You really don’t know who Jonathan Richman is? Well, let me tell you a story.
A long, long time ago, in 1969, a budding, young singer-songwriter from Boston followed his dream, to wallow in the fountain of music that was flowing from the Velvet Underground, a seminal American rock & roll band from New York City. He ended up living on the couch of their manager, Steve Sesnick. The story is reminiscent of another kid with a guitar who made his way from Hibbing, MN to New York City in the early 1960s, to bask in the glow of his hero, Woody Guthrie. He, too, lived on a couch in New York for a while. That kid was Bob Dylan.
Over the next few years, Richman would make his way back to Boston and put together a garage band that would change music as we knew it at the time. The Modern Lovers, featuring musicians that would later go on to form the backbone of the bands Talking Heads and The Cars, recorded a few demos with John Cale, a founder of the Velvet Underground, as producer. That was in 1972.
In 1976, after moving to California, reorganizing the Modern Lovers, and finding a record label that could relate to his music, an album (the results of the studio work with John Cale) was finally released on the appropriately named, Beserkely Records, simply titled, The Modern Lovers. The rest is history, but it’s the history that makes this story a great one.
Richman’s lyrics are full of prose pratfalls. He writes songs about everyday life, but employs a lyrical innocence as slapstick as it is profound. Two examples from that first album that highlight his style and substance would be “Girlfriend”:
[[mp3 modern_lovers_girlfriend]]
If I were to walk to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston
Well, first I’d go to the room where they keep the Cezanne
But if I had by my side a girlfriend
Then I could look through the paintings
I could look right through them
Because I’d have found something that I understand
I understand a girlfriend.
That’s a girl friend
Said G-I-R-L-F-R-E-N
That’s a girlfriend, baby
That’s something that I understand
Alright
And “Pablo Picasso”:
[[mp3 modern_lovers_pablo_picasso]]
Well some people try to pick up girls
And get called assholes
This never happened to Pablo Picasso
He could walk down your street
And girls could not resist his stare and
So Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole.
When you listen to the music, you can’t help but think, “Velvet Underground,” because no other band was making music like this at that time.
Soon after its release in the UK, the album became a cult classic, and that cult included some of the musicians that would go on to blow rock & roll apart with a new, irreverent, anti-establishment, in-your-face genre called simply, “Punk.” Punk was really just the most recent iteration of garage band music, but now those garages were located in the UK and France, as well as the U.S. In the UK, Richman was considered a progenitor of “punk” — one critic called him “the godfather of punk” — and his influence began to register with the bands that were breaking through, literally (guitars, stages, venues) the well-established rock & roll world. His songs were, and are still, being covered by bands like the Sex Pistols, The Stooges with Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Echo and the Bunnymen, Joan Jett, and Velvet Underground founding member, John Cale. And Richman’s influence extends to bands like the Violent Femmes, They Might Be Giants, and Weezer. You may remember his song, “Roadrunner” from the soundtrack to School of Rock. The film’s director, Richard Linklater, calls it “the first punk song” and wanted to include it for that reason.
Jonathan Richman’s music had a profound influence on the Farrelly Brothers, Bobby and Peter, who asked Richman to record the soundtrack, and perform, in their 1998 movie, There’s Something About Mary. Oh, you didn’t know that was Jonathan Richman? Yeah, that’s him, and he’s coming to the Canopy Club Wednesday night. You should go.
Jonathan Richman is set to play at the Canopy Club tonight, Wednesday, February 27, as a part of Pygmalion Music Festival’s Spring Show Series. Tickets are $15 and the show starts at 8 p.m.