had never occurred to me to witness a musician or international band at the peak of my fanaticism. Of those touches in which one feels at the sounding of the world, where one, more than a spectator, you feel a witness. The only time something similar happened to me was in Goodfellas (a touch where for a moment I felt the floor of the late BJ literally bow to the rhythm of a pogo during the song
Temperament ) and Fernando Cabrera (a presentation at the Solis of which I remember to have goose bumps almost the entire show, as if it could easily skinned with a spoon who draws the cream of coffee with milk).
All those moments have been and will, one way or another, highlights foundational structures that are still living in me.
However, international musicians always came too late. It seemed that when I finally visited, them or me, or something between them and me had changed.
When I went to Punta del Este to see Bob Dylan, prevailed on me an inner voice telling me "you're watching one of the last living legends of the twentieth century." But it was just that, a symbolic reckoning, a new pine forest history for me pissed.
The touch of Radiohead in Buenos Aires, I turned in a crowded Buquebús, satisfied, but with the sad feeling that all my fifteen years that hypothesized to change my life, I generated more than a real, but fleeting satisfaction such as who gets to finally be with the prettiest girl from high school, realizing that it is not so pretty and, more importantly, that there is no co- high school to prove it.
With Mars Volta, more or less the same, plus it would grab in a string of albums rather weak, and without their original drummer, who was the truly superhuman that existed in the Step-hairy.
Finally, Cat Power, the situation was a little different, my love, crush, fetish, slimy, chimeric, adolescent, immature, entomologist, to her had not changed, but that person I saw eat the entire stage, introducing beautiful bailecitos uncoordinated within and between each song, it was not Chan Marshall
The colors and the kids , the Chan Marshall
who was drowned with her bangs looking down while singing Metal Heart the androgen Chan Marshall who wrote songs about abortions
, Chan Marshall's fragile, like a bird that has just fallen from the nest and makes you think that you, with your love of listening, spectator, fan, only this love, you can save. No, of that 2009-and returns to our latitudes in May to just now was different, a Marshall had already strengthened its majestic wings and planned, but independent of our assistance, with those glossy r & b tracks that were far the deep pain of those folk compositions taken from the bottom of a cistern.
So when I found out I got Jonathan Richman, my surprise was multiplied to unexpected places. Because, as if it had launched a strange synergy between Jonathan and me, in recent months had not been listening previous albums such as "I, Jonathan", "Her Mystery Not of High Heels and eye shadows" or "Not so much to be loved as to love "songs serve as a kind of emotional cushion that came lightening the impact that I generated the fall of the summer (but is falling in the summer or fall of autumn?, I never became clear, even so, the two images are per se).
In short, the show grabbed me on the very crest of the wave.
I knew I was going to be an important touch from a first story that came hours before the start of it. I was walking down the windy Chucarro (unique street, where up to Martí opens onto the boulevard, as if it falls into water, creating a strange passage where the sea wind up as the tracks of the trolleys that are sticking of asphalt) due to the house of Cecilia, spiritual cousin of my girlfriend, who had been in together to go to the concert to be held in the backroom. Having already played his intercom doorbell, waited with his back to his building, watching with amazement the front of
The closed- Bacilon was Tuesday, "this strange ghostly air, a walled store has when it is surrounded by his parishioners scattered pitbull jaw centered around like fish on the shore after an oil tanker spill, when I realize I have no input with me. I look at the bag and his pockets several times. It's those moments where a pale, touching all parts of the body as if dancing a frenetic Macarena. Right in the dance Cecilia grabbed me, coming down with a calm that I, by circumstances, was of another world. Trying to keep my composure I said that was not my post, we had to go back to my home to check if he had left there. We decided to return to take exactly the same path he had undertaken in the first leg. My head elaborated intricate guesswork, even a beginning was content with incipient Alzheimer's, but most likely just afraid that I had fallen from his pocket and that at that very moment they are flying by Martí, by March 26 for the same boulevard Street or Bordeaux, who knows. That was floating like a corpse in the jaws of a dirty storm drain, too. I was thinking things like that if he had lost the entry may be a sign, perhaps in one of these The Hidden entered flames and Richman touch Cromagnon became a Uruguayan version. It was in the midst of this crisis strangled really do not remember a word of what he was talking in that way two blocks, "when I heard the voice of Cecilia say" Agus, look there. " On the ground, calm, intact, pink and red slip waiting for me like a lost child on the beach. I almost felt as if it had been me, but the entrance that I had found.
