Jonathan Richman

The rough and charming godfather of punk sings quietly now and makes us nostalgic for a time that never existed.

By Chris Colin

Sept. 4, 2001 | Like Dylan, Springsteen, Waits, Paul Simon, Emmylou Harris and a half-dozen others, Jonathan Richman is the best living songwriter of his generation. He sings about parties, getting closer, skydiving, Bermuda and nighttime. He helped invent punk and then left to sing quietly. His followers are not to be gotten started. Their eyes get soft and they just about hug themselves; if you say, "Jonathan who?" their lower lips protrude just like Jonathan's own.

Tender, dry, loving and rough people have been learning to be like Richman for three decades now. As founder of the Modern Lovers, he showed fussy teens everywhere that they, too, could be funny brats with smart songs. Then, in the '80s, he did more and more quiet solo work, at times because it seemed that not a single other musician could stand how gentle the punk legend had become. Here he showed people that intelligent songs needn't be clever, and sweet songs could be just a little sweet.

In "My Career as a Homewrecker," he recalls the women who couldn't resist his "certain traits" over the years: "My career as a homewrecker is not yet through -- there's all these homewreckin' things to do."

He's not wrong, either. His certain traits make people rethink their relationships -- it's not always safe to introduce a lover to his charming songs, which he might sing in English, Italian, Spanish or French. When you finally see him in person, you laugh because he's tiny -- a small, handsome man with thick biceps and a huge, tough Massachusetts voice, like Lou Reed saying "Bah Hahbah." As soon as he starts to sing, he also starts to dance, and he dances so exquisitely that he immediately becomes tall. Sometimes he gets carried away and puts the guitar down on the floor so he can dance better. Then he whirls around and kicks up into the rafters, wagging his finger here and there, and doesn't stop frowning until he's picked up the guitar again.

Magazines call Richman "eccentric," and he probably is, insofar as Frank Sinatra is eccentric against a backdrop of preadolescent rappers, boy bands and 18-year-old pop sensations dancing in soda commercials so seductively that former presidential candidates are forced to make thinly veiled allusions to their own erections. Richman is simply an offbeat 50-year-old who sometimes dances on sidewalks outside clubs when the music's too loud, and who sometimes speaks in Tonto syntax, like Hemingway sometimes did: Me play music for you now.

Richman is called an eccentric because his songs seem out of place. Those recorded in the last 20 years have a wryness that seems exceedingly contemporary, but they're set to '50s and '60s rhythm guitar. The sentiment, also, feels too unironic to be modern, but not insipid enough to be regular old doo-wop. As sometime colleague Brennan Totten has pointed out, Richman's music makes us nostalgic for a time that never existed.

Rock stories often involve discovery. Great talent is found, like a distant star, and what was once dark blinds us with brightness. Throughout the person's great career, we reflect on the moment -- there is always a moment in these stories -- when the star was born. This moment happened for Aretha, for Elvis, for Eminem, and it proceeds directly from the Johnnie B. Goode allegory: Back up in the woods among the evergreens lives the next big thing. But Richman's story was much closer to Horatio Alger. Yes, people have discovered him, but they did so in fits and spurts, and the guy doesn't exactly need tinted windows.

Next page: When punks take out acoustic guitars, it's usually trouble