That Summer Feeling
In Praise of Jonathan Richman
© Jon Horne  

    I sat in my brother’s flat while he and his friend Brian talked about music. They were trying to find a contemporary record that they both liked. Seven picture-sleeved inches of ‘New Rose’ by The Damned leaned casually (as only a record can - indescribably cool in its disposability) against a loudspeaker. Brian said it left him cold, and that it made him feel his age.
    My brother thought for a moment, then he said: “What about that Roadrunner song?”
    “Yes!” said Brian, grinning hugely, “it’s just like...”
    ‘Roadrunner’ (by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers) had been on Top Of The Pops the week before. I didn’t like it. It just seemed to be a lot of banging and crashing with a gormless voice whining over the top.
    Still, I kept my counsel. Autumn and school were beckoning. My parents would be coming to collect me soon and take me away from this haven of books and records, of hand-drawn posters of Snoopy and Jimi Hendrix, of crumbling window-sills, dirty plates, and light-switches with ‘Don’t touch this switch!’ written on them in black marker-pen. I wouldn’t be back until next summer. I hung silently onto every word as two grown men talked in a way that adults back home never did, or never could.
    “...it’s just like old rock ‘n’ roll, simple.”
    My parents arrived that afternoon. The conversation became sober and sensible. I tried desperately not to fidget. On the way home, ‘Roadrunner’ came on the radio.
    ONE-TWO-THREE-FOUR-FIVE-SIX!
    Bang, bang, crash.
    Roadrunner! Roadrunner!
    Bang, bang, crash.
    Goin’ faster miles an hour!
    Bang, bang, crash.
    Gonna drive by the stoppin’ shop,
    With the radio on!
    Just like a roadru...
    “Turn that rubbish off!” my Dad snapped.
    “I dunno,” said my Mum, on cue, “these days it’s just ‘boom boom boom’. No wonder these kids are all going deaf.”
    “It’s not music at all.”
    “Oh no.”
    I was being goaded into saying something, anything so that my father could give me one of his withering disappointed looks. I wasn’t going to give him the pleasure.
    Anyway cloth-ears, it’s not ‘boom boom boom’, it’s ‘bang bang crash’.
    Thanks to my parents, I fell in love with ‘Roadrunner’. I kept hearing the song on the radio after that - in my room, in secret. I became obsessed by it. It was mine. From the ridiculous opening to the final Bye bye! , ‘Roadrunner’ created a world that I could taste and smell. Out on Route 128, by the powerlines. That line by itself instilled a desire in my twelve-year-old bones that has never gone away.
    It’s so exciting there at night
    with the pine trees in the dark,
    and fifty thousand watts of power...
   
    It’s a crackling on the skin as if you’re under those powerlines at night. Wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, it’s being imprinted on you. You’re different afterwards.
   
    I was driving late at night. I turned the radio up to mask the worrying squeal of the engine as the speed got up to ninety. A familiar voice began to sing, an artless whine that made me smile in recognition.
    Jonathan Richman hadn’t done much since ‘Roadrunner’. Every few years he’d bring out a new LP and you’d maybe hear a song from it on the Annie Nightingale show. The songs were gentle and camp, harking back to a 1950’s teenage fantasy - like Bruce Springsteen with a sense of humour and a band who couldn’t play.
    But this song made me stop the car.
    It starts with the faux-naïve images you’ve come to expect - childhood in the playground, adolescent dreams of a Chevy ‘with the top down on it’. The singing is direct and conversational. The rhymes are awkward. The rhythm guitar sounds like it’s being played in a different room to the rest of the band. Slowly though, you lose yourself in shared nostalgia. You think of times when you were a scabby-kneed kid or a hormonal teenager, and you smile wistfully to yourself...
    But that summer feeling is gonna haunt you one day
    And with that line he’s got you. The images keep piling on, but the innocence that he describes - that he’s made a career out of - has turned into something dark, something gone forever.
    Yes, that summer feeling is gonna taunt you
    The song starts to grind to a halt with repeated choruses, the band mumbling off-key backing vocals. Then he shouts: One more thing! , prompting the guitarist to hit the wrong chord. There’s a stifled giggle and then Richman starts rambling on about being in the park and seeing that little girl with... like, dirty ankles where the dust has kicked up from the swing and how it reminds him of a girl with an ankle-locket and the way she called you a flirt.
    There are another couple of minutes of this. Stuttering like an excited child, he paints a picture of all that he has lost.
    But that summer feeling is gonna hurt you one day in your life
    After that the song peters out, the band unsure as to whether or not it’s another false ending. ‘That Summer Feeling’ is a disturbing record.
   
    Mick Jones of the Clash was on television a few weeks ago, droning on about the old days - haunted by his own Summer Feeling. There was one thing he said which hit home. Talking about the ‘dinosaur groups’ that the Clash were meant to replace, he said: “They left you as they found you - a few quid poorer, that’s all.”
    Out of the mouths of babes and fools... If there’s any point in art, it exists to leave you different to the way it found you. Jonathan Richman is at best a middling talent, and his place in history will probably just be as the guy who keeps turning up in ‘Something About Mary’. But he changed me, twice, and that is more than can be said for most artists, great or small.