melting igloo - propertyistheft.com

propertyistheft.com 'zine

Belle and Sebastian, Jonathan Richman
at the historic Capitol Theater in Olympia, Washington USA September 15, 2001
by Al Larsen
(originally appeared in Careless Talk Costs Lives #12)

New York and Washington, D.C. had just been struck by hijacked jetliners. America was freaked out. A lot of people were waving flags from any available post. The news was telling us that the best qualities in Americans had been brought out: we were helping each other, giving blood, being compassionate towards each other. But if you waited long enough you'd hear about the flipside they didn't want to report: mosques being marched on, Arab-looking people being attacked, even killed. This was the backdrop against which Belle and Sebastian and Jonathan Richman came to the love rock capital of the world.

I don't know anything about Belle and Sebastian. This probably is heresy to the great population of the hipster earth for whom Belle and Sebastian is like water, like air: instantly available, essential and inevitable. I did have a vague idea, based on their record covers and the true believers I'd met, that they must sound like some combination of the Smiths and Beat Happening. I knew one thing for certain however, Jonathan Richman opening or not, I was absolutely not going to drop twenty dollars to see them. For that price I should be able to see Jonathan, without having to see Belle and Sebastian, and twice.

And yet, here we were, with reality crumbling around us, with fear all around and war looming, and Jonathan was coming to love rock ground zero. Surely, he'd have some wisdom for us. He's been lighting the path for me for twenty years - "Don't Let Our Youth Go To Waste", "She's Gonna Respect Me", "Shirin and Fahrad", up through "My Little Girl's Got a Full Time Daddy Now". And just as a generation of Russian writers could be said to have stepped from Gogol's overcoat, the rock culture of now, at least as I know and love it, has stepped out of Jonathan's corner store (and Patti's piss factory too).

Okay, I couldn't take it any more, next week we might be drinking rain water and living in a tent, but this week I'd see Jonathan. But now the word had hit the street that the tickets were sold out - hundreds and hundreds of tickets had been sold online to out-of-town Belle and Sebastian fanatics. How could it be true that we'd been shut out of our own scene by these weird Scottish pop stars that dress up like mimes and had hired our godfather as a mascot?

Now I had gotten really stuck - I couldn't get in and I couldn't be righteous about it either.

But my friends are in a similar bind and we devise a plan that we'll be there outside, we'll have our own sort of evening, and we won't see Jonathan but at least we won't be moping at home; we'll catch some reflected energy and generate some of our own as well. We tape up a slew of articles printed from zmag.org: Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky and others on the bombings, on the war rhetoric, on the mainstream news coverage. I devise a petition that states, "I believe in life and I believe in love, though the world in which I live is trying to prove me wrong" and sign the first line "Paul Weller".

But then, suddenly, I do get in - straight through the front door and carrying an electric fan. "Needs to be plugged in upstairs" I say and bolt through the door and up to the balcony.

Jonathan is brilliant. He's happy (well, he projects happiness - he's a performer). We're happy (no performance here - though we're also projecting). Personally, I'm ecstatic: Jonathan is on the stage of the Capitol Theater; my hero is standing exactly where I have had some of the best and boldest moments of my life. A long-open circuit completes itself; Gogol is reading in our garret. Tommy Larkin is brilliant, on one song his bass drum almost sounds like a teenage car blasting Wu-Tang Clan down my street at 3 am. Jonathan does a new song about how he loves New York. Is that all the wisdom he'll gives us? "I've lived there four different times," he says. Is that all the wisdom he'll give us? "People are friendly," he says. He tells a story about not being able to get his foreign currency changed on a Sunday. No, it's not possible, but before she shuts the metal window-cover on him she says, "Watcha gonna do?" "Just like that," says Jonathan, " 'Watcha Gonna Do?' See? People in New York are friendly." Is that all the wisdom he's going to give us? Jonathan - what about the nationalistic maniacs driving down the street with six-foot American flags unfurled behind their pick up trucks?

He goes on to do a snippet of "Sex Machine", play some disco guitar and do some fancy dance poses during "Dancing at the Lesbian Bar". He explicates the difference between Samba and Rumba. I go downstairs and he's doing "Pablo Picasso". I've really been beside myself with joy up to this point, but the fever starts to subside: I've never thought this song was so all-fire great, and if he doesn't want to sing the word "asshole" (and who would) he should just drop it, not slur it all weird like, "Pablo Picasso was never called ahhh-ho". And what am I doing busting myself into the show? If I really need to see Jonathan on the Capitol Theater stage can't I pay the ticket price? I'm thinking, "I'm stronger than this -- I don't have to be here. He's the most brilliant performer of the century and the poet I consistently return to, but I can take it or leave it." And I went back out to the cool September night, to my friends that had neither tickets nor last-minute missions to install electric fans in the balcony.

In the days and weeks that follow, Jonathan's non-statement has become clearer and more poignant: compassion and empathy. Compassion and empathy, expressed in seeing and treasuring the daily details of life. That's not all the wisdom there is, but it's the kind of wisdom that Jonathan can give us, and thank god he's there to do it.