Jonathan Richman likes to step away from the microphone, dance, and sing straight to the audience. He calls the back room at Kingston’s Unicorn Bar “one of the best, natural sounding rooms in the world.” He returns to the Midtown bar March 2-4 for three shows with his longtime drummer, Tommy Larkins. Richman has played the room under its current name and in its previous life as the Beverly Lounge.
One measure of Richman’s range is the distance between “Roadrunner” and “That Summer Feeling.” The former, recorded with the original Modern Lovers in the early ’70s, is a two-chord joyride through Massachusetts with the radio on. The Boston band’s wiry sound, indebted to the Velvet Underground, helped lay the groundwork for punk. “That Summer Feeling,” which opens 1983’s Jonathan Sings! and stretches out to six minutes on 1992’s I, Jonathan, is what happens when the ride is over and the past starts making unreasonable demands on the present. Few songs about the pleasures of being young are so alert to how much trouble remembering them can cause.
Then there’s “Give Paris One More Chance,” also from Jonathan Sings!, in which Richman sounds like a friend who’s heard every complaint about Paris and still thinks the city deserves another afternoon of your time. On I, Jonathan’s “I Was Dancing in the Lesbian Bar,” he leaves a stiff nightclub and finds a dance floor where everybody has room to move. (A bit too on-the-nose at Unicorn Bar?) It’s a miniature with a whole social philosophy tucked into the chorus, and it feels especially at home in the orbit of a queer bar with a disco-ball ballroom. This is the American treasure part of the equation. Richman can get an entire worldview into a song about going out on a Friday night.
As for what Richman and Larkins will play in Kingston, Richman says they’ll decide in the room. In a note accompanying the announcement, he says most of the songs date from the past three or four years. He may sing in several languages, depending on which one gets him closest to the feeling he’s after. Even the applause is beside the point for Richman. “It’s about if all the songs I sang that night were ones that I felt,” he says. Three nights in the same room leave plenty of room for a change of mind.
Tickets are on sale now with a limited number of discounted three-night passes are available. Each night, the bar opens at 5pm with light fare, ballroom doors open at 7pm, and Richman and Larkins take the stage at 8pm without an opener.
