AMERICAN PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY IV: William Gisbson, Cyberpunk, No Wave fungicide & Sonic Youth

In America, all roads lead to and from Boston. So does the Sprawl. The Sprawl feeds on undeveloped space, and is powered by corporate capital, high tech computer hardware, and minds bent away from the humanities by a hyperpresent hyperfocus on engineering, technology, and mathematics, with maybe a little bit of science thrown into the mix at the regions think tanks for the military industrial template.

One of the seeds that powered the birth of the punk ethos, in its innocent and exuberant in love with modern music and the modern world, was carried through the sprawling interchanges of Route 128 by the rock and roll poet Jonathan Richman. Cyber seeds were transplanted from the area across the tangle of telephone lines when technologists made their modems sing, ringing in a cycle of communication changes courtesy of the medium of computers in a marriage with Ma Bell. Information highways and rivers of asphalt conjoined to spread psychic mold spores across the landscape of New England, and from their reach their tendrils into the heart of America.

The world of punk, with its analog aesthetic and DIY virtue worn on a gritty shirtsleeve, was married to cyberspace when the imagination of William Gibson fired up and he set his keyboard to clacking like one of the console cowboys in his novel Neuromancer. The cyberpunk sub-genre of science fiction was born. In that novel he also introduced readers to the Sprawl. It was further explored in the books two sequels, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. Collectively, the Sprawl trilogy.

Like the wires and roads that lead in and out of Boston, heavy internet connectivity and Sprawl seem to go together. For the most part, the beginning of the internet was an urban affair, with its primary nodes being housed in universities, research centers and military installations. Punk music also thrived on urban existence, springing up as it did in various ways, and somewhat independently, as a kind of metropolitan spore in the cities of London, New York, San Francisco and L.A. Punk set out to rewind the dial back to the primitive impulse at the heart of rock music, and the pulsing fecund mold spores at its heart soon migrated to other cities around the world. Though there were individuals and clusters of punks in some rural areas, just as their were terminals to access the internet, but the punk scene and hackers scenes both started their development in polluted cities.

In Gibson’s books, the Sprawl is a specific cluster of interconnected cities and urban centers that have all congealed together due to unmitigated development and growth. The Sprawl starts in Boston and advances all the way down to Atlanta. It’s the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis, to give its official name, or BAMA, to share the banging acronym. Rot spreads not so much through wood and brick, as it does through another block being covered in concrete, asphalt, and new building made from cheap materials, with lots of plastics inside, stretching all the way from Boston, down into dirty heart of New York, enveloping Providence and all of Rhode Islands smallness. From there the Sprawl drifts down into Philadelphia, New Jersey, continuing its slick unfurling down the east coast and swamping Atlanta and any derelict town it happens to encounter in sick and seeping slime.

America hasn’t yet reached the level of urban growth imagined by Gibson, but regional planners do use similar phrases in their descriptions of bustling interconnected cities. The Northeast Megalopolis is one. It’s no coincidince that it starts in the Boston suburbs and creeps all the way down along Route 1, Insterstate-95 and the Northeastern Corridor train line down into the swamplands of Washington D.C.

The Piedmont Atlantic megaregion is another, and flows westward from Charlotte to Atlanta, to Birmingham with spurs going up to Nashville and further west to Memphis. The cities clustered around the Great Lakes form another megaregion, as do the ones flowing up from San Francisco to Portland to Seattle to Vancouver, and so on. They become a megalopolis when little rural space is left between the clusters of cities. The cities start losing their local identity and get absorbed into the regional slop of garmonbozia when the flow of goods and people between them tends to stay intermeshed, even as the legality of the towns and cities remains distinct. In Gibson’s Sprawl, and our own, much of that mesh between the districts now tends to be fiber optical and tele-communicative links. Our empire of wires, first strung together between outposts, is now a copper knot embedded within decrepit infrastructure.

Perhaps something of the raumgeist remains in these locations, but it must be teased out by psychogeographers whose psychic senses are attuned to the spirit of place, and who don’t mind following up their intuitions with time spent in psychohistorical study in libraries and archives.

In the Sprawl, the smell of exhaust and fry grease from the fast food trucks mingles along with the cook fires drifting out of homeless camps and the summer sweat of the great unwashed. The sound of metro buses hitting pot holes and of aching trains running on tracks above is abetted by sirens, shouting, gunfire. Dandelions grow up in the concrete and asphalt cracks, and a dead fox rots beneath the overpass. Crows alight on the high tension wires sparking and humming with electricity, the juice that powers it all, dug up from the earth blood of oil, and ancient veins of coal.

Such a fictional vision, and its real world counterpart, reminds us there are many positive aspects to the limits of growth, the most positive being the limitation that there just won’t be enough resources for the Sprawl to sprawl forever. Depleted resources mean that some of the worst features of Gibson’s Sprawl will remain fiction. Some parts of his future are already distributed, even if they aren’t distributed evenly, and there are aspects of his world well worth exploring in this psychohistorical drift.

