The Modern Lovers - Roadrunner

Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride

1. I wanted to pound my steering wheel with unbridled glee. I wanted to chug half a gallon of stale gas station coffee. I wanted to inhale oil fumes and exhale blue smoke. I felt the urge that could strike a teenage boy at any moment, zig-zagging through the ether like so many thousands of transmission signal lightning bolts crashing into my being. At any moment I could point the hood of my car up the highway and let my headlamps stab into the darkness. I wanted to strap myself onto a rocket sled and bolt through the American night with the radio screaming, and my engine humming a redline tune. I felt a compulsion to dose up my dharma with pure, high-octane gasoline, two windows down, heat blasting downward on my feet. Night flight liberation with everything so loud my angular nervousness and anxiety was finally, at last, at least tamed or still or quiet - hopefully an egg scramble of all three - in remission so I could shout myself hoarse with tone-deaf, full-throated versions of greasy rock and roll songs played by blitzed and blotto Brits, Dixie-fried swamp boys, and leather-clad NYC punks. Anything less would be unacceptable, anything more would be civilized and that would be worse. Because this was the signal I was broadcasting into the universe, the universe took pity on me and answered. This is how The Modern Lovers’ Roadrunner found me. The cosmos will reveal her secrets if you’re on the right bandwidth, and we often don’t discover the Grade-A primo things we love and need. They find us.

   And me in love with modern moonlight
   Me in love with modern rock & roll
   Modern girls and modern rock & roll
   Don't feel so alone, got the radio on
   Like the roadrunner

2. I’ve always believed the radio and I have a symbiotic relationship. It’s irrational, I know, but who needs rational? I want completely illogical, unreasonable relationships. The radio serves up what I need most in any particular moment - call it frequency modulation telepathy. Normal sensory channels or physical interaction is unnecessary. Like Captain Jack Sparrow, my compass doesn’t point north. It points to what I want the most. You see, I’ve been chasing musical Big Bangs since I was 14 when I first really listened to Voodoo Child (Slight Return), and my brain went KA-BLOOIE. I was pointing at my stereo, screaming gibberish, all the molecules in my body straining outward in different directions like I was about to go supernova in my basement bedroom. How could anyone make that sound??? What the hell was THAT??? HUH??? I’ve been chasing that feeling for the last 29 years. I heard it instantly in Roadrunner. I felt my atoms start to pull apart and I knew I was in love. I don’t care if the lyrics sound like they’re being ad-libbed on the spot. I don’t care if it’s only two chords. I don’t care that the organ sounds like it was bought at Sears for a child. It’s exuberant and it connects Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley’s poetic highway odes to the punk godfathers to the new wave and post-punk bands of the 1980s (members of The Modern Lovers went on to play significant roles in The Cars and The Talking Heads). It’s everything I want in a highway song and then some.

   Music has always been a matter of Energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call it Inspiration, but what they really mean is Fuel. I have always needed Fuel. I am a serious consumer. On some nights I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about fifty more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio.

   -Hunter S. Thompson

3. Let it rip. Go, man, go. How fast are we going? Who cares. Faster. 80 mph northbound on I-79. That’s cool. You know what’s cooler? Faster. 160 out of a hairpin at Monaco? Cool. Cooler? Faster. Mach 2 with your hair on fire? Faster. Faster miles an hour.

   Well now
   Roadrunner, roadrunner
   Going faster miles an hour

   The proper application of speed has saved more lives than brakes, so get to it. There are more than four million miles of paved roads in America (and more than a million unpaved roads), and musicians have supplied quite a significant number of killer road songs to help you navigate. It would be tremendously disrespectful to let ‘em go to waste. So, Roadrunner, turn the radio on, point your hood in a direction, and go.