Jonathan Richman is the very picture of the traveling musician.
On the expanse of the 9:30 Club stage, empty but for Tommy Larkins’ modest drum kit, he walked in for an early evening show still wearing his coat and carrying his guitar case. “Hi folks!” He doffs the coat, unclasps the guitar case, and takes out the instrument and starts to go. His immediate commentary is on the Washington weather necessitating the coat—which had a cold wind and some rain but also some brilliant intermittent breaks from the subject of his first song, “O Sun,” which he says could be praised more.
The same goes for Richman, who at 64 continues to delight his cult audiences with his surprising and innocent observations, his penchant to abandon his guitar to dance, play the maracas or shake a jingle bell tree, a seeming new addition to the sparse touring arsenal. Richman’s got a new album out, Ishkode! Ishkode! on Blue Arrow Records (ishkode being the Ojibwe word for electric or fire), and played a couple of things from it, but never mentioned it and certainly didn’t bring any to sell.
Likewise, those coming to hear anything from the Modern Lovers were to be disappointed. Nothing but the instrumental “Egyptian Reggae” was played from that period. Richman live shows are becoming more and more nebulous, as he’ll strum a riff for a while, shake his hips a bit, sing in various other languages, and dip in and out of recordings people might actually know.
“That Summer Feeling” got a verse or two in, and so did “No One Was Like Vermeer,” but he was more interested in getting the crowd to be part of the communal sound by clapping along. That made it more a group experience and not a concert. “We don’t do concerts,” he declared. “Beethoven does concerts.”
Rather than performing to listeners, he wants everybody to be involved—an idea he might have picked up (along with languages) at old European city plazas where buskers join in and sing songs together late at night—an idea extolled in “Take Me to the Plaza” in his first encore. At times it seemed like he was creating songs on the spot, ordering a beat from Larkins (or having him change it mid-song) and ad-libbing new lyrics to things that might not even been songs before he walked in.
A turn to funky chords led to “I Was Dancing in the Lesbian Bar,” though, one of the show high points. And “Because Her Beauty is Raw and Wild” surprisingly turned into a rare cover version of the 1973 hit “Dancing in the Moonlight” by King Harvest—a perfect choice for him, since that band too was made of American ex-pats in Paris, singing about things Jonathan would: “Everybody here is out of sight/ They don’t bark and they don’t bite/They keep things loose, they keep ‘em tight / Everybody’s dancing in the moonlight.”
Maracas!
It was good to hear his anthem to funky smells, “The World is Showing Its Hand,” and his admonition against a pain-free life, “When We Refuse to Suffer.” But the real surprise was when he offered a stark second encore to what had been a short, one-hour set—his heartfelt “As My Mother Lay Dying.”
Then he put his guitar in its case, snapped it shut, put on his coat, and walked out with a wave.
