From the Modern Lovers to acoustic whimsy, it's time to look at the best moments in the career of Jonathan Richman
*1. Don't Let Our Youth Go to Waste*
The thing to remember about Jonathan Richman is that even now (or maybe especially now), aged 62, he is unafraid of embarrassment. Not his own, so much – he dances like a loon, demands air conditioning be turned off because he can hear its hum, stands stagefront and declaims – but yours. It's easy to watch Richman and cringe, at least at first, until his open-heartedness, his belief in the goodness of life and of people, claim you. It's something he did from the start of his career – even before he was a professional musician, he would stride across Boston Common, guitar in hand, bellowing forth his songs to anyone who passed by. Don't Let Our Youth Go to Waste, one of his earliest songs (and like most of those early numbers, long since ditched from his setlists), is pretty much the apotheosis of this theatre of embarrassment. It is just Richman's voice – thin, nasal, all but tuneless – with no instrumentation. It used to feature late in the set with Richman's original band, the Modern Lovers, and has only ever been available in poor-quality live recordings, but it touches on all the key themes of early Richman: the celebration of the everyday ("I need to walk by the flowers with someone who can share my face"), the imparting of more personal information than most people would feel comfortable with ("I could bleed in sympathy on those days") and the combined celebration of both the past ("I could give you memories to rival Berlin in the 30s") and the present (the song's very title). Think of it as less a song than a manifesto.
*2. Roadrunner*
The young Richman's great obsession was the Velvet Underground. He hung around with them when they came to his home town, Boston. He moved to New York for a while as a teeanger to be closer to them. But what he loved was not the negation, but the jet roar of the guitars and organ. So while the Modern Lovers may have copied their template (Roadrunner is barely a strum away from being Sister Ray), Richman inverted Lou Reed's lyrics and sang about the light, about abstinence from drugs, about not chasing sex (he did the same thing with another of the bands he loved, the Stooges, taking a Ron Asheton riff and giving it the title I Wanna Sleep in Your Arms). Roadrunner – recorded in 1972 and finally released in 1976 – sang simply about the joy of being young and alive and driving all night on Route 128 ("going faster miles an hour") with the radio on. And it's crucial to have the radio on – "It helps me from being along late at night". At its coda, as Richman's words tumble over each other (he's got the rockin' modern neon sound, he's got the car from Massachusetts, he's got the modern sounds of modern Massachusetts, he's got the RADIO ON!) the promise the original rock'n'rollers made – that to be young and alive and living in a world of your own construction is the best thing there could possibly be – sounds like it might even be true. If you want to read more about this remarkable song, I strongly suggest this brilliant piece, in which Laura Barton set out to travel every road mentioned in every different version Richman recorded of Roadrunner.
*3. Someone I Care About*
Alongside Roadrunner on the 1976 album entitled The Modern Lovers – which was, more or less, the demos the band had recorded while seeking a major label deal, finally released after their demise – was Someone I Care About. Here were the band at their fiercest: a clang of guitars and a rattle of drums, and Richman holding forth with the stridency of a punk (not for nothing were the Modern Lovers crucial proto-punks). But he was flying against the wind of the times: this was no celebration of free love, of doing what you will, and it's that refusal to accept prevailing peer-group attitudes that was to be, arguably, Richman's greatest contribution to punk. Because he didn't want just a girl to fool around with, he didn't want just a girl to ball – what he wanted was girl he could care about, "or I want nothing … at all. All right?" Rarely has courtly love sounded so aggressive.
*4. Fly Into the Mystery*
By the time The Modern Lovers was released, Richman had already moved on. Lyrically, he was beginning a retreat into whimsy that would last until the end of the 70s, and musically he was embracing gentleness. Sometimes this toppled over into tweeness – "Well, the birds go 'tweet!' and the elves look sweet/ And the monsters got those rock'n'roll bells on their little feet," he sang on Party on the Woods Tonight – but there was some hint of the old Modern Lovers about him. Some of the less abrasive of his older songs would continue to pop up in live sets, and some of those live recordings – including this one and a transcendent, eight-minute, semi-acoustic reading of Roadrunner with the subtitle (Thrice) would crop up on a shockingly curated, disowned-by-Richman but essential 1998 compilation called Roadrunner. Fly Into the Mystery is another of Richman's great place songs – sparse and spare, "a slow dance, lady's choice", as he says in the introduction. And it opens with a line so perfect in placing you in his world that it's unbeatable: "See now, it's eight o'clock, here in Boston/ And Filene's had just locked up." And from there, a closed department store on a starlit night, Richman invites us to join him on the journey he has always sought: the flight into life's mystery.