I vowed never to take a ticket in my pocket, I promised future Cecilia beer thanks, I knew this time was the target.
I'm not good with statistics, but the back room would be about three-fifths full. Of those present, most had not followed so closely Richman path, usually focusing on his early years before the microphone of the Modern Lovers, usually putting hand on the catch-all of what they say on any note on the music of this band: the character training of the punk pioneer his friendship with the Velvet Underground, their role in the New York scene of the early seventies. However, Richman cover in its role as a pioneer of punk is like that leaves you short blanket chest or uncovered uncovered feet. Although Richman's debut album and company had some patches of darkness, hardly can be approved which made the band, and above all the rest of the compositions subsequent Jonathan-with what made the Velvet, the Dictators, the New York Dolls, or what would Suicide, the Sex Pistols or The Damned. If one goes into screaming anti-finding plan, odes to hedonism and encouragement parricide, remains completely baffled by listening to Richman. Richman Because his life has been an iconoclast, something that breaks all the molds of rebellion and pack-chartered-punk, a path followed with an iron linearity never took the form of militancy. Somehow, Richman never placed in any of the edges of rock. Neither the Dionysian side of the rockstar, or commiseration geek, and philistine facilonga indie musicians today (because, well, songs Plea for painful tenderness as
are much more than that.) And this is something that could be felt from the moment that Jonathan went into the back, on foot, by Fernández Crespo, with the guitar under his arm. While the talk in the back heel with the change in second place, Jonathan remained in the hall, talking to people who dealt not occur to him or the others much to say beyond asking a subject, or tell what
huge fans they were. Richman
arrives on stage, pulls out his guitar case and briefly tuned. His only friend is the drummer Tommy Larkins, who has kept the duo formation for several albums. His guitar is a creole, is not connected to the computer, not even strap.
began to play and the magic begins.
The peculiarity of the show is the inimitable Richman is. One can see hipertécnicos musicians, bands or
prog
powermetaleras challenging the human capacity for speed and heard, and yet always know that somewhere in the world, and lost some moldy academy in a basement filled with posters and fossil computer, or a damp overcrowded communal apartment block there is a Japanese prodigy student, a Bulgarian luthier, or a Chilean fan pendejo Lucio Fulci film that can match or surpass his master. The blues and jazz musicians say, in his defense, the technical mastery does not matter, that unique, its own brand, is the swing
.
You is not got no swing , will tell the black experience with a slight sneer on his lips the boy who comes over with his eyes bright and his demo in hand. But Richman goes beyond technical prowess and the swing and become much more complex and yet transparently simple: you have the rest Richman has not and will not have is that, precisely, is Jonathan Richman. Never in my life saw so clearly someone whose stage presence and his work come into sync so perfectly, in Swiss watch of organic homeostasis. Because there is only Richman's nasal voice, his lyrics are nostalgic about the holidays in the fifties, his eyes sometimes lost, the tenderness with which he thanked the applause, his physical child trapped in a body of six feet, that accent sediments to speak English, the moments where the microphone away, regardless of whether they are listening, dancing in a way that no one would, or would do so in another key, with a tongue in cheek
indicating that kidding. It's something else, something that is displayed on each topic as the ruin of something lost, a cop who probably never existed, but I would have been beautiful to live, an instant love connection, different from anything that might have generated any other musician equally impressive, as the intensity of Jerry Lee Lewis standing on the piano, James Brown leg opening at the Apollo, Johnny Rotten offered as carrion to the spit and bottles thrown in the last shows of the Pistols in America. It is something that even could not be trivialized, because it does not understand. The reason why there are Elvis impersonators, Freddie Mercury, or The Beatles, but not Richman is precisely that it is a truth that works like a joke: if explained, lose grace. And you can take note of this in silence prevailing in The Hidden, a silence that had come to feel or touch of the Philharmonic, and could not be further from that silence static molar, the silence of respect, legal, cloth and tie tightly that is maintained in a play, or the green of a golf course. It was a silence that celebrated Richman, who aunaba a lot of people who do not want to miss absolutely nothing that occurs, an pifie, an oversight, an occurrence, an excursion into a certain rhythm on the same topic. Kim Gordon said in an article on
old Public Image Ltd, "people pay to see others believe in themselves." In this case, you pay for able to love Jonathan Richman.
