Jonathan Richman

Depending on who's pontificating, Richman is dismissed or praised as childlike, naive, innocent and, worst of all, boyish. The boyish thing is understandable: He has big eyes and his toothy grins leave suddenly for a 10-point pout. The prose of his songs is straightforward and guileless, but not in the way that lets reviewers use favorite words, like "gritty." Richman eschews Bruce Springsteen's gravelly wisdom for a more refined candor about what love feels like. "When she kisses me, I get so ecstatic/She thinks I'm maybe being overdramatic."

Like Tom Waits, Richman is an inventory taker. He documents hot nights, California desert parties, twilight in Boston, not enough parties, lonely thrift stores, vampire girls and then, famously, the something that there was about Mary. But where Waits finds the wonderfully mundane in the alien -- the German dwarf dancing with the butcher's son is really just you and me -- Richman pulls the alien out of the normal. Twilight in Boston is out of this world if you know how to see it.

He's a proficient anatomist, too. In one song he gets to the bottom of the Fender Stratocaster, which sounds like "a tin can falling on a dead-end street." And like "taillights heading for another town." Also, "the sound's so thin that it's barely there, like a bitchy girl who just don't care."

Whatever it is that's lovable about him -- and that's the word, "lovable" -- you can't get close; picture a koala bear. Journalists who try talking to Richman report the following areas off-limits: his personal life and his musical life. Politely he will answer harmless questions as emptily as possible. One interviewer got this much out of him:

Interviewer: So what do you like to do when you're not performing?

Richman: Nothing much. Hang around. Ride my bike. Hang around.

and

Interviewer: What do you think about when you wake up in the morning? Or the afternoon?

Richman: Depends if I'm hungry. Sometimes you wake up and want something to eat, and sometimes I just think of other things. Hard to say what. Varies every day.

Other questions, he'll just try to get off the phone. Befuddled, interviewers finally ask the simplest thing they can think of: Well, are you touring? Oh yes, he'll exclaim, it's fun!

The impossibility of conducting a decent interview with Richman is well documented, and emerges as a theme in many of the write-ups. But plenty of famous people get quiet around journalists, so this alone is not revealing. The thing about Richman is that reporters keep coming back for more. Each believes he or she will be the one to finally pull the sword from the stone, because he or she is the one who truly understands the universe exalted when Jojo sings and dances just so. This tells more about him than them. Picture a koala bear with a fierce magnetic field.

And this is also where Richman lovers get caught in the brambles: In the end, their hero seems to care at most elliptically about what they think of him. For all that we locate in Richman -- the funniness, the tenderness, the gruffness, the dramatic and the nasal sweetness -- there is also indifference. If his interview persona is at all indicative, he doesn't want to hear about all the levels on which he's felt. The effect of the severely restricted access, then, becomes weird: Imagine a recluse who happens to sing and dance for people every chance he gets.

Richman says he wants his albums sold next to Maurice Chevalier's in record stores, and this might be the only rupture in his enlightenment. Richman is indeed a worldly guy -- he'll sing about Paris, about van Gogh, about ancient Greece -- but nobody could be more American. The things Richman understands are too diffuse to come from anywhere else. And what's more, they are sung too urgently to be European:

I can't take it slow and easy,
I can't live like that.
If the music's gonna move me,
Folks, it's gotta be action-packed

Action, in the Richman cosmos, means a good deal -- he's talking about how music should be, but he's also laying down the groundwork for a lifestyle. What kind of lifestyle, exactly? Hard to say what. Varies every day.

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