In Gibson’s vision, the Boston-Atlanta-Metropolitan-Axis is one vast cancerous rambling of, fungus that is urbanoid in its character. A massive incomplete geodesic dome in the style of Buckminster Fuller covers much of BAMA, an engineering project with unintended consequences. During the day parts of the dome get heated up, causing internal weather in the neighborhoods beneath it, strong and dangerous winds that wreak havoc. Inside the residents lack a connection to natural weather outside the dome, because the sight of the sky gets blocked by cloudy plastic. It hardly matters to most of the netizens because so many of them are constantly plugged into the matrix anyway. In other places the geodesic cells that were supposed to protect the city from acid rain are ruptured, letting in water, which first collects and then pours in buckets heavier than a rain shower. When the sun starts to come up, the dome filters the light and makes it gray and pink instead of golden.

In the second book, Count Zero, Gibson gives this description:

​“The condos of Barrytown looked like some gray-white fungus, spreading to the horizon. It was nearly dark and he could make out a pink glow, beyond the last range of condo racks.

‘That’s the Sprawl over there, isn’t it? That pink.’

‘That’s right, but the closer you get, less pretty it looks. How’d you like to go there, Bobby?’”

It’s interesting that in the quote from Count Zero, he says that the Barrytown neighborhood of the Sprawl looks “gray-white fungus.” Benton MacKaye also characterized relentless and unplanned urban expansion as a kind of “metropolitan mold.”

In his introduction to MacKaye’s book The New Exploration, Lewis Mumford describes how the spread of the “uncontrolled flow of population into ever more distant areas of the conurbation results in the coalescence of ever larger and looser urbanoid masses, a thinly spread conglomeration of homes, shopping centers, and factory sites adrift in a vast sea of car parks, whose planless existence provides excuse for the constantly multiplying expressways and cloverleafs and space-eating traffic interchanges that absorb, for the exaggerated needs of transportation, the time, the energy, the money, and the human effort that go into more significant aspects of life.”

Mumford himself sometimes called our massed dwellings “urbanoid.” There is is a certain frisson between Mumford’s urbanoid dwellings, MacKaye’s mold and Gibson’s fungoid city.

The origin of the word sprawl for this unplanned, uncontrolled, in many cases unwanted growth, goes back to Earle Draper, a city planner in the southeast, who gave the word its urban spin in 1937. Draper worked hard. He had specialized in the development of upper-class residential neighborhoods, and designed hundreds of them over the south during the course of his life. In this respect he contributed to the suburban problem even as he gave us a name to describe one of the effects of suburban flight. He was also very active in creating planned communities and industrial towns in Tennessee. The town of Norris was one of these places he created. Now its part of greater Knoxville, that is, the Piedmont Atlantic Megaregion.

This sun baked geography of concrete expands into the nowhere of a television tuned to a dead channel. The flight from blight has created more blight. Now the blight spreads into the dead malls of the internet. The dead malls of the city are reflected back into those vaporwave mirrorshades. Online retail squashes mom and pop shops who reopen on Etsy; Etsy overtaken by AI bots hooked up to 3-D printers spitting out the next plastic keychain to be sold in the flea market at the empty parking lot in an abandoned strip mall on the outskirts of an economically decayed neighborhood.

When so many of us are jacked-in all the time, there is a real need to jack off, to unplug from the network effect, to put the phone on silence, and disengage from the endless doomscroll of the forever culture wars.
Yet as much as a person might want to get away from the Sprawl, out into some part of the world that is forested, that has a connection to green, it just can’t be easily done. Planes fly overhead on a hike. A group of teens bring a boom box to the lake where it could have been a refreshing swim. Noise is itself however offers an avenue of escape. It’s in the Sprawl where a person needs to wrap themselves up in the cocoon made of headphones. Blocking out the external sounds that try to get inside.

On their album Escape from Noise, The media collective Negativland asked the question, “Is there any escape from noise?” In the process of finding an answer to their probe, they created more dithering dissonance. That dissonance can be extremely enjoyable. Sometimes out is the only way in, and the thing that is part of the disease is also part of the cure.

In Gibson’s short story, "Burning Chrome", the character Automatic Jack knows there is no escaping the Sprawl. “So I went out into the night and the neon and let the crowd pull me along, walking blind, willing myself to be just a segment of that mass organism, just one more drifting chip of consciousness under the geodesics.”

In Gibson’s world, the youth of the Sprawl are quick to adopt new styles and fads. Subcultures like the Lo-Teks, the Big Scientists, the Gothicks and the Panther Moderns flourish, but also disappear, to be taken over by new fads and subcultures.

Such was the fate of the very real subculture around No Wave music, and New York City was a the prime node for that undulating mass organism of mold.

