When Jonathan Richman was 19, he arrived at an epiphany in the Israeli desert. The scruffy salesman’s son from Natick, Massachusetts, was traveling after a short-lived stab as a solo musician in New York, home of his heroes the Velvet Underground. There, in the miles of sand, gazing at a full moon, Richman had a vision: he would form a band. When he returned home he assembled the group that would become the Modern Lovers, and their story is one of the greatest in rock. They helped invent punk and new wave, and they broke up before they ever released a record. Their brilliant self-titled debut, cobbled together from demos and issued in 1976, is acclaimed as one of the best albums ever.
What happened immediately afterward is another great rock story: Just as the Modern Lovers’ belated popularity was cresting on the punk wave, Richman formed a new version of the group and pushed it in a different direction, with prominent acoustic guitar and what seemed like songs for children. By 1978, Richman and these Modern Lovers had parted ways, too, and here’s where some accounts of Richman’s decades-long career lose the thread. But he actually had some of his very best work in front of him.
More than 40 years on, what happened after the Modern Lovers’ rise and fall might turn out to be the best Richman story of them all. He used his kid-friendly ditties from the late ’70s to home in on a not-so-humble goal: to really connect with an audience by just singing what he felt. “People think that what I do can’t be done because it’s too simple,” Richman told art critic Kristine McKenna in 1980. “A lot of people think I’m being sarcastic. But if people can see that I’m not afraid to entertain them just by being myself—just walk up there and sing what I feel and they can dance to it, and enjoy it, with me doing nothing more than being myself—then that’s my mission.” Richman’s solo career can best be understood as a continual expansion of this quest, using intimate live shows to communicate joy and sadness with a stripped-down sincerity and generous charm. His fourth solo album, 1992’s I, Jonathan, is his defining recorded statement as a solo artist, and it offers a natural entry point into his scattered but rewarding catalog.
The albums Richman had released in the ’80s and early ’90s had already gone a long way to challenge the widespread impression that his post-Modern Lovers music was innocent or naive. His lyrics could be plainspoken or filled with wry wonder, but his best songs might be about standing up to nosy neighbors, say, or retaining individuality during marriage. In keeping with the improvisational, no-setlist nature of his live shows, Richman began to rework songs across multiple albums. He would also sing in different languages, dust off unexpected covers, and throw in the occasional moody instrumental. The approach to recording might vary, but the basic sensibility was strummy garage-pop with hints of surf, rockabilly, and doo-wop. I, Jonathan brought these strands together for a beach party so sparsely accoutered it could be dropped into your living room. And despite its title, the album took a village to create—there are about a dozen musicians credited overall. Richman told one interviewer at the time that the album was his best because he’d had so many friends helping make it.
But I, Jonathan also succeeds because it places Richman’s solo-era whimsies firmly in the context of the one-hit wonders and uncompromising noise-rock that inspired him to make music in the first place. Throughout the album, Richman uses ’60s rock’n’roll tropes and images to illuminate his vision of a better life in the present. He gets right to point on the opening track, “Parties in the U.S.A.,” greeting listeners and declaring at that he’s “from the ’60s, the time of ‘Louie Louie’ and ‘Little Latin Lupe Lu.’” Though this song borrows shamelessly from the McCoys’ 1965 hit “Hang On Sloopy,” it tells a story about our increasing isolation from each other amid technological advancements. Richman isn’t longing for the old days, only the parties and the sense of connection they brought. It’s a feeling that hasn’t aged much in the 26 years since it was recorded.
I, Jonathan is full of these transformations, where something old starts to look new through Richman’s wise, wide eyes. In “Rooming House on Venice Beach,” he revisits a famous L.A. hippie haven but what he remembers are early-’70s holdovers—drunks, beardos, weirdos—and a dirt-cheap crash pad right next to the ocean. “It was wild and free,” he concludes the hiccupy boardwalk romp, “and that appealed to me.”
An even bigger revelation is found in the rickety Chuck Berry crunch of “Velvet Underground.” The song explains, in terms a child could understand immediately and an adult can spend a lifetime pondering, how a work of art can be so personally moving. VU’s “Sister Ray” is, famously, a 15-minute feedback dirge with lyrics about injecting heroin and sucking on someone’s ding-dong, and it’s also the song that influenced a teenage Richman to write the chugging guitar part to the most enduring Modern Lovers song, the nervy highway anthem “Roadrunner.” In “Velvet Underground,” he celebrates the band for being not only wild and free, but also for creating their own unmistakable atmosphere, and for describing the world they saw vividly without flinching. When he works bits of “Sister Ray” into his own song, it’s a strange and beautiful tribute from the closest person they ever had to a protégé.
