POP MUSIC REVIEW : RICHMAN’S ROMANTIC LITTLE DITTIES

They say that an artist must risk the ridiculous to achieve the sublime, and no one in rock ‘n’ roll illustrates that better than Jonathan Richman.

The nasal-sounding New Englander is one of modern pop’s most individual, endearing and misunderstood figures. He’s an incurable romantic who resides in the twilight zone between Lou Reed and Fred Rogers, and his very simple ‘n’ sweet little ditties tend to strike listeners as either childlike charmers or infantile camp.

Richman drives some folks up the wall and his iconoclasm has made him a leper to major labels, but on Sunday at the Roxy a full house of true believers basked in songs that compare Wranglers and Levi’s and the virtues of neon and starlight, or ponder the plight of the last dinosaur. A straight face isn’t required, but a certain innocence is.

Richman’s brand of rock minimalism has gotten particularly minimal lately. His group, the Modern Lovers, has been a revolving door of a band for the last decade and a half, but now it consists merely of two backup singers, one of whom also plays acoustic guitar.

Richman also brought his own cheap public address system along, forgoing the Roxy’s sophisticated sound. He can hardly sing, he rarely maintains a meter all the way through a tune and there are at least five dozen other reasons why he wasn’t invited to play the big musicians’ convention down in Anaheim over the weekend.

But not even David Foster could dislike a guy who writes heartfelt paeans to Van Gogh (“the baddest painter since Jan Vermeer”), baseball great Walter Johnson and the world at large. If this is infantilism, bring on the babies.