Jonathan Richman fly into the mystery

ILLUSTRATION by LUKE MCGARRY

This week in the music section we are meditating on purity—of intent and personality and transmission, which align themselves only as mathematically frequently as a three-wheel slot comes up only cherries, and possibly that is where Jonathan Richman’s unstoppable persistence is rooted; as the song warned me I would, I’ve seen him heal the sick and make the little girls go out of their heads, and if he had kept up another verse of “Pablo Picasso” I’m sure there would have come a chance to raise any locally convenient dead, too. As Jim Washburn once put it before my paraphrase got to it: These songs about love and dinosaurs and Martians and love seemed like a joke until he realized everything he’d ever specifically wanted about rock & roll was right there. The rest of the unnecessaries—amplifiers that hurt a baby’s ears, John Cales and Kim Fowleys—were miles back on the side of the road—not really worth carrying, it turned out. I got pointed in the right direction myself off “Roadrunner” (of course) but it just came through so clearly—always after that I could listen to records and hear the parts where the band was trying so hard to please, and so it made a lot of things a little harder to believe. But as the kid himself put it in a finer moment: the spirit of ’56, the last year Elvis was an independent artist, prelude to the era of intent and personality and transmission by committee. At all the Jonathan shows I’ve seen, as quiet as they could be and as carefully as they were put together—there was nothing there that shouldn’t have been there, and all that was left was the overwhelming necessity of rock & roll. My ears were never hurt at all.

JONATHAN RICHMAN {OPEN} | 2226 E FOURTH ST | LONG BEACH 90814 | 562.499.OPEN | THESTORYOFOPEN.COM | SAT 8:30PM | PRESALE TICKETS $15 | ALL AGES

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