From the RT list. Edited to make more sense, I hope--my edits are in brackets.
Dates: Towson, Oct. 17, 2000; Harrisburg, Oct. 18, 2000.
Subject: [RTLIST] RT in Towson, MD
25 words or less:
Richard has a new shirt.
Richard sang a new song.
On "Tambourine Man" with McGuinn, Richard sang the high part.
He's hoarse. He's intrepid. Boffo.
Subject: [RTLIST] 150 words or more on Towson (mostly McGuinn)
OK, I'm barging in again...(yeah, Ben was at the same show, but I think
he's confusing Goucher with Gallaudet, which is in the same general region).
Scott said:
>BTW, Roger McGuinn was absolutely terrible. When he played Ballad of Easy
>Rider I wondered whether he wasn't embarrassed to play it in front of OH,
>who did such a fantastic cover. If the room hadn't been full of aging
>former hippies, he probably would have been booed off the stage. Those of
>you going to McGuinn shows, spend the first hour of the show in the bar
>and walk over afterwards.
McGuinn was actually heckled. He was having a hard time keeping his
12-string in tune (he had a 12-string acoustic, a banjo, and an electric
guitar that I know someone else can name-I'm blanking on the model). It
was very warm in the hall, and quite humid. So he finally set the
12-string aside and said, "I'm going to switch guitars." Whereupon some
rude bastard yelled something like "You should change music, too." (Scott,
I hope I didn't just call you a rude bastard!)
I'm not a McGuinn fan, but a lot of people seemed to enjoy him, rude
bastard notwithstanding. We (husband and I) thought he seemed very ill at
ease--and we have this thing about people demanding that we sing or clap
along, so we were conscientious objectors to his attempts to get us to join in.
Still, if you wait an hour before going in, you might miss some of
McGuinn's performance with RT, which was pretty entertaining. RT is a
generous accompanist--he really makes McGuinn sound better. And I liked
"Easy Rider," though it didn't hold a candle to Fairport's version.
Assuming that the McGuinn set in Harrisburg tonight is similar to last
night's, you'll definitely find me in the bar during that @%!^#$! chestnut
mare song, which opened last night's show. If there is a bar. I've never
been to this venue before.
By the way, last night's show started very late. I heard (unconfirmed)
that the reason was that the sound crew that was supposed to set up the
auditorium had been in a terrible traffic accident and had to be replaced
by a new crew. I hope everyone's OK. (I think this was a local crew--not
Simon, who was there, or anyone who travels with McGuinn.)
Subject: [RTLIST] Harrisburg, 18 October 2000
Holy Mother of Pearl, as I think someone on M*A*S*H used to say.
McGuinn was far better tonight, though maybe it was just because I was in
spitting distance (row A, seat 2...what can I do to ensure that I have this
seat at every RT concert I attend for the rest of my natural life? Lordy!)
and was getting the sound pretty directly, without a lot of speaker
distortion. He did "Bells of Rhymney," which was a real treat. On the
other hand, my clever attempt to miss "Chestnut Mare" by hanging out in the
lobby bar was foiled by a rearrangement of the set list.
Speaking of rearranged set lists, Richard shook his lottery barrel tonight
a wee bit. We got a lot of the same stuff as last night, but overall the
set list tonight was even stronger than last night's. And he didn't seem
to be in any throat distress. And he didn't flub a single line, as far as
I can recall. (And there I was, up front with my cue cards....)
He opened with "Walking the Long Miles Home." I hope that someone else
kept track of the rest of it. I remember these songs, not in this order
(and abbreviated 'cause I'm a lazy git who should be in bed): Galway to
Graceland, Ghost of You Walks, When the Spell Is Broken, Turning of the
Tide, Daddy Is a Mummy, Valerio, Waltzing's for Dreamers, Dry My Tears,
Uninhabited Man (I think....), Crawl Back, Valerie, Easy There Steady Now,
Mingus Eyes...what have I forgotten? (Oh. Vincent. Duh.)
