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 (GRAMMYs), serves on the Advisory Board of Anthology Film Archives, the Board of Trustees of Village Preservation, the Music Making History research unit at Sapienza University of Rome, and hosts the Folk Radio show on WBAI New York.
Early years Richard Barone was born in Tampa, Florida, and began his music career at age seven on local top-40 radio station WALT (now known as WTIS) as "the Little 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 in 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 form the Bongos, a critically acclaimed new wave band that helped to create the 1980s Hoboken, New Jersey indie pop community.
Career 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 with other New York bands, a show 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. were compiled in the U.S. as Drums Along the Hudson (PVC), and a major U.S. tour with the B-52s, the group signed with 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, the latter of which was to remain unreleased until 2013.
Barone's output as a solo artist has included chamber pop, orchestral, folk, and narrative singer-songwriter material. He has been called a "gifted pop-rock tunesmith" by The New York Times."Rock: Richard Barone" New York Times Review, Robert Palmer, The New York Times, December 16, 1987]
Barone released his first solo album, Cool Blue Halo (recorded live at The Bottom Line in New York) in 1987, prior to the Bongos' amicable breakup. Writing in Rolling Stone, Anthony DeCurtis praised Barone's "spare, elegant arrangements" and credited him with fashioning "a kind of rock chamber music."Cool Blue Halo review, Rolling Stone While Trouser Press described the record as "intimate but confused,"Richard Barone reviews, Trouser Press 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. Barone toured for the next two years in Europe and the U.S. in support of "Cool Blue Halo," including a U.S. tour with Suzanne Vega and appearances at the first two Berlin Independence Days music festivals in Berlin, West Germany.
Two studio albums followed: the rock-dominated Primal Dream (MCA Records) in 1990, and the more acoustic-based Clouds Over Eden (Rhino Records), 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."Primal Dream review, Rolling Stone 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 [Barone] making."
During the recording and writing of Clouds Over Eden, Barone forged a songwriting and performance collaboration with singer/songwriter Jill Sobule, which was to continue for decades, until her death in 2025.
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 tribute album For the Love of Harry: Everybody Sings Nilsson (BMG Records) and produced B-52's frontman Fred Schneider's version of "Coconut" for the same project; and performed it with Schneider on Late Night With Conan O'Brien.
In 1996, he partnered with Phil Ramone and Larry Rosen's N2K Records label to become one of the first five artists, each representing a different genre, to make their music available as purchasable digital downloads on the pioneering Music Boulevard retail site. Amidst the music industry's growing fear of the then-new technology of digital distribution, Barone appeared on The Wall Street Journal Report television show and other programs to explain and promote legal music downloading as a legitimate method of distribution.
In 1997, Barone released Between Heaven and Cello, a live album recorded primarily at NYC's intimate Fez nightclub during a series of "Guitar & Cello" shows. In November he performed "Cello Song" and "Northern Sky" as part of the concert Bryter Later: The Music of Nick Drake at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn. Also in 1997, Barone partnered with songwriter Jules Shear to co-host "Writers in the Round - Bluebird Style," a monthly series at The Bottom Line that featured Rosanne Cash, Ron Sexsmith, Susan Cowsill, and other singer/songwriters; and he performed on Buster's Spanish Rocketship, the fourth album by David Johansen's alter ego Buster Poindexter, released on Island Records. Barone sang backing vocals on the album, credited as "Richard Barone and the Beautiful Bustiers."
Toward the end of the 1990s, Barone began collaborating with producer Tony Visconti. Nine of the songs they wrote and recorded together over the next few years were released on the album Glow in 2010. Also during this period, he was invited to sing on sessions Visconti was producing for David Bowie, including the song "Mother," which would be released in 2021. "Yet Another Midnight," a Barone/Visconti composition from this period, appears on the 2023 retrospective box set Produced by Tony Visconti on Demon Records.
In 1999 he provided musical direction and orchestrations for the off-Broadway musical Bright Lights, Big City at the New York Theatre Workshop, working with Rent director Michael Greif. From 1999 to 2004, Barone directed and performed in The Downtown Messiah, a unique, multi-genre interpretation of Handel's baroque oratorio that was broadcast annually in December on over 200 public radio stations nationwide, and combined elements of pop, folk, blues, and jazz.