THE FUNGICIDE OF NO WAVE

If the smell of the Sprawl is fry grease, petroleum and evaporating rain, all cast in a pink neon glow, then its sound is the synthetic nihilism of No Wave music as it gets further refracted into the distorted frequency fuzz of noise rock, its more palatable bastard child. No Wave is often more appreciated by the musical gourmand, while noise rock can be enjoyed by those searching for a quick listen at the hot dog or Ramen stand, under the ever present rain.

No Wave is the kind of music that could only have originated in New York City during the 1970s, a decade that saw it sink into major decline, crime and social disintegration. In 1975 NYC had been driven to the edge of economic default. This had been the result of a series of dumb decisions. It led to further bad decisions, such as giving control of the city budget to a group of bankers. From there, drastic cuts to welfare, city services, and even the cities own bureaucracy sent the metropolis into further convulsions. As a place with “No Future” it was a perfect spawning ground for punk, No Wave, and noise rock. The avantgarde of the city were already sequestered in their lofts making happening arts scenes when scruffy punk kids came to town looking for cheap rent or places to squat while they made a life not cast in the suburban mold.

Goethe is often quoted as having said “architecture is frozen music.” The architecture of brutalism is mimicked in No Wave with its abrasive sonic minimalism. It has the musical texture of concrete, the repetitive rhythms of jack hammers, and massive slabs of raw noise and texture are emphasized over melody. No Wave was a wrecking ball taken to music. It shared similar aims to the Industrial music genre spawned by Throbbing Gristle and their cohorts in England. Later cross pollination from the likes of Lydia Lunch and other No Wavers with industrial musicians would further entrench these bonds like rebar into cement.

The key groups in No Wave were Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, fronted by Lydia Lunch, DNA, Mars and Contortions. Another crucial group in the mix was Theoretical Girls, formed by Glenn Branca. The key influence was the band Suicide, and the 20th centuries avantgarde luminaries in the realms of dissonance, noise and repetitive minimal gestures, along with a helping from free jazz, and the syncopated rhythms of drum machines found in disco.

Like so many others who had been lured to the Big Apple, Branca came to New York to be involved in theater. And like so many others who had started off with the intention of being involved in one form of art, he found himself doing music instead. After building a stage in a loft with his friend Jeff Lohn, he started thinking of having a “fucking band.” They already had the stage to play on. “This band is our theater group so to speak …that was Theoretical Girls,” he said in the documentary Kill Your Idols.

True to their name, the influence of Theoretical Girls is more to their reputation and the way they were able to put musical concepts into circulation, rather than being prolific recording artists or for playing a ton of shows. They only put out one 7 inch single, and only played about twenty gigs. But such is the nature of the underground, and the fringe in general, that small hinges open big doors. Some small thing that happens, and is only embraced at first by a few people, can go on to have big implications. That is the power of the fringe, lunatic or otherwise.

The song U.S. Millie on the A side was written by Lohn and has a militant marching snare drum as the central element, along with a propulsive keyboard line. The lyrics seem appropriate to the exploration of America’s psychic underbelly. Howard Johnson, one of Jonathan Richman’s favorite institutions, turns up again here, but without the innocence of a hot meal and place to rest.
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“Howard Johnson, Puerto Rico / Texaco Co., Jews for Jesus / Ms. Magazine, Danon Yogurt / Scientology, East Germany / That’s Go Go Billy and U.S. Millie.”

Theoretical Girls played in the pivotal No Wave five night music fest organized by Michael Zwack and Robert Longo at the non-profit Artists Spaces gallery. Other groups that played were Rhys Chatham’s group Gynecologists, and another group fronted by Branca, Daily Life (that also featured Christine Hahn, originally from Cincinnati.) This event was the ground zero for the further repercussions from the short-lived explosion of No Wave.

It was also a bit of a battleground. Many of the hangers on in the No Wave scene were there as a refuge from the pretensions of New Yorks art scene. Their wrecking ball attitude and nihilistic stance was aimed at the institution of art just as much as it was at the commodified corpse of rock. Yet the Artist Spaces gallery was a newly ramped up art institution, its usual soirees now turned into a blitzkrieg of barbarous musical evocation. There were still ways to cash in on that, though.

Brian Eno had been in the audience at the festival during the final two days of the show. He was really blown out of the water by their reductionist take on popular and experimental sounds. He had come to New York to produce the Talking Heads album More Songs About Buildings and Food. The No Wave artists were doing something else altogether, and he thought the scene should be documented. Filmmaker and art world denizen Diego Cortez was in the scene and Eno tapped his shoulder to put together a compilation. The result was the 1978 comp No New York.