Sometimes Richman refreshes the familiar just by bringing the song’s concept into the modern age. Disheveled stomper “You Can’t Talk to the Dude” sympathizes with a woman who’s stuck in a doomed relationship with a guy who won’t share his feelings—not a common Nuggets compilation theme, as I recall. With low-tech sound effects, “Tandem Jump” updates novelty surf-rock for a world where there’s skydiving, and the effect is positively exhilarating. “I Was Dancing in the Lesbian Bar,” perhaps Richman’s best-known solo song, borrows liberally from the Impressions’ “Gypsy Woman,” but this ode to un-self-conscious dancing happens to take place in a venue where older songs couldn’t dare tread. It’s pure joie de vivre, political merely by its existence, and its sweetness spreads through a crowd as surely as if they were standing downwind from a chocolate factory.
As the songs unspool, I, Jonathan continues to find inventive links between Richman’s past and present. “A Higher Power” channels the Lovin’ Spoonful’s belief in magic and finds proof of its existence in what seems to be Richman’s real-life romance (“I knew it from afar in that lonely rock and roll bar,” he sings, a description that matches how he reportedly first saw his then-wife Gail). “That Summer Feeling,” one of Richman’s most gently devastating songs, is about knowing that the good old days really weren’t, but finding yourself longing for those sensations anyway. On the dream-like closing track, “Twilight in Boston,” where Richman vividly narrates a walk through his long-ago stomping grounds, he signs off, “Time for adventure.”
After I, Jonathan, Richman’s solo act slowly gained a cultural foothold. In 1993, “Saturday Night Live” cast member Julia Sweeney did an endearing interview with him for SPIN. That same year, Richman was the second-ever musical guest on “Late Night With Conan O’Brien,” after Radiohead, and he’d appear on the show several more times, including the YouTube-famous performance of “I Was Dancing in the Lesbian Bar.” By the end of the decade, those ’70s kiddie songs like “I’m a Little Airplane” had become staples on “Sesame Street,” and Richman had appeared in two Farrelly Brothers films, most prominently as a Greek chorus in There’s Something About Mary. He divorced and remarried, kept touring and, every now and then, he quietly released an album, many of which are very good.
Richman’s work is about being fully present in the moment with other people, and that’s difficult to capture in a studio for all time. But I, Jonathan is as close as he’s come, and it’s a perfect gateway to all that his music promises. In recent years, he has revised the Modern Lovers’ “Old World,” which originally took aim at hippie drug culture by declaring his love for his parents and full engagement with reality; now he clarifies, “I don’t want to go back to the old world,” what with its “mustard gas and women not being allowed to vote.” Just this year, when an interviewer asked Richman about a much-circulated 1973 letter he’d sent to Creem titled “Masculine Arrogance Blows,” he admitted to still having to work on that arrogance in himself.
Richman challenges us to experience pain and pleasure at their fullest. To embrace progress, but not when it dehumanizes us. To be ourselves completely, in the knowledge that we’re all in this together. To be free, like “Roadrunner”: I feel alone I feel alive I feel a love. He has been dissected by gifted critics from Lillian Roxon and Lester Bangs to Ellen Willis and Greil Marcus, but the most illuminating writing I’ve found about Richman’s I, Jonathan era comes from the closing line of a St. Louis Post-Dispatch concert review: “He simply played and sang with love and joy, and he made his audience feel good.”
Richman recently translated a book of Italian poetry, by the Bologna-based writer Alberto Masala. A blog post announcing the project includes these verses: “An old man went every night to sing the sunset in a cave on the mountain top/And every night a child followed him to observe him from a distance. One day the child asked: ‘You sing alone. Your people are scattered, broken up, exterminated by alcohol, fatigue, hunger, drugs, prison… Now only they speak the language of the empire, and are not even able to understand you… they laugh at you… why do you continue to sing? You’re left alone…’/The old man replied: ‘If I do not sing would mean that they also took me.’” They haven’t taken Richman yet.