*5. The Morning of Our Lives*
The Morning of Our Lives never appeared on a studio album, getting its release on the 1978 Modern Lovers Live set, and also coming out as a single (these, I'm pretty sure, were the recordings that also yielded the live tracks on the Roadrunner compilation). In other hands – or in Richman's in another mood – it could have been unbearably gloopy and saccharine sweet, but somehow he manages to keep it just about under control. Richman is addressing a friend who's going through a bad patch – "It hurts me to hear, to see you got no faith in yourself"– and as ever, he knows the solution lies in being not an island, but looking both within at one's true heart and outside at what the world can offer – because "our time is now, here in the morning of our lives". What keeps it in check, I think, is Richman's careful use of language. There's no "You're beautiful" emoting; no protestation that together we can climb every mountain. He sounds, in fact, like a parent addressing a kid who's had a disastrous sports day: "Darling, you always put yourself down. But I like you … You're OK, dear. There's nothing to feel inferior about. You can do it." It's a song to lift spirits, to play to someone you know needs a boost.
Reading on mobile? Listen to our Jonathan Richman playlist on Spotify here
*6. I Was Dancing in the Lesbian Bar*
Richman's early albums have been well served – most are in print, or available on streaming services. But his catalogue since is, frankly, a mess. Crucial albums like Jonathan Sings!, Rockin' and Romance and It's Time For … Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers have become collectors' items, the only consolation being that as the years passed, some of the songs that had disappeared from view would be rerecorded for later collections (though the stellar That Summer Feeling, recorded in both 1983 and 1992, is still sadly unavailable on Spotify) . What was apparent, though, was that Richman was – finally – growing up. Though you will search in vain for sex in his songs, 1992's I, Jonathan saw as unilkely an expression of solidarity with lesbians as you would ever find from a middle-aged man whose work, when it addressed relationships, had been solidly heterosexual. Richman has gone dancing to an uptight club, when some kids come along and take him … well, you know where. "In the first bar folks were drinking sips/ But in this bar they could shake their hips/ I was dancing in a lesbian bar." If only someone had filmed it.
*7. Velvet Underground*
Though he had left their sound a long, long time before, Richman's love of the Velvets lived on. So I, Jonathan included his own tribute to them. It doesn't sound a lot like them – an amiable rock'n'roll chug (though the Velvets themselves were far from unwilling to dabble in that sort of thing; it just somehow sounded different in their hands). The affection shines through – and the moment 75 seconds in, when Richman asks "How on earth were they making that sound? Velvet Underground! Like this!" then moves into 45 seconds of Sister Ray, still on one guitar, bass, handclaps and a hi-hat, is simply priceless, jawdropping in its audacity. And if you were to describe the Velvets you could do a lot worse than quoting Richman: "Twangy guitars of the cheapest types. Sounds as stark as black and white stripes/ Bold and brash, sharp and rude/ Like the heat's turned off and you're low on food."
*8. True Love Is Not Nice*
Richman had married in 1983, before getting divorced in the mid-90s. Many of the songs he recorded over the years following the divorce sounded as if they were reflecting on the failure of his relationship, albeit through the prism of gentle humour. He'd sing about a woman leaving him because she was fed up being treated at just the plus-one on the guestlist, about how his daughter now had a full-time father, as well as a series of songs in which the open-heartedness of all his work was tempered with warnings about what the world could do the unwary – set to one of his occasional cod reggae beats, True Love Is Not Nice is a sentiment the younger Richman would surely never have expressed. (A word to the wise: the album from which this comes, I'm So Confused, is a very oddly produced record, full of slick studio instrumentation, far from the setting that works best for Richman's songs.)
*9. Vincent Van Gogh*
Richman's habit of rerecording songs meant a second life for this joyous 1983 paean to the painter, which reappeared on 2004's Not So Much To Be Loved As To Love, which is the version we're using. "Well have you heard about the painter Vincent Van Gogh/ who loved colour and he let it show/ And in the museum, what have we here?/ The mosst soulful painter since Jan Vermeer." By this point Richman had dispensed with the notion of a conventional band entirely – his recordings and his live shows featured just him on guitar, and Tommy Larkins on a minimal drum set. At shows – between which Richman usually travels by train, to minimise his carbon footprint, the lack of equipment making it possible – he's often unamplified, forcing the audience into silence so they can hear every word. The simple format turns his gigs into something different – he stops, he starts, he talks to the audience, he serenades them. They are remarkable and wonderful events, and you're strongly encouraged to see for yourself.
*10. Old World*
And finally, let us come full circle, with this 2008 reworking of a song from the first Modern Lovers album. Where the original saw Richman trying to place himself outside the modern world – "Because I still love my parents, and I still love the old world"– here he completely changes the perspective, creating something elegiac and melancholy. Now, rather than trying to save the old world, he's bidding farewell to it: "I have respect for the old world/ But I want to say goodbye to the old ways." More than 30 years before, Richman had pronounced: "Someday I think I'll be dignified and old." He had the gift of prophecy, too, then. Reported by guardian.co.uk 7 hours ago.
