I Was Dancing In The Lesbian Bar

concert review: Jonathan Richman w/ Jesse DeNatale @ Lula Lounge (Toronto, Ontario), November 8, 2004

I'll keep this one brief as I only caught about 75% of Jonathan's set yesterday. He's playing Lula Lounge tonight and tomorrow also so I may just go down again to catch his full set. Considering all the shows I've been going to recently, I passed on going to the Matthew Sweet/Velvet Crush show yesterday, but at the last minute I decided to head down to see Jonathan Richman. It was a cheaper ticket and also, never having gone to Lula Lounge, I was curious to check it out. It would have helped if I wrote down the address for one thing, because for a good 15 minutes I was driving around Bloor St. when in reality it was on Dundas St. Even when I was on Dundas, I couldn't find it right away and had to visually scan the addresses going down the street. Eventually, my eyes landed upon Lula Lounge and I luckily found a parking spot just down the street from the venue. I unfortunately walked into the venue about 3 songs into his set already but the woman at the entrance did me a favoour charging me only $15.00 cover rather than the usual $20.00 at-the-door ticket price. Lula Lounge is quite a swanky place with beautiful wood floors and fixtures. There's a stage at the front with a floor area leading up to the stage. On either side of the floor area are dinner tables elevated just a step up from the floor area, separated from the floor area by beautiful wood banisters. Towards the back of the floor area on the left side was a swanky bar. For all its swankiness, Lula Lounge's web site says it doesn't have a dress code which was most apparent by the mixture of people there that night, from indie hipsters, to suburban couples and everything else in between.

I missed Jesse DeNatale's set but walked in on Jonathan's set as he was playing "I Was Dancing In The Lesbian Bar". There were people in the audience that were obvious fans of his, especially those who I could audibly hear singing along to his songs. My knowledge of his music is pretty much limited to his album "You Must Ask The Heart" and unfortunately I didn't recognize any songs from the album that night. Otherwise, Jonathan sang and performed on guitar, accompanied with drummer Tommy Larkins, a set of quaint and playful pop ditties. Jonathan would often times between verses bust out into some spazz-tastic dance moves which drew a postively giddy response from the crowd. Between songs, Jonathan would often go into a stream-of-consciousness rambling in French or Spanish, that would get people laughing either because he actually said something funny in the language or, in my case, it just sounded funny. A highlight of the night was his performance of his song "Vincent Van Gogh" during which he performed a 'guitar solo'; well not 'solo' in the traditional sense, but he has a unique sense of chord progressions and finding interesting melodies. During these 'solos', instrumental breakdowns, or whatever you might call it, Tommy Larkin kept a solid backbeat while Jonathan often gazed hypnotically into the audience as he played his guitar. From where I was standing, I was hardly given the opportunity to take any decent pictures except for the one above which I had to airbrush some dude's head out of. In any case, I enjoyed Jonathan's all-too-brief set[it started around 10 pm and was over by 11 pm, and there wasn't an encore] . ...And I guarantee that you'll leave his show with a big grin on your face. :-)