If Music for Airports was Brian Eno’s most ignorable record, the No New York album he helped curate produce was saturated with the gnarly overtones that emitted toxic fumes against cities own toxicity. Released on the Antilles label, it resides at an opposite pole from the relaxing minimalism of ambient. It’s a kind of music you can’t not pay attention to, and was even known to cause listener’s physical pain.​

Noise music can be a shield. No Wave provided a shield for its makers and fans. According to homeopathic medical theory like cures like. Noise is a cocoon to slip into when the outside world itself becomes so abrasive and nihilist, it calms one down amidst the spasming multitudes of the city that never sleeps. What else to do on those restless nights when the agitation of modern life demanded expression, except use whatever means one had available to make noise? Strip away the rock from punk and see the exquisiteness of what lies beneath. No Wave was like a fungicide against the metropolitan mold.
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It is argued how this particular grouping of bands was given the moniker No Wave. Certainly it was in reaction to the poppy growth of New Wave with its punchy melodies and cheap hooks, ready to suck a listener in and tell them how to feel. One story claims that it was Lydia Lunch who first used the term in an interview with Roy Trakin for the magazine New York Rocker. Others say it was musician and writer Chris Nelson in a piece he had written for New York Rocker. Thurston Moore claims different. He had come to the city in search of punk, and he claimed that he saw the words No Wave spray painted on the walls of CBGB before it ever appeared in the music press. Given that this is an essay about the metropolitan mold it seems fitting the term No Wave had its debut as graffiti. This is the Sprawl after all, where graffiti is gospel.

As Moore recalls, “While it was happening nobody even knew that it was called No Wave, and as soon as it started becoming called No Wave it was already in sort of a dissipation mode. The first time I saw name [the term] No Wave was not in the SoHo Weekly News when Roy Trakin was interviewing Lydia, at least I don’t remember. I remember seeing it spray-painted in front of the CBGB Second Avenue Theater, which used to be the Anderson Theater, where the Yardbirds played. Hilly and his wife had opened up the Anderson Theater, renamed it CBGB Second Avenue Theater and attempted to have a bigger space for bands. I remember going there a couple of times and seeing Blondie and Patti Smith and Richard Hell. It was fun, but you knew it was a disaster because it was a seated venue and people were just smoking pot in there and drinking, and the fire marshals had their eye on it. It just couldn’t last, and finally they closed it down after month or two. And somebody had spray-painted on the front of it, ‘No Wave.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, that’s kind of clever.’”

In the work of Thurston Moore and the band Sonic Youth he played in, something of the DNA of the No Wave scene remained.

SONIC DETRITUS

Three souls found their way into the gritty and neglected petri dish of New York during its insolvent years of economic crisis. Thurston Moore had come to pursue a life in punk, the energy of which thrilled him to no end. Kim Gordon, who had arrived from the west coast to pursue a life in the arts, and got a gig writing for Artforum. Lee Ranaldo had been a native of the state, growing up in Long Island, and gone to art school in Binghamton, before finding his way to the crusty core of NYC.

It didn’t take long for Ranaldo to go from art student to band member, starting with the Flucts, and then finding a spot in Rhy Chatham’s Guitar Trio, before settling into a spot in Glenn Branca’s guitar orchestra.
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These guitar orchestras became Branca’s hallmark. In 1980 he had released Lesson No. 1, his first album under his given name, and after that he started getting very interested in creating music for ensembles of guitar players. His 1981 album The Ascension featured Ranaldo as one of his players. After these ensemble versions of his entrancing microtonal and heavy guitar music, Branca graduated to symphonies. (Industrial percussion stalwart Z’ev joined him for Symphony No. 2.) Branca had been influenced by the scientist of sound Hermann von Helmholtz, and instrument builder and composer in the American experimental tradition, Harry Partch. He was also indebted in this work to the theories of dissonance and its spiritual value that came from the astrologer, theosophist and arch-modernist, Dane Rudhyar.

​Branca and his efforts would remain a foundational influence on Sonic Youth, as Thurston Moore also later played in his ensembles. Ranaldo and Moore appeared on the first three recordings of Branca’s symphonies. That other angel of noise rock, Michael Gira, was under Branca’s spell as well. He went on to form Swans, along with Dan Brau and Aglis Kizys who also played in the detuned orchestra. Swans can be considered the other helix from the DNA of No Wave whose code went into noise rock. For a time the two bands even shared a rehearsal space.

As with many other composers, conductors, writers and artists, Branca had a reputation for being a bit of an egomaniac. When the components of Sonic Youth swirled together in the early eighties, with Moore meeting Ranaldo and Bob Bert, Gordon meeting Moore, and the group coming together in sonic synergy, Ranaldo and Moore still worked with Branca. Yet they were starting to get antsy to focus with intense purpose on their own initiative. Ranaldo had to tell Branca that they were leaving his group. Sonic Youth was the thing.