Someone more techie than me should describe what he did with his tuning for
"Easy There Steady Now"--retuning the lowest string way down and thereby
simulating Danny a wee bit.
Highlights included a somewhat more polished version of "I Agree with Pat
Metheny," a Nader endorsement of sorts, a story about Ralph McTell's skewed
audience demographics, and the outburst of an obviously very young
attendee: "I love Richard Thompson!" to which RT gamely replied with a few
bars of Raffi's "Baby Beluga."
Anomalies noted: a ball cap with a red "F" on it during the duet with
McGuinn (for the main set it was back to the ol' beret/balmoral); something
pink wedged in at the head of the guitar (thumbpick?);
three-count-'em-three cheat sheets plus an index card from his pocket; more
elaborate stage lights than I've seen at a solo show in a while. (This was
a pretty posh setting--700 seats, two balconies.)
A spectacular show, well worth the drive, even without the stop for donuts.
Pam (on a sugar/caffeine high)
pmw@annapurna.com
P.S. Oh, yeah, though I was in spitting distance, I didn't spit. I got
spat upon, though, however inadvertently. And I didn't really have cue
cards, honestly.
Subject: [RTLIST] (1) McGuinn; (2) new thread
First off, I want to take back my "one-trick pony" comment on McGuinn's
guitar playing after sitting just a few feet from him last night. I was
especially impressed by the zeal with which he attacked "Eight Miles
High." But he's no slouch at banjo, blues guitar, and other un-Byrdsy
instrumental genres.
Driving to and from Harrisburg last night, I listened to Hejira and Perspex
Island back to back. I hit the CD "repeat" button a lot. Listening to
Robyn Hitchcock, I thought about covers. You know how Elvis Costello did
"Withered and Died" and RT did "Pump It Up"? I wondered about "song swaps"
(temporary, of course) that RT and other musicians could do.
I'd give Robyn a go at "She Steers By Lightning" (though maybe it's too
obviously Hitchcockian), and RT his best effort at "Child of the Universe."
Others?
Friday, October 31, 2008
Richard Thompson Scores Grizzly Man (Harp)
Build-A-Bear:
Richard Thompson Scores Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Flick
By Pamela Murray Winters
Director Werner Herzog once said, “Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness.” For his documentary Grizzly Man, about Timothy Treadwell—a self-styled naturalist whose enthusiasm for getting inside the mind of the Alaskan brown bear was such that he ended up inside an Alaskan brown bear—Herzog demanded a soundtrack that drew on dark wildness.
Richard Thompson could have said no: “If you do a lot of soundtrack work you get used to having stuff chopped around, hacked up, ditched unceremoniously.” But given a chance to work with Herzog and two longtime friends—Erik Nelson, Grizzly Man's producer, and improvisational musician Henry Kaiser, who produced the film's music—Thompson signed on as the primary composer and performer.
The musicians didn't see the finished film before they began; they didn't work “to picture.” Instead, they followed the direction of Herzog and Kaiser, their knowledge of some of the film's scenes, and their own artistic impulses. “I didn't want to have a score written from millisecond to millisecond; I needed a basic mood and a climate,” says Herzog.
The creation spawned another creation: As the musicians worked at Berkeley, Calif.’s Fantasy Studios, Nelson shot a documentary of the process, called In the Edges. The title comes from Thompson: “If you rub the edges off music, you really take away the music itself. The music is in the edges; it's in the rough bits.”
“Werner was in the studio for the whole thing, which was, uh,” Thompson pauses for a long time, and then laughs: “Well, I won't say 'intimidating.' I think it was a kind of focus for everybody. Werner knew exactly what he wanted; he didn't necessarily know how to get there. That was our job: to figure out how to arrive at his vision.”
In the Edges shows Herzog directing his musicians to go bigger (to Thompson: “Plant your foot down. You are too melodious. Change the planet!”) or smaller (to Kaiser: “If you go too wild, I'll step and trample on your foot!”) It also contains music that didn't make it into Grizzly Man, including a duet between Thompson on guitar and Jim O'Rourke (Sonic Youth) on prepared piano.
