It’s in his eyes: Dark, haunted, at times vacant but rarely smiling, no matter what the subject of the song or the raw emotions he was trying to convey. Last night at the Cactus Café, Jonathan Richman played two short 30-minute sets of proto-folk. He continues tonight and tomorrow at the Continental Club.
Accompanied only by drummer Tommy Larkins, Richman strummed his nylon-stringed guitar and sang his simple songs without much interaction with the nearly full Cactus. Some songs were taken from his 2008 release, Because Her Beauty Is Raw and Wild, explaining mid-song – and I’m paraphrasing here – “songs have to be fresh and that’s why we don’t do your favorite old songs.”
His eyes on “When We Refuse to Suffer” exposed a soul that felt the words more deeply than just another singer-songwriter. The rudimentary setup lent an early rock & roll feeling to some of the songs, bringing to mind Buddy Holly’s garage days, and his youthful outlook was candidly displayed with a tune about the memory of the acrid smell of diesel fuel as a very young child.
He shimmied, banged a cowbell occasionally, and the crowd laughed appropriately at some of the odd juxtapositions in his lyrics. But Richman’s eyes didn’t really smile until near the end of the second set, perhaps relieved that he’d made his way through another show, but more likely because of the wave of ardent applause.
This article appears in January 22 • 2010.