Sonic Youth channeled their own darkly incipient Americana into their proceedings. They also channeled their prolific readings. At some point Kim Gordon and the other members of the band became enamored of William Gibson. The Sprawl, named after Gibson’s locale, appears as one of the center piece songs on Daydream Nation, an album that can be listened to as a version of America seen through mirrorshades.

Daydream Nation came out ten years after No New York began its infamous rotations and circulations. The year was 1988. New York City was only just starting to recover from the financial bailout it had orchestrated in the previous decade. People were starting to dream again about the possibilities inherent in the American experiment.

Sonic Youth was also hitting their stride. They’d taken elements of No Wave, and their own eclectic listening, interest in the subculture and ferocity of hardcore, and melded it with the theoretical underpinnings of the avantgarde art they loved, but infused it with a melody that reached out beyond those confines and into the hearts of the jaded American youth of urban and suburban conclaves who took their message and eloped with it on a long honeymoon.

On the opening track Moore sings, “it’s getting kind of quiet in my city head / it takes a teenage riot to get me out of bed.” The Sprawl comes alive when youth take to the streets, whether to tangle with the establishment, or to rumble with one another.
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“The Sprawl” launches just after the fuse of “Silver Rocket,” finishes its distorted explosion. Gordon is singing on this one. Along with the influence of Gibson, the lyrics from the first verset were taken from the Denis Johnson novel, The Stars at Noon, a novel about an American woman stuck in Nicaragua during the Sandinista years and the time of “the stupid CIA” and their regime change operations, with corruption on all sides. This literary cross referencing is very apropos for a song inspired by Gibson, as his own novels frequently globe hop between the Sprawl, central America, Europe, and Japan.

​The essential verse is when Gordon sings, “I grew up in a shotgun row / Sliding down the hill / Out front were the big machines / Still and rusty now, I guess / Out back was the river / And that big sign down the road / That’s where it all started.”

It conjures up visions of tenements, followed again by the recurring mantra, “Come on down to the store / You can buy some more, and more, and more, and more,” here a bodega where aside from the ones on the shelf, all kinds of black market goods might be available.

The song “Hey Joni” written and sung by Ranaldo is as much a tribute to Joni Mitchell and the rock standard “Hey Joe” as it is another tip of the hat to Gibson when he sings, “In this broken town, can you still jack in / And know what to do?”

​Rock music about the road is nothing new in the genre. Noise rock music about The Sprawl is something else all together.

​.:. .:. .:.

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​[This long essay, a kind of psychohistorical drift, on Route 128 MA is to be published in three parts. The first came out on March 25, the second on April 1st, and this segment concludes today, though their may be future installments on the theme of American Psychogeography.]
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As the area around Boston got developed, the greenspace around Route 128 became “Silicon Valley before there was a Silicon Valley.” The farmland that would have sat between the parks and trails and townless highways envisioned by Mackaye ended up becoming industrial parks as the land was bought up by a variety of tech corporations ready to pursue postwar growth. Saruman had once again raided the Shire. In the wreckage he erects Satanic mills of industry. Transcendental Concord became a note discord. A note with the seed of cyberpunk embedded within.

​Route 128 soon became its own kind of information superhighway, as electronics firms seeded the area, growing as businesses and then growing new kinds of silicon lifeforms. The farms and fisheries were cleared and made way for the building up the automotive industry, and the fields around them for the creation of factories churning out machine tools and all the kit and kaboodle that the make electrical world possible.

Then the big engineering minds who had connections to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology sauntered in to continue the buildup of the areas electric powered might. MIT had roots going back to 1861 in Boston and their cooperation in military research had gathered up steam in WWI. It went on full display in the lead up to the United States involvement in WWII. The mad scientists at MIT wore the lab coats while their politician suppliers donned the full cloak of global empire from Great Britain in the aftermath of the war.

Among those involved was the cyberneticist Vannevar Bush. He was one of the founders of the American Appliance Company in 1922. Their project was to usher us into a new age of refrigeration. Perhaps this company should give another kind of chill, as they eventually evolved into Raytheon, the U.S. defense contractor and industrial corporation whose key work is manufacturing military grade weapons. As ever the commercial electronics that trickle down to the happy American consumer are just a byproduct from the applied research in how to kill and destroy.

Their eventual buildup into global bomb blasters can also be seen as stemming from their failure to keep things cold. Their refrigerator design was a flop, so they moved into the glowing world of radio. It started with the purchase of patents from C.G. Smith and his rectifier tube from the AMRAD company who went on to become X-ray innovators. At this point the company changed their name to Raytheon and went on to success by selling the S-tube that allowed radios to work on home electrical grids, helping to usher in the golden age of radio.

Then in 1927 Bush built his Differential Analyzer, an early mechanical computer that would pave the way for the mainframes that followed in the wake of WWII.