A soundtrack album is planned, and In the Edges may be released as an extra feature when Grizzly Man comes out on DVD. Or maybe Herzog will again get his way: “It could really be a film on its own, in its own right,” he declares.
Harp, Sep/Oct 2005
Richard Thompson Scores Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Flick
By Pamela Murray Winters
Director Werner Herzog once said, “Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness.” For his documentary Grizzly Man, about Timothy Treadwell—a self-styled naturalist whose enthusiasm for getting inside the mind of the Alaskan brown bear was such that he ended up inside an Alaskan brown bear—Herzog demanded a soundtrack that drew on dark wildness.
Richard Thompson could have said no: “If you do a lot of soundtrack work you get used to having stuff chopped around, hacked up, ditched unceremoniously.” But given a chance to work with Herzog and two longtime friends—Erik Nelson, Grizzly Man's producer, and improvisational musician Henry Kaiser, who produced the film's music—Thompson signed on as the primary composer and performer.
The musicians didn't see the finished film before they began; they didn't work “to picture.” Instead, they followed the direction of Herzog and Kaiser, their knowledge of some of the film's scenes, and their own artistic impulses. “I didn't want to have a score written from millisecond to millisecond; I needed a basic mood and a climate,” says Herzog.
The creation spawned another creation: As the musicians worked at Berkeley, Calif.’s Fantasy Studios, Nelson shot a documentary of the process, called In the Edges. The title comes from Thompson: “If you rub the edges off music, you really take away the music itself. The music is in the edges; it's in the rough bits.”
“Werner was in the studio for the whole thing, which was, uh,” Thompson pauses for a long time, and then laughs: “Well, I won't say 'intimidating.' I think it was a kind of focus for everybody. Werner knew exactly what he wanted; he didn't necessarily know how to get there. That was our job: to figure out how to arrive at his vision.”
In the Edges shows Herzog directing his musicians to go bigger (to Thompson: “Plant your foot down. You are too melodious. Change the planet!”) or smaller (to Kaiser: “If you go too wild, I'll step and trample on your foot!”) It also contains music that didn't make it into Grizzly Man, including a duet between Thompson on guitar and Jim O'Rourke (Sonic Youth) on prepared piano.
A soundtrack album is planned, and In the Edges may be released as an extra feature when Grizzly Man comes out on DVD. Or maybe Herzog will again get his way: “It could really be a film on its own, in its own right,” he declares.
Harp, Sep/Oct 2005
Action Packed review
This is from the Washington City Paper, May 11, 2001.
Action Packed: The Best of the Capitol Years
Richard Thompson
Capitol
"Of the three things I do—writing, recording, performing—probably recording is my least favorite," says a characteristically self-deprecating Richard Thompson in the press kit to his new album, Action Packed. And dammit, Richard, it shows. Comprising 16 tracks from his six albums with Capitol—released between 1988 and last year, when Thompson left the label of his own volition—as well as a new recording and two outtakes, Action Packed is a decidedly uneven collection. Although it may present Thompson's favorites among his recent compositions, it also offers some of the most egregious missteps in his 30-year recording history. Mitchell Froom produced four of Thompson's Capitol releases, and the resulting recordings are cluttered with synths and other injudiciously chosen lush-pop sounds that are at odds with the guitarist's essential rawness. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the gentle lost-love song "I Misunderstood," in which the elegant guitar figure that opens the song is buried under reverby keyboards and Casio-plastic percussion. The few songs that are spared undue Froomage—"1952 Vincent Black Lightning," "Beeswing," and "Waltzing's for Dreamers"—reinforce Thompson's folky cred but reveal only that one dimension of his work. Of the albums excerpted here, only 1999's Mock Tudor, produced by Tom Rothrock and Rob Schnapf, shows the quietly stubborn artist whose music is rooted in tradition but has rampantly blossomed into something neither folk nor rock. Four Mock Tudor tracks lead up to the fan bait at the end of Action Packed: "Persuasion," originally written for the film Sweet Talker, and the Mock Tudor outtakes "Mr. Rebound" and "Fully Qualified to Be Your Man." The outtakes are as purely Thompson as anything on Mock Tudor: The former is a Celtic/Moroccan-sounding cuckold's plaint, the latter a double-entendre-laden punk-pop romp. But it's "Persuasion" that should make the Capitol suits sorry they let Thompson get away: With spare yet rich acoustic instrumentation and vocal harmonies—Thompson sings most of the backup, with the lead taken by his silken-voiced son Teddy—it's more radio-friendly than anything else in Thompson's iconoclastic back catalog.
