Jonathan Richman

(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)

Jonathan Richman is a singer-songwriter from Boston who emerged at the dawn of the new wave and was associated with it. In reality, his music (a jovial and spartan folk that told stories of teenagers) had little or nothing in common with the noise and anger of punk rock or even with the intellectual poses of the new wave. Over the years, Richman imposed a "mask" of a shy and self-conscious boy who observes his contemporaries and himself with the demeanor of a satirical jester.

Richman is the most direct heir of the "chronicle" of manners pioneered by Chuck Berry, where the rock singer takes inspiration from a more or less trivial event, transforms it into a parable that applies to his entire generation, and lets this metaphorical value entertain the audience. In this period, Richman, quite isolated, could not find the right musical accompaniment.

Richman remained on the sidelines of the rock scene, holed up around his outspoken satirical vein, his candid optimism from a small-town perspective, and his dedication to urban folklore.
Having passed through the workshops of John Cale and Kim Fowley, and the streets of Boston, Richman arrived at the album fronting the Modern Lovers (Beserkley, 1976 - Rhino, 1986), a band (with Jerry Harrison on keyboards and David Robinson on drums) that for five years had been reinterpreting the hypnotic and anguished style of the more acid and metropolitan Velvet Underground. Some tapes produced years earlier by John Cale surfaced after the explosion of punk rock and cemented the band among the classics of the renaissance. Other unreleased tracks would surface years later on Original Modern Lovers (Bomp, 1981) and Precise Modern Lovers Order (Bomp, 1994). The first explains how the original style (the one produced by Fowley in 1972) was even more brutal than the one released by Cale in 1976.
Roadrunner has the cynical and cold pace of the underworld, with a stentorian rhythm fueled by hypnotic organ stabs. Pablo Picasso is a martial, piano-driven boogie over which Richman’s gray, detached recitation rises. She Cracked is a psychedelic refrain propelled by a hammering background ostinato. Together, these tracks reproduce the gloomy and desolate atmospheres of underground nightclubs and align with the most hallucinatory remnants of punk civilization.

But Richman’s original musical conception only emerged when, with a singular and sudden transformation, the singer decided to retreat around a grotesque instrumental and vocal poverty (down to acoustic sound and pitchless singing) in one of the most striking cases of infantilization. Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers (Beserkley, 1977) is a gem of oddity and adolescent carefree, in which paradox and futility coexist marvelously, a clean-faced David Peel and a voiceless Todd Rundgren.
The result was extraordinary caricatures of teenage music, rock and roll melodies inspired by childhood nursery rhymes, telling with sarcasm everyday scenes of youth life, hummed in a nasal voice by a smiling young man with short hair: New England, a jovial doo-wop that remains his spiciest satire, Hey There Little Insect, tribal and crackling, the funereal and martial Lonely Financial Zone, the other great satire of Abominable Snowman In The Supermarket sung with the naive fervor of a David Peel, the street shuffle of Here Come Tha Martian Martians, the swinging Rockin' Shopping Center, the other, more romantic, doo-wop Important In Your Life, and the South American Folk Song, a beautiful cross between Ennio Morricone and a little reggae band. Always halfway between nostalgia for the carefree '60s and jester-like satire (in the role of the fool who is wiser than those who laugh at him), Richman speculates on the funny and kitsch, a master of pretense and deception; and lives like Alice in a wonderland populated by little insects, small airplanes, and tiny dinosaurs.

Rock And Roll (Beserkley, 1977) amplified the psychophysical crisis, stripping the sound entirely, down to the point of just spoken word, and mixing lullabies, doo-wop, and street folk with even more childish energy. Joke-songs like Ice Cream Man, his most melodic and carefree doo-wop (complete with an ice cream bell), Dodge Veg-o-matic, still a street shuffle in the style of David Peel, with flavors from the beatnik era, a Salvation Army bass drum, Egyptian gong hits, drunk chorists, the infamous riff from La Bamba, and a singing/reciting style worthy of bebop, Rockin' Leprechauns, a disheveled rock and roll for a basement ensemble, Afternoon, a reggae-flamenco with music hall choruses, and the novelty song Roller Coaster By The Sea are minimal refrains accompanied by a farcical band, worthy corollaries to an ethnic music program for outdoor picnics; however, this band is also capable of crafting instrumental pieces like the hilarious Egyptian Reggae.
In these, Richman proclaims his faith in rock that is barely whispered, to capture even the smallest nuances of adolescent sensitivity (in concert, Richman often silences the audience by humming almost imperceptibly).

The Live album of 1978 added three unreleased tracks: I'm A Little Airplane, a Berry-style rock and roll, I'm A Little Dinosaur, another doo-wop in the style of Dion, and the country-reggae My Little Kookenhaken.

