Jonathan Richman - "Because Her Beauty Is Raw And Wild" (mp3)

I remember in the mid-90s, when my brother and I and our friends were, like many alternateens of the time, rediscovering early punk rock and pre-punk, and seeing the Ramones on their final tours and forming terrible bands and learning Sex Pistols covers and I think everybody loved that Modern Lovers record and it's always remained close to my heart. We were living in lower (slower) Delaware at the time, and at one point we found out that Jonathan Richman was playing some small cafe upstate and made a big deal out of trying to go, and we never did and were really bummed out about it. Of course, I realized years later that this wasn't such a precious sighting, and that Jonathan Richman has probably been touring small clubs nonstop for my entire life, right up to this day, and I'd get many more chances to see him in person. The first time I did, at the Ottobar a few years ago, remains one of my single fondest concert memories of all time, a night when I just couldn't not wipe a smile off of my face, and I think the third time, at the 8x10 in March, was nearly as good.

Richman, of course, very sparingly plays any of the Modern Lovers stuff, and I don't know a whole lot of his solo records, but it works out just fine, since his songs always come across the best live, and make me hunger to track down the records they're on. His new album, Because Her Beauty Is Raw And Wild, didn't come out until several weeks after the 8x10 show, so by the time I got the record, I already had good memories attached to a lot of the songs. And the album does very little to divorce the songs from the way they appear in his live show; it practically sounds like a live album with no audience, like Richman and drummer Tommy Larkins set up in a room, completely unaccompanied, and ran through these songs in one or two takes. They're casual and sometimes sloppy recordings, but they work better than the sometimes overproduced material on some of his previous solo albums.

Because Her Beauty Is Raw And Wild runs through a lot of Richman's established obsessions: painters ("No One Was Like Vermeer" may not be as good as "Pablo Picasso," but did a much better job of making me want to look at the artist's work), the way the modern world keeps steamrolling over the past ("Old World" and "Time Has Been Going By So Fast") and bittersweet heartache and romance (almost every other song). Sometimes his deadpan humor creeps in just enough to make me laugh out loud without things getting too goofy, as on "The Lovers Are Here And They're Full Of Sweat" ("well of course they smell a little, they didn't bring no change of clothes"), but for the most part it's a quiet, lovely record that actually makes me feel a little contemplative. The two versions of "When We Refuse To Suffer" that appear on the record, particularly the second version, articulate a rare feeling, the concept that things like air conditioning and antidepressants make us more comfortable in the short run while depriving us of some essential piece of life, and it's a very Jonathan Richman sentiment, one I can't imagine any other songwriter articulating quite so earnestly or so convincingly. But, of course, my favorite song right now is the title track, because any ode to a curly-haired woman is bound to make me smile and think of my wife.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 11, 2008 at 10:58 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.