By Matthew Wolfe
inger-songwriter Jonathan Richman is best known to American audiences from his one brief burst of mainstream attention, when, in 1998, he appeared as an affable guitar-strumming Greek chorus in the Farrelly Brothers’ gross-out romantic comedy, “There’s Something About Mary.” Yet for a smaller, far more intensely devoted segment of the music listening world, Jonathan Richman, affable and undistinguished as he is (save for his exceptionally adenoidal voice, Richman has little to his profile that makes him appear at all extraordinary) is something of a minor deity, a man responsible for pioneering a dynamic yet intensely personal and willfully naïve strain of pre-punk music. Richman, sincere persona largely unchanged, perhaps even concentrated, in the 35 years since he launched his career, will be appearing on March 5 at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, in the heart of the community that most appreciates this legacy. Expect an audience of those who remember seeing him in the early 1970s and those who found his MySpace page before they heard his songs. It was in an early iteration of the pilgrimage that thousands of young musical devotees continue to undertake today – particularly to the today’s cultural Ellis Island, Williamsburg – that Jonathan Richman, a young man of 18, moved to New York in 1969 to purse a music career. Like most of the young émigrés, he worked a panoply of odd menial jobs and resoundingly failed to get anything of substance off the ground. Defeated, but inspired by the music he’d heard while living in the city, he returned to his hometown of Boston to form his brainchild, seminal early 1970s rock n’ rollers, The Modern Lovers. Now a band of classic status (earning a key mention in the roll call of important bands shouted by Brooklyn dance group LCD Soundsystem in their song “Losing My Edge”), the Modern Lovers were perhaps the first of countless bands to consciously imitate the Velvet Underground. Richman spent his first two weeks in New York on the couch of Steve Sesnick, the Velvets’ manager, and his earliest songs particularly channeled the playful, earnest energies of Mo Tucker and the wry wit of John Cale, with whom the Modern Lovers recorded their first demos. Richman’s innovations in the band – taking cues from English garage bands and the Velvets alike – was cranking up the energy of two and three chord music while sapping it of aggression, sexual or otherwise. The music was as deceptively simple as punk and the subjects of his songs – like most punk – were his frustrations and neuroses. But Richman’s outlook was by turns wounded (by girls) and excited (by rock n’ roll) rather than offended and angry. His response to inequity was, like many twee indie kids after him, to focus on the childlike and the fragile. Anyone who names an album “More to be Loved than to Love” as he did in 1983, suggests a man at odds with punk’s central “Bollocks to you” ethos. Young Brooklyn, awash in willful adolescence, can be considered Richman’s children, in world view and in music. While it’s said the first Velvets record initially only sold 1,000 copies (the joke being that everyone who bought a copy started a band) they’re still considered the Godfathers of Indie Rock. Yet it’s still infinitely easier to compile a long list of indie bands who perform whimsical songs about insects and ice cream men than it is to find a handful of bands that sing about the difficulties one encounters in the course of trying to score heroin. In that sense, the Modern Lovers may perhaps be the bigger influence. Jonathan Richman will be appearing at the Music Hall of Williamsburg at 66 N. 6th Street on Wednesday, March 5. Tickets are $15. The show begins at 9 p.m., with doors opening at 8 p.m. 18+ only. For ticket information, visit themusichallofwilliamsburg.com.