*1. Don't Let Our Youth Go to Waste*
The thing to remember about Jonathan Richman is that even now (or maybe especially now), aged 62, he is unafraid of embarrassment. Not his own, so much – he dances like a loon, demands air conditioning be turned off because he can hear its hum, stands stagefront and declaims – but yours. It's easy to watch Richman and cringe, at least at first, until his open-heartedness, his belief in the goodness of life and of people, claim you. It's something he did from the start of his career – even before he was a professional musician, he would stride across Boston Common, guitar in hand, bellowing forth his songs to anyone who passed by. Don't Let Our Youth Go to Waste, one of his earliest songs (and like most of those early numbers, long since ditched from his setlists), is pretty much the apotheosis of this theatre of embarrassment. It is just Richman's voice – thin, nasal, all but tuneless – with no instrumentation. It used to feature late in the set with Richman's original band, the Modern Lovers, and has only ever been available in poor-quality live recordings, but it touches on all the key themes of early Richman: the celebration of the everyday ("I need to walk by the flowers with someone who can share my face"), the imparting of more personal information than most people would feel comfortable with ("I could bleed in sympathy on those days") and the combined celebration of both the past ("I could give you memories to rival Berlin in the 30s") and the present (the song's very title). Think of it as less a song than a manifesto.
*2. Roadrunner*
The young Richman's great obsession was the Velvet Underground. He hung around with them when they came to his home town, Boston. He moved to New York for a while as a teeanger to be closer to them. But what he loved was not the negation, but the jet roar of the guitars and organ. So while the Modern Lovers may have copied their template (Roadrunner is barely a strum away from being Sister Ray), Richman inverted Lou Reed's lyrics and sang about the light, about abstinence from drugs, about not chasing sex (he did the same thing with another of the bands he loved, the Stooges, taking a Ron Asheton riff and giving it the title I Wanna Sleep in Your Arms). Roadrunner – recorded in 1972 and finally released in 1976 – sang simply about the joy of being young and alive and driving all night on Route 128 ("going faster miles an hour") with the radio on. And it's crucial to have the radio on – "It helps me from being along late at night". At its coda, as Richman's words tumble over each other (he's got the rockin' modern neon sound, he's got the car from Massachusetts, he's got the modern sounds of modern Massachusetts, he's got the RADIO ON!) the promise the original rock'n'rollers made – that to be young and alive and living in a world of your own construction is the best thing there could possibly be – sounds like it might even be true. If you want to read more about this remarkable song, I strongly suggest this brilliant piece, in which Laura Barton set out to travel every road mentioned in every different version Richman recorded of Roadrunner.
*3. Someone I Care About*
Alongside Roadrunner on the 1976 album entitled The Modern Lovers – which was, more or less, the demos the band had recorded while seeking a major label deal, finally released after their demise – was Someone I Care About. Here were the band at their fiercest: a clang of guitars and a rattle of drums, and Richman holding forth with the stridency of a punk (not for nothing were the Modern Lovers crucial proto-punks). But he was flying against the wind of the times: this was no celebration of free love, of doing what you will, and it's that refusal to accept prevailing peer-group attitudes that was to be, arguably, Richman's greatest contribution to punk. Because he didn't want just a girl to fool around with, he didn't want just a girl to ball – what he wanted was girl he could care about, "or I want nothing … at all. All right?" Rarely has courtly love sounded so aggressive.
*4. Fly Into the Mystery*
By the time The Modern Lovers was released, Richman had already moved on. Lyrically, he was beginning a retreat into whimsy that would last until the end of the 70s, and musically he was embracing gentleness. Sometimes this toppled over into tweeness – "Well, the birds go 'tweet!' and the elves look sweet/ And the monsters got those rock'n'roll bells on their little feet," he sang on Party on the Woods Tonight – but there was some hint of the old Modern Lovers about him. Some of the less abrasive of his older songs would continue to pop up in live sets, and some of those live recordings – including this one and a transcendent, eight-minute, semi-acoustic reading of Roadrunner with the subtitle (Thrice) would crop up on a shockingly curated, disowned-by-Richman but essential 1998 compilation called Roadrunner. Fly Into the Mystery is another of Richman's great place songs – sparse and spare, "a slow dance, lady's choice", as he says in the introduction. And it opens with a line so perfect in placing you in his world that it's unbeatable: "See now, it's eight o'clock, here in Boston/ And Filene's had just locked up." And from there, a closed department store on a starlit night, Richman invites us to join him on the journey he has always sought: the flight into life's mystery.
