[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.]
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.
MILITARY INDUSTRIAL TEMPLATE
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.
JONATHAN RICHMAN, ROADRUNNER
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.”
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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Raytheon is a big deal in my neck of the woods. Sometimes it seems like half my college class ended up working for them. Can't say I ever got the urge, to put it mildly.
Thanks as always for this thorough walkthrough, Justin. Great writing as always.
The wisest words I have ever read about Utopias are these by Emerson. https://wa1kij.livejournal.com/3689.html