Jonathan Richman

Jonathan Richman, born in Natick in 1951, founded the Modern Lovers in 1970 and cut a stripped, pulsing kind of rock and roll that the proto-punk crowd has been chasing ever since. "Roadrunner", which turned up in 1975 on Beserkley Chartbusters, Volume 1, is the whole creed in one song: a relentless, simple drive and a singer who sounds thrilled just to be alive inside it.

The Modern Lovers had the teeth; Richman had something odder. From the middle of the decade on he went his own way, sometimes alone, sometimes with a small band giving him quiet acoustic or plugged-in backing, and he never bothered with the pose. What's left is a guy with a guitar and an unguarded, wide-eyed, almost childlike way of looking at things, singing like nobody ever told him to be cool.

The foundation stays basic rock and roll, with a streak of folk, but Richman keeps borrowing from music from all over the globe. His labels have included Beserkley Records and Vapor Records, and a title like "Dodge Vedge-O-Matic" tells you he never lost his taste for the gleefully offbeat.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.