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations (Treatise on Living for the Young Generations, known in English as The Revolution of Everyday Life): “The show is over. The audience get up to leave their seats. Time to collect their coats and go home. They turn round . . . No more coats and no more home.’ ” That’s where they are.
A girl and three boys take the first steps. They enter the black terrain like two-year-olds set down on familiar concrete at the edge of a field of grass—will it hurt? Feeling the lightness of the grass beneath their feet, they run, and as they run a double fantasy possesses them: the crowd smiles, tenses, joins them; it flinches, and stones them to death.
It’s the chance of a lifetime. The four grab hold of the wooden sign, break it into pieces, and begin to beat on them: they make a narrow, channeled noise. It’s a noise that acknowledges no listeners, connects only to itself: it’s random, then focused, helpless, then cruel. That the four can’t keep time with each other makes time move so fast it seems to stop: freeze. No one can get out of this moment, and so the four hammer out the common fantasy that possessed them when they first moved toward each other, ages before. The music pulls against itself, the first two or three lines of each verse violent, cynical, present, the next two almost drifting away into a split-second reverie of doubt, regret, a sense of chances already taken and blown, a tense of future past. Only the momentum of the music holds it together.
I wonder what we’ll play for you tonight
Something heavy, something light
Something
To set your soul alight
I wonder how we’ll answer when you say
WE DON’T LIKE YOU! GO AWAY!
Come back
When you’ve learned to play
I wonder what we’ll do when things go wrong
When we’re halfway
Through our favorite song
We look up
And the audience is gone
“THE WONDERS DON’T CARE!” shout three of the group, “We don’t give a damn!” answers the last one, and they press on like that, ten, twenty times, back and forth, but as with the verses the double chorus is opposed to itself: the three singers hard and certain, their chant never varying in tone or speed, the isolated voice hard too at first, then mournful, then despairing, then leaving the cadence as the other side of the chorus marches on in lock-step—that single voice rises, twists almost out of the music, discovers hints of a melody in the banging rhythm, abandons the melody and turns into a scream that comes from deep in the body, then buries itself in a greater noise.
THE SPACE
The space wasn’t altogether empty. There was that sign, and attached to the sign was a string that, once pulled, turned the world inside out. As people in the Roxy heard the Adverts, or the two girls and three boys who made up X-ray Spex, or the balding teenage Beckett fan who sang for the Buzz-cocks—all people who had climbed out of the Sex Pistols’ first audiences—there was a reversal of perspective, of values: a sense that anything was possible, a truth that could be proven only in the negative. What had been good—love, money, and health—was now bad; what had been bad—hate, mendicity, and disease—was now good. The equations ran on, replacing work with sloth, status with reprobation, fame with infamy, celebrity with obscurity, professionalism with ignorance, civility with insult, nimble fingers with club feet, and the equations were unstable. In this new world, where suicide was suddenly a code word for meaning what you said, nothing could be more hip than a corpse, but the affluent survivors you saw on the street every day, the ones you had paid to see in concert halls the day before, were walking corpses. Punk factored the equation with the instinctive apprehension of an old argument: “The only objective way of diagnosing the sickness of the healthy,” Theodor Adorno wrote three decades earlier in Minima Moralia, “is by the incongruity between their rational existence and the possible course their lives might be given by reason. All the same, the traces of illness give them away: their skin seems covered by a rash printed in regular patterns, like a camouflage of the inorganic. The very people who burst with proofs of exuberant vitality could easily be taken for prepared corpses, from whom news of their not-quite-successful decease has been withheld for reasons of population policy.” In other words, the only good survivor was a dead survivor.
Since heroes were frauds and poverty riches, both murderers and deformity were privileged: had Myra Hindley or the Hunchback of Notre-Dame entered the Roxy the crowd would have boosted them onto the stage. Entertainment was posited as boredom and boredom as the categorical imperative, the destroyer of values, precisely what the new entertainer, shaking her falsity as a sign of authenticity, had to turn into something else: for an hour, for the length of a single song, just a moment within it, the source of values.
There were no more coats, so people began to dress in rips and holes, safety pins and staples through flesh as well as cloth, to wrap their legs in plastic bin liners and trash bags, to drape their shoulders in remnants of curtains and couch coverings left on the street. Following the lead of McLaren’s designs for the Sex Pistols and the Clash, people painted slogans up and down their sleeves and pants legs, across jackets, ties, and shoes: the names of favorite bands and songs, passwords like “ANARCHY” or “RIOT,” phrases more cryptic (“WHERE IS DURUTTI?”, “YOUR ON THE NEVER NEVER”), or a noisy, cut-up zeitgeist: “WE AN’T PROUD PUNKS ONE big MESS, like something
else SCHOOL’S A RIP off straights out of it all, everywhere if you dont we will include 1/4!,” the whole scored with a giant X.
“There couldn’t have been more than a hundred real punks in all of England then,” Lora Logic, in early 1977 the saxophonist for X-ray Spex, said in 1980 of the group’s first performance; her working word was “real.” There was no more home, so she left hers—left behind the pink uniform she’d worn to her good private school, which, she realized too late, was a mistake, because it would have looked just right on stage. Along with her, the rest of the “real punks,” more than a hundred, the two or three or ten in every town in Britain by early 1977, changed the picture of social life.
Punk began as fake culture, a product of McLaren’s fashion sense, his dreams of glory, his hunch that the marketing of sado-masochistic fantasies might lead the way to the next big thing. “The art of the critic in a nutshell,” Walter Benjamin wrote in 1925–26 in One-Way Street: “to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.” This was Benjamin’s careful absolutism—the pre-pop, anti-pop conviction that you can’t have it both ways. It was an absolutism an anarchist gold digger like McLaren could have never shared, and didn’t have to. In a milieu shaped by the enervation of the pop scene, crushing youth unemployment, IRA terrorism spreading from Belfast to London, growing street violence between British neo-Nazis, colored English, socialists, and the police, punk became real culture.