Last night, Jonathan Richman came to Kansas City, wide-eyed and inscrutably eccentric, and the good-sized, mostly older crowd that gathered at the Record Bar seemed to return his guileless stare and revel in his eccentricity.
Forester Michael
I've seen performers take over a space and "make it their own," but never quite like Richman did last night. The lights were down. The air-conditioner was way, way off. Richman and his drumming accompanist Tommy Larkins set up side by side at the front of
In addition to recording his new album, Skitter On Take-Off, live with no overdubs, Vic Chesnutt got the legendary Jonathan Richman to produce and play on it.
Richman wrote a short essay explaining as to why he decided to take it on, entitled "The Vic Chesnutt Record And Why Me And Tommy Wanted To Do It."
My drummer Tommy Larkin and I were driving in the van across the United States as we do two or three times a year on our tours of clubs and I said, "Y' know, we should produce Vic's nex
There's often a dearth of the "show must go on" attitude among opening bands when the headliner cancels. In last night's case, Brooklyn's Talk Normal and its tour mates, Wet Hair, got stranded in Denver due to a van breakdown and the stage at the Jackpot was given over to local bands.
Considering that it was a Sunday night and Talk Normal isn't huge or even very well-known by anybody in this town (myself included), the crowd probably would have been just as small had they showed. But the night
