SHOOT-OUT AT SESAME STREET: JONATHAN RICHMAN TALKS!

SHOOT-OUT AT SESAME STREET: JONATHAN RICHMAN TALKS!

FEATURES

Bill Holdship

“If I have a choice, give me infantile any day!"

I hate it when my heroes get attacked. That’s why I screamed “Ignorance!” and threw a copy of Musician magazine across the room when this capsule review of Jonathan Richman & the Modern Lovers’ latest LP—Jonathan Sings!—appeared several months ago: “It’s great that Jonathan Richman wants to be rock’s great innocent, but does that mean he has to sound like he hasn’t been toilet trained yet? Somebody point this guy toward Sesame Street. ” “Oh, but I liked that one!” exclaims Jonathan. “I think it’s right on the ball. Point me to Sesame Street. I want to be on Sesame Street! I thought that was one of the best reviews I’ve seen.”

But wasn’t the review putting him down? “Oh, the guy was definitely putting me down, as hard as he could,” he laughs. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t like it! No, I think he’s right. I want to go on Sesame Street. ” So he doesn’t mind it when critics accuse him of being infantile?

“No. That’s better than people thinking I’m mature. If I have a choice, give me infantile any day!”

These may sound like strange words to those who recognize Richman solely as one ot the founders of the early new wave/punk explosion. The Modern Lovers—a 1976 LP y 71 demo tapes (partially produced by John Cale) remains a minimalist classic argu&bly one of the greatest rock LPs of all time. Dark, yet full of poignant romanticism (and often hilarious lyrics—“Some people try to pick up girls and get called asshole/This never happened to Pablo Picasso”), the LP vividly portrayed the plight of every sensitive American “wimp.” It not only boasted future members of both Talking Heads and the Cars, but also included one of the few rock ’n’ roll anthems of the ’70s in “Roadrunner,” a song that would later be covered by the Sex Pistols.

‘Roadrunner’ was a lonely thing/’ he says. “I never thought anyone would like it.

1 said ‘Boy, I like this piece, but I don’t think anyone else is gonna.’ I made it up when I was 18, and thought it was just too sad. But people managed to like it anyway by misunderstanding it! I guess it was happy some of the time, but mainly it was sad.”

To this day, Richman really‘can’t fathom what the fuss was all about. “Well, let’s look at it. What I was listening to at the time was a combination of the Velvet Underground, the Stooges and early Kinks. So I don’t know why I’d be credited as an influence because when I wasn’t stealing from one of those groups, I was stealing from the other. That’s how I mostly see it. I mean I had some things those other people didn t, but I was mainly trying to copy them a lot of the time.”

So what does he think of the Violent Femmes, who are being called early Richman imitators by many critics?

“They’re nice guys. They’ve been sending us stuff, and they’ve been greeting us everywhere, saluting us—stuff like that. But as far as influencing them goes, it’s hard for me to tell.”

Although Jonathan still occasionally performs “Hospital” live, and I saw him get a crowd of “punks” dancing to an acoustic version of “Roadrunner” (drumbeat courtesy of h.is feet) in 1980, he says that most of the material from that first demo tape LP is “past history to me now. I’m younger than I was when I made that early stuff.” Indeed, Richman’s subsequent LPs with various lineups of Modern Lovers have been quieter, mostly acoustic rock ’n’ roll, while the lyrical tone has been brighter and, well, a bit “infantile.” Which isn’t meant to be derogatory. Richman’s unique charm is that he often views life through the eyes of a child (“Actually, those are just my general songs. If anything, I make so-called adult songs for adults who can’t grasp the regular stuff”), and his songs have dealt with such concepts as rockin’ leprechauns, ice cream men and just “magical” things in general.

“It wasn’t really a sudden change or shift,” he explains. “It was gradual. I started playing quieter and making up stuff like ‘Hey, Little Insect’ as early as ’72. Every year was a little different from the year before. I was already enough of a nuisance to turn off my original band by ’73. But I think the turning point may have been playing for and entertaining children. It made a difference, and changed the way I saw entertainment and what I wanted to do with it.”

In the years since his change, Richman has become one of rock’s most misunderstood artists. Granted, he’s a genuine eccentric, but his eccentricity is so endearing and his romantic stance (“everyone needs love”) so heartfelt that I can’t understand why he’s not irresistible to anyone who was ever a kid. On the other hand, even his concerts—which I view as pure magic (you haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen Jonathan Richman doing the “Peppermint Twist” in-between sets)—seem to be divided between the believers and skeptics, so maybe he’s just one of those artists who speaks to certain people. Case in point: The summer of ’77 was a particularly bad one for me—a friend died, my girlfriend split (after a game of what is commonly known as the “mind fuck”) and I was living in a “hippie house” full of druggedout zombies. I practically wore out a copy of Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers that summer because the song “Important In Your Life” was one of the few things that made me feel good. Everyone else in thehouse hated it, but it made me feel absolutely joyous. I later thanked Richman at a concert for writing the song and helping me through this terrible, lonely period. He became quite animated, smiled, put a'hand on my shoulder, and said, “That’s why I write those songs!”