Action Packed: The Best of the Capitol Years
Richard Thompson
Capitol
"Of the three things I do—writing, recording, performing—probably recording is my least favorite," says a characteristically self-deprecating Richard Thompson in the press kit to his new album, Action Packed. And dammit, Richard, it shows. Comprising 16 tracks from his six albums with Capitol—released between 1988 and last year, when Thompson left the label of his own volition—as well as a new recording and two outtakes, Action Packed is a decidedly uneven collection. Although it may present Thompson's favorites among his recent compositions, it also offers some of the most egregious missteps in his 30-year recording history. Mitchell Froom produced four of Thompson's Capitol releases, and the resulting recordings are cluttered with synths and other injudiciously chosen lush-pop sounds that are at odds with the guitarist's essential rawness. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the gentle lost-love song "I Misunderstood," in which the elegant guitar figure that opens the song is buried under reverby keyboards and Casio-plastic percussion. The few songs that are spared undue Froomage—"1952 Vincent Black Lightning," "Beeswing," and "Waltzing's for Dreamers"—reinforce Thompson's folky cred but reveal only that one dimension of his work. Of the albums excerpted here, only 1999's Mock Tudor, produced by Tom Rothrock and Rob Schnapf, shows the quietly stubborn artist whose music is rooted in tradition but has rampantly blossomed into something neither folk nor rock. Four Mock Tudor tracks lead up to the fan bait at the end of Action Packed: "Persuasion," originally written for the film Sweet Talker, and the Mock Tudor outtakes "Mr. Rebound" and "Fully Qualified to Be Your Man." The outtakes are as purely Thompson as anything on Mock Tudor: The former is a Celtic/Moroccan-sounding cuckold's plaint, the latter a double-entendre-laden punk-pop romp. But it's "Persuasion" that should make the Capitol suits sorry they let Thompson get away: With spare yet rich acoustic instrumentation and vocal harmonies—Thompson sings most of the backup, with the lead taken by his silken-voiced son Teddy—it's more radio-friendly than anything else in Thompson's iconoclastic back catalog.
Birchmere shows, spring 2001
RT did a run of shows at the Birchmere right around Easter, and I ended up being talked about as well as talking on the list. I had the delightful and somewhat unsettling experience of being called out, by name, by RT to give him a request and had to come up with one ("Don't Let a Thief Steal Into Your Heart"). Then there was the Chocolate Bunny Incident, which led to an e-mail to Flip Feij of the Richard Thompson for Completists site--now, alas, erased) that he then disseminated to the list.
First, here's Flip, who will then cut to my letter to him:
As the Birchmere gigs seem to have ended in An Exclusive Pam Winters Tribute, and we've heard Pam is away for some time, I'd like (after a short hesitation) to come forward with the story Pam mailed me after the first Birchmere concert. I pretty well know it's not done putting on private mails to the full list, but I think this mail really says it all: a proof of ultimate RT-fandom, that - maybe, in European circumstances - could only be equaled by Emanuelle from France. No offence meant to either of these female RT-lovers of the highest class. I think forwarding this to you all is worth the naughty sin. If you want to flame me for this, please do (but keep it off-list, please ;-)
Pam addressed her letter to me and to someone else on this list that I know of , but I think she was silently hoping I would forward it to the guys in RT's direct environment & I'm afraid I surely did.
