For generations of Jewish girls, Modern Lovers frontman Jonathan Richman was the attainable rock star crush. Turns out he wasn't so attainable after all.
When I was a teenager, I had two favorite rock stars. One was Lou Reed, because he was a suburban Jewish kid who escaped the suburbs for a life of urban depravity. The other was Jonathan Richman, because he was a suburban Jewish kid whose favorite rock star was Lou Reed.
Richman was still in high school in 1969 when he made his way from Boston to New York to hang out with Reed’s band, the Velvet Underground. Reed, nine years Richman’s senior, accepted the short-haired, drug-eschewing aspiring musician into his famously wild cadre. Richman stuck around until he couldn’t take it any more. Then he went back to Boston and started the Modern Lovers, a band that synthesized the Velvet Underground’s grating, grinding sound with lyrics about the frustrations of being a serious young man who wanted an equally serious girlfriend.
As a teenager, I assumed that Richman was just like me; that his Velvet Underground fandom represented the same crush on the same thing, and that his marriage of their sound to his lyrics reflected the tension between my own comfort in and disdain for my placid suburban surroundings. I spent much of my adolescence waiting for a Jonathan Richman of my own to show up. I would recognize him by his hapless innocence, his glasses, and his Jewish last name. Love would take root, and next thing you knew we’d be holding hands in an art museum.
I misunderstood Richman, but then, so have many of his fans. In a recent essay about Richman and Jewishness, Tony Michels, a professor of American Jewish history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, speaks of Richman’s “defiance toward everything ‘hip.'” It seems indisputable that Richman was defiant. And if we understand “hip” as basically synonymous with “popular” or “cool,” then yes, it seems that hip was Richman’s target of derision. But if we understand "hip" as a discrete tradition that stretches all the way from Norman Mailer’s nihilistic “white Negro” to the slew of contemporary indie bands that borrow heavily from the imagery of childhood, Richman starts looking like an important step (and maybe a point of expansion) in the hip tradition. He also starts looking like someone with more in common with Lou Reed than with me.
Reed and Richman were part of a generation of American Jews (and, more specifically, American Jewish men) for whom some major goals of assimilation had been accomplished. If their grandparents were concerned about making a living and their parents were concerned about being allowed into universities, they were concerned about getting laid once they got there.
“In the early sixties, Bob Dylan would single-handedly change the image of what a hip young boy could look like,” punk chronicler Victor Bockris writes in Transformer, his biography of Reed. “He made the hooked nose and frizzy hair the very emblem of the hip, intellectual avant garde.” Reed and Richman, both ennosed and enfrizzed Jews, had to negotiate the same question around the same time: how were they to make Americans desire them?
Reed’s strategy for becoming a heartthrob was complicated. It involved amassing street cred by playing up the most dysfunctional aspects of his Long Island upbringing (what Bockris calls “creating the myth of his own Jewish psychodrama”); selectively flaunting his drug use and deviant sexuality; and, perhaps most surprisingly, identifying himself with urban Jews of an earlier generation. Reed’s mentor at Syracuse University was the writer Delmore Schwartz, who was very much a first-generation American Jew. Schwartz's stories are about the foibles of immigrants, and his friends and admirers included Irving Howe, Dwight Macdonald, and Saul Bellow, who wrote Humboldt’s Gift about him. After graduation, Reed moved to the Lower East Side, a place that bore a much closer resemblance to the Jewish ghettos of Schwartz’s fiction than to his parents’ petit bourgeois community. He was, you might say, the first Jew to move back.
Richman’s strategy, by contrast, was to cut out the middleman of cultural appropriation: A kid from the Boston suburbs, he claimed authenticity for himself by playing a kid from the Boston suburbs. For Richman, street cred meant playing shows at old age homes after he had alienated young audiences with songs like “I’m Straight,” a diatribe about his contempt for drugs and hippies. Though the frequent disconnect between Richman and his audience was genuine, it was also deliberate. Richman explained to Interview magazine in 1973 that his performances were stronger when audiences rejected his square look because “it makes me feel persecuted.”
David Berson, who signed The Modern Lovers for Warner Brothers, told Richman biographer Tim Mitchell, “He cried on stage more than any other performer I’ve ever seen. He’d pick up the microphone stand, he’d be pounding it into the stage and crying, and girls in the audience would be throwing him their handkerchiefs. They’d be saying, ‘Oh Jonathan, don’t cry!'”
Charming.
But it was. I kept looking for my Jonathan Richman all the way through high school and into college. The problem, I gradually discovered, was not that they had stopped making boys like Richman, but that the short-haired, bespectacled young Jewish men around were, de facto, desired; they didn’t need me to discover them. For every Jewish Lou Reed-type boy who did drugs, there was a Jonathan Richman-type who pointedly abstained; for each one whose sexual confidence was brazen, there was another pining for a perfect woman; and for each underachiever with an extracurricular specialization in slasher films of the 1980s, there was a valedictorian who couldn’t shut up about Eisenstein. They ran the gamut from decadence to abstinence. And all of them were being called hipsters.
One thing hipsters aren’t is flagrantly aspirational. What I liked best about Richman was that he seemed to aspire to be like Reed, but also appeared dumbstruck as to how to go about it without disavowing the place he had come from. But I think now that Richman was not trying to be Reed at all, that he just borrowed what he wanted and left. In doing so, he helped to expand the category of hipness to include his own brand of defiant squareness.
The autograph line after a tiny Jonathan Richman concert I attended was the perfect place to test this theory. Since I only had about three seconds to explain myself while he signed my poster, I decided to skip all that stuff about the fine line between identification and desire and skip right to the heart of the matter.
“You were my Lou Reed,” I said.
“Thanks,” he said, like he had no idea what I was talking about.
He fucking knew, just like Reed knows his music will always be more popular with kids from Long Island than kids from the street. Richman’s job, even now as his fifties stretch on, is to maintain the demeanor of a Bar Mitzvah boy trying to rustle up the courage to ask a pretty girl to dance. I don’t know Richman personally, beyond that three-second interaction, so I can’t be sure; maybe in his case there’s nothing more to it than that. But his posture has been adopted by a generation of young Jewish men whose bodies now read, almost unambiguously, as American.