Because Jonathan is constantly celebrating and expounding the simplest joys in life—mainly love, affection and nature (“I make most environmentalists look like nothing,” he says)^some may consider him a modern day moralist, but he doesn’t see it this way at all.

“I would say no—because I just tell what’s happened to me, and I don’t really think that I suggest things for other people to do. The problem with the word ‘moral’ is then you get into words like ‘good.’ See, I’m not suggesting what’s ‘good.’ I’m just saying what’s happening to me. When I sang ‘People all over the world are starving for affection,’ that was something that I just noticed, you see?”

Well, then, how about a modern day optimist?

“There’s a difference between a romantic and an optimist. I would say romantic, yes. I wouldn’t say an optimist, though. An optimist is a guy who tries to look on the •bright side of things, and I don’t do that. I just look at it as it is. That’s how I see myself anyway. I see myself as a fun lover, though, which could be confused with an optimist, I guess. To me, my albums have light colors, but they also have the very darkest colors. Take ‘I Hear You Calling’ (a song about love beyond the grave) on Back In Your Life. I don’t know how much darker of a tone you can get than that.”

But isn’t he one of the few rock artists who maintains a positive outlook in an age of cynicism?

“I don’t maintain my outlook. That would make me an optimist. I don’t care to maintain my outlook. I just feel how 1 feel at the time. What I’m starting to think, though— and this kind of goes back to those people who feel I haven’t lived up to my promise— those people are mostly depressed all the time. Since I’m actually happy a lot of the time, they can’t understand it. They figure I must be trying to maintain something. If I was a realist, I’d be taking drugs like them and trying to live on the street. Since I don’t do that, they assume that I live in fantasy. They think they’re living in the real world. Got it? See, that’s what we’re talking about here. If I feel sad, I’m sad. And I tell the audience when I’m sad—which still happens. I tell the audience when I don’t like them. I don’t try to maintain anything.”

Regardless, Jonathan Sings! may be Richman’s best LP to date (though Back In Your Life was also an unsung masterpiece) in expressing what seems to be “the world according to Jonathan Richman.” This is most evident on “That Summer Feeling (is gonna haunt you the rest of your life),” a song that expresses how hard it is to regain childhood innocence and wonderment once you’ve let it slip by.

“Well, 1 don’t say they’re never going to get it back,” he explains. “If they wait too long, though—if they wait until they’re older, someday they’ll feel resentful inside. Maybe they could still get it back, but eveything’s gonna be kind of creaky inside and they’ll be sorry.”

It’s almost a chilling song.

“Good! If it’s a chilling song, then maybe people are finally starting to catch my drift!”

Jonathan Sings! also features a lot of his trademark, happy-go-lucky ’50s style rock ’n’ roll, most notable on the terrific “This Kind Of Music,” and he laughs when I tell him that “Those Conga Drums” reminds me a lot of both “Stranded In The Jungle” and the Coasters. “Yeah, I figured it would! It reminds me a lot of those things, too. It also reminds me of ‘Riot In Cell Block #9.’ ” Jonathan rattles off a list that includes Elvis Presley, the Four Seasons, Joe Turner, Little Eva, the Diablos, the Orlons, Frankie Lymon and numerous other doo-wop singers—“all that stuff”—as the music that originally changed his life ctnd which he still listens to today. But from a “fan” standpoint, Jonathan is probably best known as one of the Velvet Underground’s biggest “groupies.”

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“Well, I don’t really like that choice of word. You would say that I was a big admirer of the Velvet Underground. I followed them around as much as I could. I saw them perform over and over again. I watched them rehearse, and I made myself a big pain in the neck. Yeah, you bet. I still am a Velvet Underground fan. In fact, 1 recently opened some shows for John Cale in Australia.”

You won’t hear a lot of V.U. influence in Richman’s recent music, although some is evident on The Original Modern Lovers— a compilation of early Kim Fowley-produced demos released by Bomp Records during the four-year lapse between Back In Your Life and Jonathan Sings! He now wishes it had never seen the light of day.

“I allowed them to release it because they lied, telling me that the other original Modern Lovers had been contacted and wanted it out. But my liner notes pretty much disclaimed it. What I said in those is true, and I kind of warned everyone. To me, it’s mainly contrived trash—those songs weren’t even done the real way. They were being run down in the studio, supposedly just for the hell of it, and I did these sort of throwaway vocals that didn’t mean anything. That’s what at least half of that stuff is—trash. It doesn’t sound anything like the way we did at the time.”

Richman has managed to maintain an American cult following with constant touring—a sort of minstrel of the heart. (He has a much larger audience in Europe, where he’s scored two hit singles and his live LP was recorded.) As far as the future is concerned, though, Jonathan is hoping for mass appeal in the broadest sense of the term.

“I want to be on those shows like the guy in that review said. I want to be on The Muppets and Sesame Street and stuff like that.

I want to play for all ages. I want to put on family matinees—you know, where you see me at your movie theater in suburban Detroit somewhere, and there’s popcorn, and there’s six-year-old kids running around, and there’s 40-year-old parents in the audience and that kind of stuff. I want to see rock ’n’ roll be something that’s for everyone. Because that’s what I think it is.”

Big Bird would probably approve.