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Vice Blog

NEW YORK - A PLEA FOR TENDERNESS


Sometimes you get out of school for the summer, you feel good to be done studying physics or whatever, and you decide it's an appropriate time to do drugs nonstop for several weeks. But then after trashing your apartment, having your gas cut off, and waking up covered in candle wax without sleeping for three days because you decided to write a "meta-self-help book" cover to cover you realize it's a good time to take a short break.

Luckily for me Jonathan Richman is playing tonight at the Bowery Ballroom. I don't think drugs are bad, so I don't have an anti-drug--but if I were forced to have an anti-drug it would be Jonathan Richman. He stands for everything I love in the world, and if he thinks drugs are bad, well…that's some food for thought. There comes a time when we must all enjoy a moment of abstinence in order to make room for the coming intoxication, we love the wasted because we know the sober. I've seen Jonathan Richman perform a handful of times in the past, and every time his eyes were filled with genuine tears of joy and wonder by the end of the show. He gives me hope for humanity.

Once I even had the opportunity to have dinner with Jonathan Richman. This was in early 2002, when everyone was talking about September 11 and the conspiracy theories were still really new. So I said something about the YouTube "inside-job" videos and Jonathan Richman started freaking out at me. He was like, "You want to know about a conspiracy theory? Al-Qaeda is a conspiracy theory!" and started rattling off all these facts like, "How does steel stay liquid for two days? Ask any architect, it was a demolition, steel does not collapse like that!" I was totally speechless. He is my idol and I had just caused him to have a very un-Jonathan freak-out about the World Trade Center. After that he resumed being exactly who and what I hoped him to be. For example, when a friend offered him coffee he askedif he could "just smell the beans"--and did!

That weird anecdote aside, I think everyone should go see him tonight. Leave the drugs, cigarettes, and alcohol behind and have an honest, tender, affectionate time.

HAMILTON MORRIS