During the 1930s, as Benton MacKaye’s pans for the Bay Circuit were bypassed and the commercial agenda for Route 128 unfolded, other radio tube companies moved their operations into the area. These included Hygrade and Sylvania who later merged into the Hygrade Sylvania Corporation. General Radio moved into the area as well, along with the scientist Edwin Land, who went on to start Polaroid. Then in 1939 the first Radio Shack catalog was published by the Boston based company.

By the end of the decade another researcher into the nascent world of cybernetics and information technology came on the scene. It was a gentleman by the name of Howard Aiken. He was a physicist at Harvard, and with help from the school and IBM he created the Harvard Mark I, a giant electro-mechanical beast that weighed five tons and was the first programmable computer.

By the end of the following decade Claude Shannon had created the first chess playing computer at MIT. Over the course of those years this burgeoning sector had blossomed from the establishment of the Rad Lab at MIT, short for the Radiation Laboratory where all manner of things such as radar and radio research were conducted, to the continued growth of Raytheon and its involvement in computers. The aided the war effort through the building of magnetrons, a high-powered vacuum tube that converts electrical energy into high-frequency microwaves.

In the 1950s the growth along Route 128 further accelerated. An Wang had immigrated to the United States from China in 1951 and started Wang Laboratories. Wang was a pioneer in the area of Random Access Memory, receiving a patent for Core Memory in 1955 that he sold to IBM.

In 1952 a section of Route 128 was opened from Danvers to Needham. A parade was scheduled to celebrate the occasion. The elephants who had been brought into lead the parade didn’t cooperate with their human handlers, and got “cold feet” because the asphalt was still hot. On November 4th of that year Dwight D. Eisenhower became the 34th president of the United States. In his 1961 farewell address, he would warn us all of the growing military-industrial complex. A complex whose research had gathered in one cluster around
Route 128. The elephants were getting cold feet about the cold war.

In 1957 computer engineers from MITS Lincoln Laboratory set up shop in the Massachusetts town of Maynard to establish the Digital Equipment Corporation. In 1970, the same year that Jonathan Richman started his band the Modern Lovers they shipped their first 16-bit minicomputer the PDP-11/20.

​Over the intervening decade of the sixties, missile interception became a thing with the Raytheon HAWK system which was “like hitting a bullet with a bullet.” The space race against those evil communist soviets was on, and many of the corporations who had planted themselves around Route 128 applied themselves to the mission. Computer Aided Design was born at MIT and Wang Laboratories perfected the art of computer typesetting. Wang furthered the industry by developing logarithmic calculators and word processing software. All of this ushered in the modern world, and it was the world Jonathan Richman bathed in every night as he ran the roads in his motorcar, with his radio on, keyed in to the energy percolating out from all of those laboratories.

​On the 16th of May 1951 Jonathan Richman was born. Before the year closed out the public radio station WGBH began to broadcast and the Museum of Science opened. The Korean war was still ongoing, Truman was President, and campy science fiction flicks were invading the new drive-in theaters. the Boston Red Sox had finished up the season with 87 wins over their 67 losses. The air was alive with the crackle of radio signals and curving baseballs.

Richman’s dad was a traveling salesmen peddling goods across the roadways. In time he would initiate Richman to the way of the road, taking his teenage son out on treks with him in the car, driving around Massachusetts. His mother taught reading to kids who had a hard time learning to read. The family lived in the suburban town of Natick, Massachusetts, “in the far western reaches of Boston, impaled by Route 9,” as Richman is quoted in the book There’s Something About Jonathan by Tim Mitchell. Natick was a “halfway house between the city and the open highway…a blandness between the bleakness of subways, expressways, and skyscrapers and the magic of neon, radio towers, and ‘fifty thousand watts of power’…”

Those fifty thousand watts of power probably came from the station WMEX, a station that left a radio frequency burn in Richman’s heart. “When I was eleven I had a crush on Debbie Salvin. This was 1962. She and Janet Woish listened to WMEX - the teenage station of that time. Well, when I came over to Janet’s to pester Debbie, I’d hear ‘Johnny Angel,’ ‘Torture,’ ‘Summertime Lover’ and songs by Connie Stevens and Tommy Sands. So pretty soon I was there with the transistor radio hearing ‘The Locomotion,’ ‘The Watusi,’ ‘He’s A Rebel’ and everything else. That music is in my heart now as it always will be.”

The suburban landscape of tract houses didn’t do much to stimulate Richman’s imagination, but the roads and the rock and roll delivered over the medium of radio did. Richman was an earnest kid, and his continual sense of wonder left him at odds with other people, with other teenagers. Rock and roll was a lifeline in the sameness of the suburbs. Soon he had a transistor radio with him at all times, to tune in to and resonate with the frequencies that gave him, already a dreamer, something else to dream about. When WMEX boosted their power up to a mighty fifty thousand watts in the daytime during the late 1960s, and respectable five thousand at night, Richman would have been able to tune in the rock sounds that soothed his soul.

