Why ‘Modern Lovers ‘Live’’ remains an unpunk classic

Arts admin July 19, 2026 0 Comments

Why ‘Modern Lovers ‘Live’’ remains an unpunk classic

In our weekly series, One Special Thing, the Globe arts staff highlights something timeless — movies, books, TV shows, albums, paintings, plays, symphonies, dishes — that we return to in good times and bad. Something we’re just dying to tell you about. The only parameter is passion.

When I was 12, my brothers abruptly shelved their copies of “Dark Side of the Moon” and “Who’s Next” and started playing records I hadn’t heard on the radio in Western Mass. Overnight, it seemed, Emerson, Lake & Palmer was out and The Sex Pistols, The Clash, Elvis Costello and the Attractions, The Stranglers, The Jam, Television, and Talking Heads were in.

I’m grateful. 1977 was a landmark year for new music and if I didn’t have discerning older siblings I might still be listening to Styx and Leo Sayer. Instead, I got deeply into punk — so deep, in fact, that I briefly wore a padlock around my neck because Sid Vicious had one. (But it bruised my sternum when I played tennis so I took it off; I wasn’t that committed to non-conformity.)

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Five decades later, my love for all of those bands and their startling debut LPs full of short, sharp-edged songs is undiminished. But there’s another album from the time that I also cherish, in part because it’s completely unpunk. “Modern Lovers ‘Live’” is sosweet, so honest and openhearted, that it’s hard to believe it was recorded in 1977 — in London, no less, the epicenter of punk.

Most people, if they know the Modern Lovers at all, know the band’s eponymous first album, released in 1976. Today, it’s rightly regarded as a proto-punk masterpiece — Rolling Stone ranks “The Modern Lovers” among the 500 greatest albums ever — but it was familiar to very few at the time. I don’t recall my brothers playing it around the house. (The Sex Pistols were at least aware of the album’s first song, “Roadrunner,” because there’s a ragged recording of the band trying to play it soon after the LP’s release.)

What’s striking about that Modern Lovers record is the influence of the Velvet Underground, the pioneering New York ensemble that Modern Lovers frontman Jonathan Richman had seen perform dozens of times at the Boston Tea Party. (Richman grew up in Natick.) The Velvet Underground’s sound and sensibility are all over the album, likely because former VU bassist John Cale produced much of it. “Roadrunner,” in particular, shares certain musical DNA with VU’s epic cyclone of noise, “Sister Ray.” And on songs about girlfriends, drugs, and Pablo Picasso, Richman’s nasal, not-quite-singing vocal recalls Lou Reed, the Velvet Underground’s principal singer and songwriter.

But enough about the first Modern Lovers record. By the time it was released, the band — or at least that version of it — had broken up. I discovered the reconstituted Modern Lovers in 1978, when my brother Ed gave me a copy of “Modern Lovers ‘Live’” for Christmas. He’d heard it in his freshman dorm at Columbia and was instantly intrigued.

Me? Not so much. I thought it was goofy. I’d been listening to a lot of sneering punk anthems by the Ramones, Buzzocks, and Dead Boys, whose first album was aptly titled “Young, Loud, and Snotty,” and here was Richman singing songs like “I’m a Little Airplane” and “Hey There Little Insect.” Was this children’s music? Was it satire? Were the lyrics — I’m a little airplane nyow/ I’m a little airplane nyow nyow/ And wangity-wang wangity-wang/ I’m a little airplane now —truly as inane as they seemed?

With repeated listens, however, I was won over. Completely. Most teens today would cringe at a song like “Ice Cream Man” — an eight-minute homage to the feeling you get when an ice cream truck drives down your street — but it was so ingenuous and over-the-top that it seemed like art. There was something subversive about singing “I’m a Little Dinosaur” when many others were screaming about anarchy. (FWIW the Velvet Underground had a kidlike quality, too, as on “After Hours” and “I’m Sticking With You”: I’m sticking with you/ ‘Cause I’m made out of glue/ Anything that you might do/ I’m gonna do too.)

What sealed “Modern Lovers ‘Live’” for me was the last song on the record, “Morning of Our Lives‚” which the band played as an encore at London’s Hammersmith Odeon in September 1977. Richman was backed that night by guitarist Leroy Radcliffe and bassist Asa Brebner, both of whom were later in Robin Lane & the Chartbusters, and drummer D. Sharpe.

Richman introduces the song by saying: “We know that the time is now cuz now is the morning of our lives.” Radcliffe then strums a sunny progression. The lyrics, though, communicate something else. Richman is consoling a sad friend with gentle words. You always put yourself down but I like ya/ That’s all I came to say/ There’s no need/ To think that other people can do things better than you can do ’em/ ‘Cause you got the same power in you.

The sentiment is sweet without being sappy, earnest without being off-putting. By the end, the audience is clapping in time; they’re all in. I am, too.