About Richard Barone
Richard Barone is an American rock musician who first gained attention as frontman for the Bongos. He works as a songwriter, arranger, author, director, and record producer, releases albums as a solo artist, tours, and has created concert events at Carnegie Hall, Hollywood Bowl, SXSW, and New York's Central Park. He teaches the course “Music + Revolution” at The New School's School of Jazz and Contemporary Music, has served on the Board of Governors of The Recording Academy , serves on the Advisory Board of Anthology Film Archives, and hosts the "Folk Radio" show on WBAI New York.
Richard Barone was born in Tampa, Florida, and began his music career at age seven on local top-40 radio station WALT as the Littlest DJ. By age sixteen he was producing local bands and recorded the idiosyncratic performer Tiny Tim after the two met following a Tampa performance. It was Tiny Tim who first suggested to Barone that he should live in Greenwich Village, New York City, where Tim himself had gotten his start. Moving to New York, Barone lived briefly at the Hotel Chelsea, modeled, and landed small acting roles. Answering an advertisement in the Village Voice newspaper led him to meet the musicians with whom he would soon form the Bongos, a critically acclaimed new wave band that helped to create the 1980s Hoboken, New Jersey indie pop community.
The Bongos quickly gained favor at New York City music venues as well as at their home venue, Maxwell's in Hoboken. Signed to the British label Fetish Records, they were invited to perform at the Rainbow Theatre in London as part of a concert that included other bands on the New York scene and was recorded for the live album Start Swimming, released on Stiff Records. A European tour with the Bush Tetras followed. After a string of independent singles released in the U.K. on Fetish were compiled in the U.S. as Drums Along the Hudson , and a major U.S. tour with the B-52s, the group signed to RCA Records. With the advent of MTV, they made a commercial impact with the title song of their label debut, the Barone-penned "Numbers With Wings." The song's accompanying video earned the group a nomination at the first MTV Video Music Awards. Two more albums followed, one for RCA and one for Island Records, which was to remain unreleased until 2013.
Breaking out as a solo artist, Barone's albums have included chamber pop, orchestral, folk, and narrative singer-songwriter material. He has been called a "gifted pop-rock tunesmith" by The New York Times.
Barone released his first solo album, Cool Blue Halo in 1987, prior to the Bongos' amicable breakup. Anthony DeCurtis, writing in Rolling Stone, praised Barone's "spare, elegant arrangements" and credited him with fashioning "a kind of rock chamber music." While Trouser Press described the record as "intimate but confused," NPR's Tom Moon, in a more recent assessment, called the album "a plaintive masterpiece," adding "Cool Blue Halo feels timeless, and maybe even exotic." Moon also credited Barone's version of David Bowie's "The Man Who Sold the World" with influencing Nirvana's own cover of the song on their 1994 album MTV Unplugged in New York.
Two studio albums followed: the rock-dominated Primal Dream in 1990, and the more acoustic-based Clouds Over Eden , dedicated to his late friend, rock journalist Nicholas Schaffner, in 1994. Trouser Press championed the "fine set of yearning love songs" on Primal Dream, while calling their production and arrangements as a "step backwards" from his debut album. But David Browne, writing in Rolling Stone, gave the album four stars and commented that "Barone is fast moving beyond the limited vocabulary of twelve strings and wimp-pop vocals." Billy Altman, in The New York Times, called his next album, Clouds Over Eden "unquestionably the most fully realized effort of Barone's career," while Trouser Press described the album as "wrenching and thoroughly worthwhile" and "the great album fans always imagined making."
In the mid-1990s, Barone performed and recorded with experimental guitarist Gary Lucas and his group Gods and Monsters, in which Barone handled lead vocals and played Mellotron. In 1995 he recorded Harry Nilsson's "I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City," with Lucas on guitar, for the album For the Love of Harry: Everybody Sings Nilsson and produced B-52's frontman Fred Schneider's version of "Coconut" for the same project. He performed the song with Schneider on Late Night With Conan O'Brien.
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