​Benton MacKaye’s fiend Lewis Mumford had gone on to spend much time thinking about the ills caused to society by our long-term investment in machines, and the ills of suburbia. Mumford was critical of urban sprawl and thought suburbia inculcated a childish way of looking at the world in the people who lived there. In his 1961 masterpiece The City In History, Mumford writes, “In the suburb, one might live and die without marring the image of an innocent world, except when some shadow of evil fell over a column in the newspaper. Thus the suburb served as an asylum for the preservation of illusion.”

Natick was place of such illusions is just on the outside of Route 128. Natick forms one of the loops on the beltway that cinches up Boston’s angling streets. Natick is a word from the Massachusett language meaning “place of the hills.” The name for the state itself derives from the tribe and comes from a term in their tongue meaning “At the Great Hill,” by which they meant the Blue Hills that stood above Boston Harbor from the south.

“Roadrunner” would become Richman’s most famous song. But in order to get to that point, in order to become a singer himself, instead of the painter he at times dreamed of being, he first had to have an encounter with the Velvet Underground, heard first over the radio when a DJ played “Heroin.” Richman didn’t need the drug, but he sensed in the music of Reed and Cale and the rest of the Velvets a new kind of rock music that he could mainline via the power of electrical communication into his own veins and bring into his own being, to emanate something of his own, something equally American, something equally new.
He recalls having “I heard live bands in junior high but didn’t start singing or playing till I was 15 and heard the Velvet Underground, out of New York City. They made an atmosphere and I knew then that I could make one too!”

He had already been making music. He already had an amp and a guitar. Now he had the reagent. When the Velvet Underground started playing in Boston, he started attending their shows, got to meet and hang out with the band, it began a process of transformation.

Highschool in suburbia was a real drag for someone as wide eyed as Richman. He knew what he wanted to do even if he didn’t quite know how to get there yet. There was no class for rock and roller on offer in the curriculum, and Richman thought there were better things he could do with his time. His parents thought differently, and so he managed to stay and graduate.

If human creativity can be conceived of as tapping into a field of consciousness, the field of consciousness he found himself inside was one of innovation. The success of radio, from the first morse code pulses sent out by Marconi to its successive apogees in the voice of Wolfman Jack broadcasting the religion of rock and roll out of the radio towers. Richman was a convert.

He was such a convert to the rock and roll religion that after he graduated high school in 1969, he made the pilgrimage to New York City to meet and hear his idols, the Velvet Underground. He couched surfed at their manager Steve Sesnick’s place as he worked odd jobs and tried to make a go of it as a rock and roller himself. He did manage that, but not right off the bat, and he went back home, where he promptly formed a band with a neighbor and some other friends.

​Richman was driven, and he started to write songs, and some of those were inspired by his travels as a teenager with his father, out on sales trips around the area. The Howard Johnsons and “Stop ‘n Shops” held a special appeal to him. They might have been sickening to MacKaye, a symptom of the motor slums he wished to thwart, but for Richman they held an everyday beauty. The stop ‘n shops and new fast food joints held an allure of satisfied desires, and there was comfort to be found in roadside motel rooms. It all filled him with a sense of wonder. This unadulterated happiness and pleasure in what life had to offer was innocent in him, and free from pretense. When he was finally able to translate these feelings into music on his song “Roadrunner” about driving along Route 128 the joy in these things came through without artifice. Buzzing through it all was his love affair with radio, which he had a nonstop communion with, using it as a way to modulate his very being.

​When the Modern Lovers first formed, and before they had settled on a final name, Richman had called themselves, “The Modern Lovers, the Dance Band of the Highways.” The last part was promptly dropped but it lingers around Richman and all the tracks he has left in space. “The Dance Band of the Highways” may not be a household name but Route 128 became immortal the day Jonathan Richman got his first inkling of the song “Roadrunner.” The year was 1970. He was nineteen, he was in love with the modern world, he was in love with the radio towers and all the electrical wires that lit up the area with glowing industry, he was in love with driving, and more important than anything else he was in love with modern girls and modern rock and roll. When he drove up and down Route 128 late at night his imagination got fired up. Cruising in the late 1960s under the starlight the world seemed to open up. The evenings were electrified. The electricity powered rock music and held new expanses of knowledge.

His connection to the Velvet Underground did pay off. John Cale had produced the demos, including the songs “Roadrunner” and “Pablo Picasso” that wound up on the Modern Lovers album. Cale said that “There was very little that was orthodox about Jonathan. Like his views on life, his views on music and art were much more from a childlike and dream-filled perspective, which allowed him to create his own special reality.”
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And Richman sang with innocent childlike glee “With the radio on / I’m in love with Massachusetts / And the neon when it’s cold outside / And the highway when it’s late at night / Got the radio on / I’m like the roadrunner.”