*5. The Morning of Our Lives*
The Morning of Our Lives never appeared on a studio album, getting its release on the 1978 Modern Lovers Live set, and also coming out as a single (these, I'm pretty sure, were the recordings that also yielded the live tracks on the Roadrunner compilation). In other hands – or in Richman's in another mood – it could have been unbearably gloopy and saccharine sweet, but somehow he manages to keep it just about under control. Richman is addressing a friend who's going through a bad patch – "It hurts me to hear, to see you got no faith in yourself"– and as ever, he knows the solution lies in being not an island, but looking both within at one's true heart and outside at what the world can offer – because "our time is now, here in the morning of our lives". What keeps it in check, I think, is Richman's careful use of language. There's no "You're beautiful" emoting; no protestation that together we can climb every mountain. He sounds, in fact, like a parent addressing a kid who's had a disastrous sports day: "Darling, you always put yourself down. But I like you … You're OK, dear. There's nothing to feel inferior about. You can do it." It's a song to lift spirits, to play to someone you know needs a boost.
Reading on mobile? Listen to our Jonathan Richman playlist on Spotify here
*6. I Was Dancing in the Lesbian Bar*
Richman's early albums have been well served – most are in print, or available on streaming services. But his catalogue since is, frankly, a mess. Crucial albums like Jonathan Sings!, Rockin' and Romance and It's Time For … Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers have become collectors' items, the only consolation being that as the years passed, some of the songs that had disappeared from view would be rerecorded for later collections (though the stellar That Summer Feeling, recorded in both 1983 and 1992, is still sadly unavailable on Spotify) . What was apparent, though, was that Richman was – finally – growing up. Though you will search in vain for sex in his songs, 1992's I, Jonathan saw as unilkely an expression of solidarity with lesbians as you would ever find from a middle-aged man whose work, when it addressed relationships, had been solidly heterosexual. Richman has gone dancing to an uptight club, when some kids come along and take him … well, you know where. "In the first bar folks were drinking sips/ But in this bar they could shake their hips/ I was dancing in a lesbian bar." If only someone had filmed it.
*7. Velvet Underground*
Though he had left their sound a long, long time before, Richman's love of the Velvets lived on. So I, Jonathan included his own tribute to them. It doesn't sound a lot like them – an amiable rock'n'roll chug (though the Velvets themselves were far from unwilling to dabble in that sort of thing; it just somehow sounded different in their hands). The affection shines through – and the moment 75 seconds in, when Richman asks "How on earth were they making that sound? Velvet Underground! Like this!" then moves into 45 seconds of Sister Ray, still on one guitar, bass, handclaps and a hi-hat, is simply priceless, jawdropping in its audacity. And if you were to describe the Velvets you could do a lot worse than quoting Richman: "Twangy guitars of the cheapest types. Sounds as stark as black and white stripes/ Bold and brash, sharp and rude/ Like the heat's turned off and you're low on food."
*8. True Love Is Not Nice*
Richman had married in 1983, before getting divorced in the mid-90s. Many of the songs he recorded over the years following the divorce sounded as if they were reflecting on the failure of his relationship, albeit through the prism of gentle humour. He'd sing about a woman leaving him because she was fed up being treated at just the plus-one on the guestlist, about how his daughter now had a full-time father, as well as a series of songs in which the open-heartedness of all his work was tempered with warnings about what the world could do the unwary – set to one of his occasional cod reggae beats, True Love Is Not Nice is a sentiment the younger Richman would surely never have expressed. (A word to the wise: the album from which this comes, I'm So Confused, is a very oddly produced record, full of slick studio instrumentation, far from the setting that works best for Richman's songs.)
*9. Vincent Van Gogh*
Richman's habit of rerecording songs meant a second life for this joyous 1983 paean to the painter, which reappeared on 2004's Not So Much To Be Loved As To Love, which is the version we're using. "Well have you heard about the painter Vincent Van Gogh/ who loved colour and he let it show/ And in the museum, what have we here?/ The mosst soulful painter since Jan Vermeer." By this point Richman had dispensed with the notion of a conventional band entirely – his recordings and his live shows featured just him on guitar, and Tommy Larkins on a minimal drum set. At shows – between which Richman usually travels by train, to minimise his carbon footprint, the lack of equipment making it possible – he's often unamplified, forcing the audience into silence so they can hear every word. The simple format turns his gigs into something different – he stops, he starts, he talks to the audience, he serenades them. They are remarkable and wonderful events, and you're strongly encouraged to see for yourself.
*10. Old World*
And finally, let us come full circle, with this 2008 reworking of a song from the first Modern Lovers album. Where the original saw Richman trying to place himself outside the modern world – "Because I still love my parents, and I still love the old world"– here he completely changes the perspective, creating something elegiac and melancholy. Now, rather than trying to save the old world, he's bidding farewell to it: "I have respect for the old world/ But I want to say goodbye to the old ways." More than 30 years before, Richman had pronounced: "Someday I think I'll be dignified and old." He had the gift of prophecy, too, then. Reported by guardian.co.uk 7 hours ago.