[from
Boston MA] I was silly excited to see this show – I only discovered him in the
last year or so but love his work with The Modern Lovers AND his solo career –
of course the post-punkness of The Modern Lovers is appealing to me but there
is generally something very appealing to me about his voice and his song
constructions – so he turned out to be a bit of a wack job with perpetually
turned-up eyebrows in a seemingly contrived expression of innocence and
goofiness that I suspect masks a deep dislike for humankind and a vicious
little ego – but maybe being an odd genius results in such behaviors and
feelings – the real surprise to me is that the man is a guitar virtuoso,
playing songs riddled with jazz and Latin influences and then handling both the
bass and lead progression in a song – he would end each song with a spin of his
guitar – in my theoretical version of his life, he was the sort who got bored
so easily and quickly that he had to constantly move on to new things or be
suffocated, so he was a punk and then went into a prolific career as a
singer/songwriter and then moved out of the US and became infused with new
sounds and learned to speak French and Spanish - he sang several songs in
Spanish and midway through the show got into the habit of re-singing the song
he just sang, either a new version of the intro or the entire song in a
different language, I found this presumptuous and pretentious and wasn’t sure
if he was trying to insult the crowd or really saw value in resigning the same
songs – oh! oh! the most important part for understanding my impressions of
this show: $15 was charged for him alone without the standard two opening
bands, he started at 9pm, he insisted on no air-conditioning at the show, it is
still in the 90s in Austin, therefore eccentric or pretentious – he had
something of the Mountain Goats about him but his songs aren’t as quirky or
deep but rather more childlike and silly – this may have been a reflection of his
poorly crafted set list for the show, at least insofar as the songs I like by
him – lastly and most importantly, I figured out that my affinity for Jonathan
Richman is a result of the incongruity of his post-punk voice overlaying infectious
little Latin-flavored melodies (Photo courtesy of https://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/music/2010-01-27/943310/)
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