A few months ago, E won tickets from Prince of Petworth to see Jonathan Richman at the 9:30 Club. I was not familiar with him, though I had heard a bit about the Modern Lovers and as PoP pointed out, Richman's bio is pretty amazing.
The show was great fun. Richman cultivates a guileless stage presence, but he's just self-aware enough in concert that he's endearing rather than annoying. Sample song titles: "If You Want to Leave Our Party Just Go," "No One Was Like Vermeer," "The Lovers are Here and They're Full of Sweat" and "My Affected Accent." My favorite might be a song in Spanish about stale bread ("Es Como El Pan"), which he sang as a means of explaining why he doesn't play older music on his tours. He did dip into his catalog, to the delight of the audience, when he played his surprisingly catchy 1992 song "I Was Dancing In the Lesbian Bar."
I dare you not to whistle this song sometime today.
From Late Night with Conan O'Brien
aaahhhh I totally had tickets to that show and we didn't get to gooooooooooooo. SO JEALOUS. cannot even remember why, but Something came up and we had to miss it. I had been waiting for yearssssssssss for him to come back to DC. Oh Oh was that the night I got food poisoning? that might have been it.. Anyway. SUPAR JEALOUSS. (it bore repeating)
ReplyDeleteBummerz!!! Food poisoning is both a very good and a very terrible reason to miss a show. Hopefully he will come back and do his awesome can-can kicks again sometime verrrry verrrry soon. In the meantime, I just sing his songs around the apt. and do can-can kicks until I bruise myself on the furniture.
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