Jonathan Richman, the rock legend behind “Roadrunner,” is thankful some lawmakers want his song to be the official rock song of Massachusetts.
“It takes a lot of devotion to, you know, to take a song that you like and try and go somewhere with it,” Richman told GBH News. “I think it’s an honor that there are people in Massachusetts who would like to honor our old song in some way.”
The 1972 track by The Modern Lovers, the band Richman fronted, features specific callouts to the Bay State — most directly, “I’m in love with Massachusetts.”
Former Boston Mayor Marty Walsh first proposed the song be given the honor in 2013 when he was a state representative, a proposal that’s come up many times over the years. Now, state Rep. David Linsky of Natick and Sen. Bruce Tarr of Gloucester have co-filed bills to renew the effort.
Richman, who grew up in Natick, said he wrote the song when he first moved to New York and felt nostalgic for his life in Massachusetts and “those lonely highways.” He thought other people wouldn’t even like the tune, which has since been twice included on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.
“I just made it up for myself, really, just to make up this hypnotic chord guitar chord thing about how I felt about the loneliness of borrowing my father's car, which I did at 16 and 17, and driving around — and sort of being consoled by the lonely industrial parks, which felt as lonely as I felt,” Richman said.
When the band recorded the song, he said it ended up sounding a lot happier than he originally had written it.
“You might not realize how lonely that song is,” he said.“Well, actually I was saying I'm in love with my own loneliness. Isn't that kind of narcissistic? It's true, you know and I meant it that way. It was a sort of a lonely, self-involved song.”
He said he was inspired to write the song after often seeing The Velvet Underground at the Boston Tea Party, a concert venue that was located in Boston’s South End.
“I would see them and I would watch them improvise and do long improvisational chants like the song ‘Sister Ray,’” Richman said. "And that's what that piece ‘Roadrunner’ was based on.”
Richman said he still enjoys writing songs about Boston and his time in the rock scene.
“I'm trying to express sort of how I feel sort of in a dreamy kind of way,” he said. “Like, I sing about the Fenway — because the Fenway is sort of a part of my inner world, just that little stretch of land. I don't mean the baseball park in this case. I mean the actual Fens, that strip.”
Linsky, who brought the bill to the House, says Richman is an icon of the early punk scene in Boston.
“Roadrunner is a fantastic song that captures the essence of why growing up in suburban Boston in the 1960s and 1970s was like,” Linsky said. “It talks about cruising past the Stop & Shop and driving on Route 9 and Route 128.”
Linsky says the legislative process slowed down the measure happening in the past, but he’s hopeful he can get the bill to Gov. Maura Healey’s desk.
For Richman’s part, he said he already has plans to come back and tour in Boston in the fall.
“There are nights when a certain atmosphere happens in the crowd, and I see certain people who just have a certain feeling for Boston songs,” Richman said. “And I'll just put four or five of them together. Like I'll just string a whole bunch of them because I get in that mood to sing about Boston.
“There's a certain thing that can happen in Boston that doesn't happen anywhere else,” he said.