A boxed set of Barone's first three studio albums was released in Europe in 2000 as The Big Three by Line Records, Germany. In 2001, he contributed a version of "Showdown" to Lynne Me Your Ears - A Tribute to Jeff Lynne. He also sang backing vocals on Visconti's version of "Mr. Blue Sky" on the album, along with Kristeen Young.
As a concert producer/director, Barone began to create large-scale concert events, including three all-star tributes to Peggy Lee at Carnegie Hall, the Hollywood Bowl, and Chicago's Ravinia Festival in 2003 and 2004 in partnership with concert impresario George Wein. The fully orchestrated concerts spanned Lee's entire career and were staged as a musical biography. Performers included Bea Arthur, Nancy Sinatra, Rita Moreno, Debbie Harry, and Shirley Horn. For New York's Central Park SummerStage in 2004 he created The Not-so Great American Songbook, a lovingly irreverent revue of guilty-pleasure hits of the 1970s, featuring an eclectic cast that included Moby and Justin Vivian Bond.
In 2004, Barone interviewed Quincy Jones for the PBS documentary Fever: The Music of Peggy Lee. That year also saw the first release on his own RBM Special Editions label, an anthology of highlights from his back catalog entitled Collection: An Embarrassment of Richard. He also performed in The Blood on the Tracks Project in June at Merkin Hall, a multi-artist tribute to Bob Dylan's landmark 1974 album on its 30th anniversary. He was accompanied by Tony Visconti on bass, Vernon Reid on guitar, and Buddy Cage, who had performed on the original album, on pedal steel.
Also that year, Barone joined 1960s folk-rock icon Donovan for a series of the latter's Beat Café concert events, including nine performances at New York's Joe's Pub, singing and reading excerpts from Allen Ginsberg's Howl. These appearances were the first of many collaborations with Donovan.
Barone increasingly turned his attention to producing, including a duet between Liza Minnelli and pianist/vocalist Johnny Rodgers; a children's album for Jolie Jones (daughter of Quincy Jones); Fred Schneider's solo album Just Fred; and others. He also collaborated with Schneider on songs for British pop star Sophie Ellis-Bextor. Other projects during this time included executive-producing The Nomi Song DVD (Palm Pictures, 2005), which includes his remix of operatic New Wave countertenor Klaus Nomi's "Total Eclipse."
Barone's songs and collaborations, including several written with Jill Sobule, were heard on the TV shows The West Wing, Dawson's Creek, Felicity, and South of Nowhere; as well as in The Nomi Song film.
In 2006, the original three Bongos reunited in the studio with Moby to create a re-make and music video of "The Bulrushes," an early Bongos single, for the re-issue of the group's debut album, released by Cooking Vinyl Records in June 2007. Several Bongos reunion concerts were held, culminating with an outdoor performance at the Hoboken Arts and Music Festival, during which the band was honored with a Mayoral Proclamation and the keys to the city.
In September 2007, Barone's memoir, Frontman: Surviving the Rock Star Myth, with cover and interior photos of the author by Mick Rock, was published by Backbeat/Hal Leonard Books. In late 2007, he began staging a series of musical readings of Frontman with excerpts of the book read by television actress Joyce DeWitt and radio DJ Vin Scelsa, among others. On his birthday, October 1, 2008, he brought Frontman: A Musical Reading to the stage at New York's Carnegie Hall as a benefit for public radio station WFUV, with "Special Guests and Legendary Friends" including Moby, DeWitt, Lou Reed, Garth Hudson, Marshall Crenshaw, Terre and Suzzy Roche, Randy Brecker, Carlos Alomar, and others.
In July 2009, Barone entered the recording studio to complete work on the album he began at age 16 for performer Tiny Tim. In addition to production, Barone also arranged multiple songs and played bass and sang backing vocals on the title track. The album, I've Never Seen a Straight Banana - Rare Moments: Volume 1, was released in October 2009 on Collector's Choice Records.