Back In Your Life (Beserkley, 1979) continues the misunderstanding, with Morning Of Our Lives, a musical theme in the style of Tea For Two that celebrates a philosophy of life reminiscent of transcendentalism from his fellow countryman Ralph Waldo Emerson, My Love Is A Flower Me, an acoustic ballad with a '50s-style choir, the jovial Party In The Woods, the surreal gag of Nature's Mosquito, the sad and delicate Affection, his moral testament, and another hilarious pan-ethnic music hall sketch, Abdul And Cleopatra.

After relocating to Berkeley (California), following a period of voluntary exile from the artistic scene, Richman returned with Sings (Sire, 1983), with the utmost naturalness and simplicity, unchanged in the slightest, in fact, progressing in eloquence and humor: This Kind Of Music could be a 1950s rock and roll, Give Paris One More Chance a rhythm and blues with honking saxophone, That Summer Feeling a nostalgic folk ballad (perhaps the greatest of his career), and Those Conga Drums another novelty doo-wop. The frivolous worldliness of his caricatured doo-wop makes him the most important gnomish troubadour of the era (Not Yet Three is a protest song expressing the point of view on adults of a child).

Rockin' And Romance (Twin Tone, 1985) is even more casual and minimal (but with eight chorists!) and emphasizes comedic autobiography: the most worldly and naïve singer-songwriter in rock contemplates his jeans (My Jeans), praises the beach (Beach), recalls exotic vacations (Down In Bermuda), between another nostalgic ballad (Fenway) and another doo-wop melody (Vincent Van Gogh), the little St. Francis of the post-pubertal world.

In reality, Richman stopped singing about the "happy days" of the '50s a long time ago. His lyrics are a collection of adolescent sagas from the '80s. It's still innocence that troubles the funny minstrel from Boston, but the innocence (present) of the younger generation, not the (past) innocence of the older generation. With David Thomas, he is the most serene and optimistic intellectual of the new wave. His repertoire continues to enrich year after year. It's You, the instrumental Yo Jo Jo, the most aggressive of his career, and the anti-consumerist ode Corner Store on It's Time For (Upside, 1986); the erotic song Gail Loves Me, the surreal novelty When Harpo Played His Harp, the Holly-style rock and roll Dancing Late At Night, and the garage-rock California Desert Party on Modern Lovers 88 (Rounder, 1987); an ode to the Fender Stratocaster and the comic nursery rhyme I Eat With Gusto on Jonathan Richman (Rounder, 1989), the most primitive and spartan album of all.

Richman has exploited bubblegum music to the point of exhaustion, rendered with a monotonous and anonymous nasal voice, and made it a vehicle, deliberately improbable and inadequate, for his tender, adolescent, romantic minimalism. Together, nursery rhymes and instrumentals form a rare sample of out-of-fashion music and everyday nonsense. Whether toys or whims, these tracks rightfully belong alongside the Marx Brothers' films and Vonnegut's novels on the podium of the most comically useless aspects of American civilization, but with a naturalist attention to the common man.

After two spartan albums that had not added significant songs to his repertoire and an excursion into country music, Jonathan Goes Country (Rounder, 1990), the eccentric Bostonian recorded live Having A Party (Rounder, 1991), with another string of hyper-realistic comic confessions, largely dedicated to his marital misadventures (When She Kisses Me, Just For Fun), which now belong more to the genre of comic soliloquy than rock (the musical accompaniment is truly minimal).

I, Jonathan (Rounder, 1992) confirms that slightly nostalgic and somewhat paranoid mood, masked by the usual narrative gags (I Was Dancing In The Lesbian Bar, Parties In the USA, Velvet Underground) and at least one successful harmonic anomaly (A Higher Power).

If Richman were honest with the title of You Must Ask The Heart (Rounder, 1995), he would stop making records. He has even nauseated his most devoted fans with this sequence of identical copies of each other. On reflection, even the early albums weren't exactly the height of originality. When you build your art around a joke, you must also remember that a joke is only funny as long as it’s short. Even the best, To Hide A Little Thought and Let Her Go Into The Darkness, are adult observations that lack the liveliness of earlier works.

Surrender To Jonathan (Vapor, 1996) contains more than anything else better-arranged versions of a couple of his classics. My Little Girl's Got A Full-Time Daddy Now, Not Just A Plus One On The Guest List Anymore, and Surrender are charming, but once again, they belong more to philosophy than to music.

Later albums include: Ishkode! Ishkode! (2016), SA (2018), Want to Visit My Inner House? (2021), and Only Frozen Sky Anyway (2025).