​His friend and fellow musician in the Modern Lovers had said that he and Richman “used to get in the car and just drive up and down Route 128 and the Turnpike. We’d come up over a hill and he’d see the radio towers, the beacons flashing, and he would get almost teary-eyed. He’d see all this beauty in things where other people just wouldn’t see it.”

Richman’s song is a bridge between the optimism of the 1950s and the suburban hellscapes then emerging. It is a bridge between the industrial parks of the high tech sector, and the cruising culture of rock and roll that has no greater tech than cars and radios and blasters. It’s the bridge between the unbridled optimism of boomers high on progress, and the sneering cynicism of Generation X and the actual future of no future that all of this was heading too.

​Richman liked his car as much as he liked women. “The highway is your girlfriend as you go by quick / Suburban trees, suburban speed / And it smells like heaven.”
The film American Graffiti came out in 1973, the year after “Roadrunner” was recorded, and it captures a similar flavor and psychic terroir. Wolfman Jack is howling from the radios throughout, and is central to the plot of the movie. The car and the radio are one. There is no cruising culture without the power of the AM coming out through the speakers late at night.

In the song Richman speaks of the “Spirit of 1956.” In 1956 the Platters had number 1 hits with “The Great Pretender” and “Only You.” James Brown had his debut single released. Elvis Presley hit the television variety shows and the film Rock Around the Clock reeled across the movie screens spurring movement on the dance floor and an explosion of teen culture as Bill Haley and his Comets headed for the stars. Rock and roll was here to stay, and it was something to do twenty four hours a day, all day every day, “patient in the bushes next to ’57.”

Lester Bangs, in a two-part review for the Stooges proto-punk album Fun House, said that their arrival on the scene and subsequent embrace by the youth movement signaled “the decline of Western civilization.” Richman was another ingredient in the protopunk stew, but he leant the movement some of its innocence, magic and mystery that would later reappear in the work of groups like Beat Happening, who also flouted the cynical aspect of punk.

As the 1970s waxed the fortunes of the firms on Route 128 waned. Silicon Valley’s fortune was starting to wax, and in their early years, before their complicity with the surveillance state, and their own contracts with weapons manufacturing firms, the early California hackers were opposed in ethos to the establishmentarian mindset of the east coast engineers. California was an escape hatch from the military industrial template. Punk rock was an escape hatch from the ponderous proceedings of prog, and the celebrity worship culture on display in the rock god shows held in stadiums. Richman was riding the protopunk wave, the wave of hundreds of bands started under the influence of the Velvet Underground, and his own influence went on to be one of the formative pulses kickstarting the punk rock movement in England where the Sex Pistols had adopted “Roadrunner.” It makes sense that the afterlife of “Roadrunner” would have such an influence on the development of punk. Joan Jett, one of punk rocks godmothers was also among the first to cover the song.

​From a mythological perspective the song is perfectly aligned with the god Mercury and Hermes. It is about travel and communication, about moving at high speeds. Yet Mercury and Hermes are also tricksters. Even the iconic cartoon and bird the song was named after has a connection to the trickster spirit through its close association with Wiley Coyote.

​Roadrunners are chaparral birds, a kind of ground cuckoo native to the southwestern part of the United States, Mexico and Central America. They are desert creatures. They like to run away from their predators, such as coyotes. Though they can fly, their feet are capable of fast movement and they move along the ground. And though Richman likely never saw one in the wilds surrounding Boston, most Americans his age had seen the roadrunner on Looney Tunes.

In Native American stories the coyote is a kind of trickster being, and when he makes his presence known, you can be sure that things are going to change, things are going to get shaken up. Jonathan Richman remains a pivotal figure in the shake-up of underground music, but his character is more like that of the bird than the coyote. Still in love with the modern world, he is chased by the changer down Route 128, and along that same path he flew, so many things were ushered in for both good and ill, computers, weapons. The country was never the same.

​Perhaps the ultimate trickster trick was played on the people who live in Boston, and on their fellow Americans via the concentrated thought energy that pours out of the realms surrounding the doom loop beltway. What could have been built according to the ecological vision of Benton MacKaye, instead blubbered into the hot potato of defense contracting, the creation of industrial effluvia whose complexes still ensnare the collective psyche. A road meandering through parks and preserves and protected places was instead poisoned. Where there had once been human settlements interspersed with nature, we were instead given the Sprawl.

[Another version of the classic song -you’ll want to listen to all the versions, I promise.]
RE/SOURCES:

This article would have been much tougher to research and write without the books, There’s Something About Jonathan by Tim Mitchell, The City in History by Lewis Mumford, the website Route128History.org by Alan Earls and his book Route 128 and the Birth of the Age of High Tech, and numerous other websites and sources.
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In next weeks segment we will explore the M.ilitary I.ndustrial T.emplate and the way Route-128 excited the fertile imagination of Jonathan Richman as we move along the roadrunner not taken.


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