Jonathan Richman can still pinpoint how the Velvet Underground transformed his life with their collar-grabbing sound back in 1967. “It was on record and it was that drone! Oh my God! They changed everything!”
As a teenager, he saw the band over 80 times and was a regular presence before and after gigs. “If the Velvet Underground had a protégé,” VU guitarist Sterling Morrison observed, “it would be Jonathan Richman.” Even their acerbic frontman Lou Reed enthused, “I love Jonathan Richman. There’s something about Jonathan.”
As a skinny Jewish kid from the Boston suburbs, Richman drew amplifier treble dials on his jeans and was pretty awkward, but his all-time favorite band made it cool to be an outsider. When he’d play songs on the Cambridge Common, he antagonized longhairs by shouting things like, “I’m not a hippie! I’m not stoned!”
Richman kept his hair short, his wardrobe clean-cut, and sang about wanting to grow dignified and old. For an era that popularized the phrase “don’t trust anyone over 30,” his point of view flew in the face of counterculture orthodoxy. But with the Velvet Underground as his North Star, Richman knew he wasn’t alone.
In 1968, he wrote about the group in Vibrations, a local underground music magazine. “The Velvets are astounding! … Three black Vox amplifiers, black lyrics, black rhythms! They seemed unexcited, cool and seldom gyrated.” The following year, Richman moved to New York City and worked as a busboy at Max’s Kansas City, a downtown cool kid hangout. He also spent time at Andy Warhol’s Factory, where the debauched regulars treated the strait-laced young man with a bemused curiosity.
In 1970, Richman moved back to Boston and formed the Modern Lovers, which came together after he showed up with a copy of VU’s Loaded album at an apartment shared by bassist Ernie Brooks and keyboardist Jerry Harrison, who would later join the Talking Heads.
“We were like the original punk band,” Harrison once said. “Most music had gone away from heartfelt things towards professionalism. We put inspiration first.” The Modern Lovers’ signature track “Roadrunner” was an homage to the chugga-chugga-chugging rhythms of VU’s “Sister Ray.” Richman maintained the song’s dark, cool vibe, but he traded Reed’s lyrics about blowjobs and shooting junk for wide-eyed tributes to AM Top 40 radio.
Richman’s contrarian streak was also on display in “I’m Straight,” a song that mocks “Hippie Johnny” for being stoned all the time. Richman confirmed to me that the idea behind playing that song for live audiences certainly was “to make the hippies angry.” But he added, “The hippies were too smart to fall for it. They just watched.”
The Modern Lovers never shied away from ruffling feathers, particularly the time when they opened for West Coast horn rockers Tower of Power. According to legend, the crowd grew increasingly irritated as Richman sang “I’m Straight,” “Pablo Picasso” and other mood-killing numbers. They were chased off the stage after bottles and rocks rained down, so country-rock pioneer Gram Parsons (a friend from Boston) came to the rescue and calmed everyone down.
“It’s a great story,” Richman told me, “but it’s fiction. The audience was antagonistic because we were all wrong for that kind of show. Anyway, I used to sort of ask for it. I strolled out into the crowd after our show to see if anyone wanted to give me any trouble. But no one did. Gram was there, but strictly as an audience member.”
“Oh! Ya know what Gram Parsons did tell me after that show? ‘Jonathan, you really know how to handle people!’ He meant it too. It was because I didn’t let the audience push us around. I told them, ‘Look, this is what we’re going to do and we’ll be here for another half hour. Then, the music you like will happen.’ Or words to that effect, I forget exactly.”
The Velvet Underground’s John Cale produced the Modern Lovers’ self-titled debut, which was recorded in 1972 but wasn’t released until 1976. They would have fit right in with the emerging punk movement, but it was not to be. Richman’s aesthetic interests changed after the group took up residency as a house band at a Bermuda resort and he fell hard for the joyful sounds of the island’s music.
This inspired him to develop a more whimsical, less abrasive songwriting style, so he broke the band up in 1974. The new material that Richman introduced during punk’s year zero was a mixture of simple rock ‘n’ roll styles, kid’s songs and folk music from China, Egypt, Ecuador and the Caribbean. Concertgoers who expected to hear lines like “Pablo Picasso never got called an asshole / not like you” were confronted instead with “I’m A Little Dinosaur.”
“Pablo Picasso” was the first in a series of songs about artists that he continued writing through the years, including “Salvador Dali,” “No One Was Like Vermeer” and “Vincent van Gogh.” Richman himself is a painter. “I do landscapes and have had the occasional show,” he said. “Oils, watercolors and pencil sketches.”
When asked what it is about this particular art form that makes him want to sing songs about painters, he responded in a characteristically Richmanesque way. “I don’t think about writing songs,” he said. “In fact, I’m not really a songwriter. I just sing and make things up and dance around and stuff.”
Rather than seeing himself as an artiste, Richman takes a craftsman approach to songwriting that reflects his own interest in stone masonry and making brick ovens. “I just like to build walls and ovens,” he said. “I apprenticed in the mid-1990s. It’s fun. It’s soulful. It’s physical. And you’re outside.”
Richman doesn’t have a smartphone — just a landline with the ringer turned off and an old-school answering machine — so this interview was conducted in writing via snail mail. When asked about the benefits of living an unplugged life, his handwritten response was simple: “Cause it’s way better. Try it. It’s slow. You spend more time outside. Do it.”
On his most recent albums, Jonathan Richman has let his inner Hippie Johnny come out and play, something that was inspired in part by his meditation practices. “I started when I was 17,” he said. “You can see things more clearly this way. It slows ya down, way down.”
Richman has also been making music with his old bandmate Jerry Harrison, who first appeared on 2018’s album SA! playing Mellotron, harmonium and clavinet. This eclectic collection of tracks blend tambura-driven ragas, catchy Spanish-language numbers and tear-jerking love songs.
“I needed somebody to play a Mellotron that was in the recording studio,” Richman said. “I called Jerry and that was sometime ago. My musical colleague! We’re close.” On SA!’s follow-up, Want To Visit My Inner House?, Harrison stepped up as co-producer and played keyboards on about half of the songs — including the droney blissed-out title track and a reprise that bookended the album. 2025’s Only Frozen Sky Anyway follows much the same path with humor, earnestness and otherworldly drones.
When asked what inspired his current cosmic inner-spaceways-traveling path, Richman explained, “John Cale of the Velvet Underground studied with LaMont Young, senior student of Pandit Pran Nath along with Terry Riley. I got into that stuff about 15 years ago. Since I started out by trying to copy the Velvet Underground, it’s not that big a stretch.”
In Richman’s 1968 article for Vibrations, he insisted that the then-obscure Velvet Underground were as important as the Beatles. The piece also included a diagram he drew that anticipated the cultural ascension of his favorite group while accurately predicting the demise of groups like the Doors, Cream, Jimi Hendrix and Jefferson Airplane.
It was a pretty prescient observation for someone who was only 16 at the time, and when I dredged up this memory in my final question, he playfully wrote back, “STATUTE of LIMITATIONS INVOKED.”
Upcoming event:
Jonathan Richman, Friday, Oct. 17, 7:30 p.m., Englert Theatre, Iowa City
This article was originally published in Little Village’s October 2025 issue.