Those who have been expecting to meet eminent issues of the Modern Lovers, possibly have been half bewildered. By contrast, Richman dived extensively by his solo material, with songs like
Because her beauty is raw and wild or
I Was Dancing in a lesbian bar (in a free version of almost ten minutes), and especially in songs sung in another language, not only in English (as we came but
A fall or
I have a girlfriend), but also in Italian, French and Hebrew. Most love songs, some glare, but all bathed by the same sense epiphany or surprise, as you can see in those moments when Jonathan opened his eyes, like a child who is just revealing a big secret. That surprise can only be explained on a notion of eternal youth, "not" mummified youth, "as in some bands, which becomes, in fact one of the most intriguing aspects of Richman. Born into a movement that proclaiming the fast life and died young, old age or maturity was virtually a taboo subject. Like football players with early expiration date marked on a barcode on his neck, many of the musicians are increasingly devoted to conceal their age, engage in something completely different, or die fast enough to avoid having to take tests. To that should join them a kind of Teenage FBI (referring to the giant song Guided By Voices-led precisely by Pollard, which debuted with 35 Pirulos) that Stalinised their lists to any musician who was older than twenty years. Times have changed and today the market gives to those musicians who hid their age as a Jew who hides his menorah in a basement in Nazi Germany, can exploit the nostalgia of a few. But while today large groups of the past come together to become in cover bands themselves, Richman is still the same kid, the same kid who, paradoxically in 1969 knew how to sing a theme like
Dignified and old.
Going back to those old generations, recent years have been particularly severe with our idols. Lux Interior fell fell Malcolm McLaren, S. Rowland fell Howard, Alex Chilton fell. Most fell not appear in shows that seem showcases a natural history museum, passing through the stage as Ratzinger in a popemobile. And winter is raw, and hungry winter for other idols, and something inside me tells me, he is certain that I will be alive to see the death of Springsteen, Robyn Hitchcock, Iggy Pop, Mark E. Smith, Scott Walker, Tom Waits, Johnny Rotten. And seeing Richman, with a thin chin, beard of a week and sing sad eyes but
Which came fall, there comes a chill in the back. But then the song ends, people clap, Jonathan smiles and puts his hands in the form of prayer and for a moment as an epiphany comes a phrase used by Benito
time ago, "Jonathan Richman can not die, because dying is bad vibes. "
The finished touch as best they could finish. People left with a smile on his face, as I have rarely seen, and I was willing to see. Crespo Fernández climbing, hoping to Cecilia and
Eze a taxi to take us to the round, and comes in the conclusion that I just witnessed an important moment in the history of Uruguay. May not appear in the newspapers, possibly comment on any number of blogs
friends and forget the next international tour will reach these latitudes. But for me it was important. It was a touch that shows another way to connect with the audience, a way of playing relaxed, unleashed all performative conventions of rock or music in general, while avoiding sounding vague and lacking in substance (something difficult to process in a country whose proposals often make balance between solemnity and laziness). But more than a new way of making music, a form of listening. One of my favorite quotes comes from Rock Lester Bangs, and says: "The only questions worth Asking whether Humans Are today is going to have any emotions tomorrow, and the quality of life What Will Be if the answer is no." Amid such postmodern reference, trapped in the terrifying and gigantic spa is cool
(Diego D'Avila, dixit), among so afraid to say what we feel without putting it in quotation marks, Jonathan Richman shows how things can be said by name, talk about wanting someone, shock of seeing the beautiful harp playing Harpo Marx, to dance to dance, to accept suffering as part of life, pain generated by the girl you like do not laugh at your jokes, joy of walking down the street, to appreciate how cute is your girlfriend's clothes all day, yearn for the arrival of an ice cream to your neighborhood.
But I read this I've been writing, and I realize that I forgot the essentials, all that matters. Hear
Richman, only that matter. Nothing you can say or suggest you are outside of their albums.
As stated on your hard Not so much to be loved as to love , "I Gave us the wine to taste, NOT to talk about it" So let's
taste it, kids.
We both Richman * 
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