Last night we went to see Jonathan Richman at the Great American Music Hall. I was excited to see him, less excited that there was an opening act, some group called the Felix Dukes I'd never heard of. Oh dear. You see, when I first saw him in concert, sometime in the early to mid-nineties, the opener was a band called Daisy Spot, whom my friend Kimberly and I mutually found quite loathesome. (We still have horrible memories of the lead vocalist singing "Sil-ly Bil-ly. Sil-ly Bil-ly" over and over.)
So when I heard the first tentative notes on the guitar, I thought, "Oh no. Here we go again." Then suddenly there was a blast of power chords, and the band launched into a set of power pop that made me think of Weezer and Franz Ferdinand and early 80s New Wave, but managing not to sound exactly like anybody else either. Every song was tight and insanely catchy. A very pleasant surprise. So I went home and Googled them. They don't seem to have any music on Emusic yet, but they do have some songs available for streaming onine, which is what I'm listening to as I type this.
And then their set ended, and Jonathan Richman arrived, and he was as great as I hoped. (And I'm shocked that he's now 57 — he's still very high-energy. Not that 57 is ancient or anything, but I still can't help but think he must have a picture of himself aging badly in his attic.) He did make one major concession to the fact that he's no longer in his 20s with his closing number, a melancholy song about watching his mother fade away and die in bed.
The one sour note was in an otherwise sweet song about how people shouldn't be afraid to live their lives and feel bad, when he basically criticized taking antidepressants, namechecking Zoloft. Like many people, he assumes that depression = feeling deeply, when for many people, it just means feeling numb, or worse.
Oh well, maybe it's just a generational thing. Back in his day and all...
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