Born on May 16: Jonathan Richman, a simple yet determined troubadour

He was born in Natick, a small town in Massachusetts, in 1951. His passionate discovery of the Velvet Underground led him to New York.

As the story goes, Richman and his band were hosted on their manager's Steve Sesnick sofa for a while! Jonathan Richman was barely 18 years old but still remembers those precious moments with emotion. “I took the bus to New York just to try to meet Lou Reed,” he told a journalist from "Rolling Stone" in 1980. “I sincerely thought that if I could just talk to him, I would understand how to make music like they do.” Jonathan already possessed that slightly lunar innocence that lead him to write offbeat gems such as "I’m A Little Dinosaur" or "Hey There Little Insect".

Although some songs were written as early as 1972, the first eponymous album of his band The Modern Lovers was released in 1976. With a somewhat hasty shortcut, even daring, these fifteen songs are considered precursors of the American punk movement. This is debatable, but "Roadrunner", a real hit of disarming simplicity, is already present. And Jonathan would write others like "Egyptian Reggae" and even the haunting "Pablo Picasso". “I wanted to make sincere rock’n’roll, no frills. No poses, no costumes. Just songs. Even at 20, I wanted to talk like an 8-year-old kid. Because that’s the age when everything is true.”

After dissolving the Modern Lovers, his music became more acoustic, even more stripped-back. He wrote songs about the warmth of summer nights, Spain, bees, hospitals, or, why not, the displeasure of wearing glasses. Jonathan is indeed capable of writing a -good- song on the most insignificant subjects! “Noise makes me nervous,” he said in 1992 to the BBC. “I need people to hear me, for the words to matter. I don’t want to sing for drunkards. I want to sing for children, lovers, and old couples".

At over 70, Jonathan Richman continues to perform concerts regularly in the United States. If he stops near you, like soon in Seattle and Vancouver, he always chooses an intimate, warm venue and settles there for several evenings. At the end of the concerts, he will offer you his albums in person, in cash please because credit cards are not his thing. Nor are the platforms for that matter because, as he says,“I write songs for people. Not for computers.” Jonathan Richman thus remains true to himself…

(MH with Stéphane Soupart - Photo: © Etienne Tordoir)

Photo: Jonathan Richman at La Réserve aux Beaux-Arts in Charleroi (Belgium) in May 1979