Dancin', Dancin' Late At Night

Jonathan Richman and Me

Jonathan Richman was never a musical guest on Saturday Night Live. So it’s funny that SNL led me to his music in the first place. There was no late night performance that drove me to rush to the record store the next day, like there was when Counting Crows (warning, that is possibly the most 90’s video ever) played in 1994 and toppled my best friend Adrianne and I into an unparalleled teen-girl obsession with the band. But that’s another story for another time. Or possibly, for never.

Jonathan Richman was a somewhat less likely target of our admiration, but he came into my life around the same time via an issue of Spin Magazine guest edited by the 1993 SNL cast. Julia Sweeney, a huge fan of Richman’s, interviewed him for the issue (Richman said the interview was “light and breezy, a beach party”) and she made his music sound absolutely irresistible. Not long after reading the issue, I was visiting my friend Kat and we were record shopping in Vancouver (also we ate lentil stew cooked by a barefoot white guy in a tiny restaurant) and I found Richman’s I, Jonathan album and bought it immediately.

This album is one of the top albums of my life. That’s not hyperbole. It’s the perfect combination of a great album discovered at the perfect time. Finding Jonathan Richman at a time when I was on the cusp of actual adulthood was the best thing for my muddled, anxiety-ridden, music-obsessed mind. Here was a man who wrote child-like songs with the brain of an adult, who had success and was loved for being a bit of a weirdo, and who had created a kind of adulthood that was wildly different from any I’d been exposed to so far. He was a dad, a husband, he sang about normal adult feelings and responsibilities, but he also seemed to be having a good time in a wholesome way.

I was never a big drinker or a real partier. I didn’t have those vices to cling to when adulthood yanked me into the future. Jonathan Richman provided a different model, one where you could be kind and silly and creative and that would allow you to hold onto your youth and your joy. I listened to I, Jonathan just as many times as I played August And Everything After, It’s a Shame About Ray, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, or any of the other 90’s rock albums that dominated at the time.

Jonathan Richman was also accessible to fans, he toured extensively through the 80s and 90s and into the early 2000s (he’s actually on tour right now, but sadly my adult responsibilities prevent me from travelling to see him in Montreal or Toronto). Those tours included a bunch of Ottawa dates. He was a favourite of Eugene Haslam, who owned and booked Ottawa’s Zaphod Beeblebrox club for decades. The first time Adrianne and I saw Jonathan Richman was at Zaphods in the mid 90s. The club had a greenroom in the basement, but no direct access to the stage so performers had to walk through the crowd to get to the stage. I can remember him quietly slinking through the crowd holding his guitar vertically, close to his body as he made his way to the microphone. The place was packed. People started cheering before he had even stepped up on the stage. It was one of the best shows I’ve ever been to, filled with absolute joy and dancing and laughter. He was even better live than he was on his records, with added charming sloppiness and dance breaks featured throughout his set.

I’ve lost track of how many times I saw him after that, but any time he’s played in Ottawa I’ve been there and several times I’ve made the trek to Montreal as well. One Montreal trip ended with a blizzard so dramatic, the four of us who had driven up from Ottawa gave up on the terrifying drive halfway home and slept in our clothes in a roadside motel until the roads were plowed and the snow let up. I went to work for eight AM the next day, unshowered, running on three hours of sleep. Worth it.

Jonathan Richman’s music is exactly what I need in this bleak mid-winter, his songs teeming with kindness and silliness and weirdness and joy. If you need something to dance to in your kitchen after a hard day of calling your elected representatives, this might be it.

February 2025 - How To Help

One of the organizations that I currently volunteer with is Penn 2 Paper which matches volunteer pen pals with people who are incarcerated. I’ve been a pen pal for a few years now and have had three different incarcerated pen pals over that time. Some people write a lot, some write a little, but it is always interesting to get letters from the people I’m matched with.

The organization is very respectful of everyone involved and takes safety and privacy seriously. When I send my letters I send them directly to the prison and then the pen pal sends their letters to a PO Box where the Penn 2 Paper volunteers retrieve them. They scan the letters and send them by email to the intended recipient using an encrypted-type method that is basically a non-exploding version of “this message will self destruct”. There’s a great training session for all volunteer pen pals before you start writing letters and the P2P volunteers are always available to answer questions.

This is a way to volunteer that doesn’t take a lot of time or money, so it’s ideal for busy people who want to make a small difference in someone’s life.

February 2025 - Songs

The title of this post comes, of course, from a Jonathan Richman song of the same name. This is a song that I used to sing under my breath when I walked the floor with fussy babies in the middle of the night in my early days of being a parent. Richman meant a more fun kind of dancing late at night, but we take what we can get.

It’s hard to choose a favourite JR song, but for me it might be Everyday Clothes. Him singing about being enamoured with a lady wearing random shit she bought at a hardware store really speaks to me.

And just because things have been tough for lots of people working at various government jobs lately, here is Government Centre. Old Mr. Ahern can calm down a while.

February 2025 - Feelings

I read two romances recently and I think both are technically “backlist” because they came out in 2021 and 2024. However, Emily Henry’s Funny Story just made it to me after a long and patient wait for a library copy and Casey McQuiston’s One Last Stop was given to me as a Christmas present from my 12-year-old kid so both are new to me.

One Last Stop was just an incredible and compelling romp of a novel. While it’s technically a romance, the plot encompasses all sorts of other stories (Work to save a pancake restaurant! Solve a time glitch mystery! Search for a lost uncle! Cultivate deep friendships with weird new roommates!) and it really is a wild and original ride. Good job, eldest child!

Funny Story is yet another book out there proving that Emily Henry has freaky contemporary romance super powers that no one can touch. Was this book stunningly original? No. But did it suck me in with an unstoppable force and make me repeatedly laugh and cry throughout? Yes. Of course it did.

Thanks for reading! See you next month.

J.W.

Instagram : @JenniferWhitefordWrites

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