Imagine, it's earlier this week. Just After Easter 2001. Pam Winters:
QUOTE:
Dear Flip:
I am too humiliated to approach Thompson Management with this tale directly. However, should it prove significant in the future, it would be best if the details were made clear. You may share them at your discretion. Herewith, my affidavit.
- - -
I do admit to bringing 11 (eleven) chocolate bunnies to the Birchmere this evening--Easter evening, April 15, 2001. They were not removed from my bag when it was searched (glanced at) by Birchmere officials.
Having gotten a seat within four yards of the stage, I was quite thrilled and perhaps a little giddy. I admit to having then freely, nay promiscuously, and certainly gleefully presented a number of these bunnies to various friends, strangers, and other folks at the concert, including one Simon Tassano.
I attest that the following conversation then took place: When Mr. Tassano asked, "Are you going to give a chocolate bunny to Richard?" I asked him if he would like me to give it to him to give to Mr. Thompson, or should I just follow through on my original plan of, and I quote, "lobbing it at him onstage." Mr. Tassano's reply, as I recall it, was, "Oh, yes, lob away: but make sure that you DON'T HIT THE GUITAR."
I swear that I was quite well-behaved throughout the concert and did not cause anything approaching a ruckus. I can call witnesses who will verify my account--oh, except that they were probably too busy gazing, slack-jawed, at the amazing Mr. Thompson to notice my demeanor.
I thought carefully about the bunny delivery, and at the beginning of the first encore, after judging the various trajectories and considering the placement of the folks in front of me, I forswore all lobbing activity and asked the nice woman seated between me and the stage to gently ease the aforementioned bunny onto the stage near Mr. Thompson's feet.
I was not responsible for the people around me who pointed at me extravagantly when Mr. Thompson held up the bunny with a smile and gleefully announced that he could "play all night if I had 50 more of these."
Most definitely, I deny ALL responsibility for what happened next, when, in a fit of Easter- and Thompson-induced euphoria, a friend (who shall remain nameless) pitched HER bunny in the general direction of Mr. Thompson, where a metallic BRZNNNGGK! suggested that it had hit at least two guitar strings. I do not believe that this bunny's velocity was enough to do any damage. Really, though, am I my friend's keeper? (Perhaps my friend needs a keeper.)
I do, finally, swear that I will never again bring chocolate bunnies to a Richard Thompson concert, even if it is Easter. I am relieved that no one was injured, that no harm seemed to have come to the guitar, and that Mr. Thompson was forgiving enough to join me in a post-concert chorus of "My Bunny Lies Over the Ocean." Nevertheless, I am mortified at what might have happened.
Respectfully submitted,
Pamela Murray Winters
P.S. I didn't even get a damn bunny of my own. Thompson got Bunny No. 10; I gave Bunny No. 11 to our waitress as part of the tip.
P.P.S. My friend the bunny-lobber had only one beer; I had only two beers, and one was stale. So alcohol did not factor into this incident.
P.P.P.S. I ought to have noted earlier that each bunny was sealed in a foil pouch. No one was flinging loose chocolate around or anything. I mean, at least not in my section of the Birchmere.
- - -
[I believe that it was two nights later, April 17, when I was called upon for a request and asked for "Don't Let a Thief Steal Into Your Heart." My listpal Scott kept talking about it on the list, and I replied to one of his messages:]
Not to sound ungrateful or anything (reminds me of the joke about the lost child with the punch line "He had a hat!"), but what I really miss is the coda that he sang at a St. Ann's show a few years ago--the one that goes something like
You're living in dreamland
And you're standing on quicksand
Won't you try try try to understand
Don't let a thief steal into your heart
That really made the song for me back then--I hadn't been a fan of it before that, but that performance, with its evangelical fervor, really knocked me out. I'm glad to hear him doing "Thief" again.
Pam (and again and again....)
First, here's Flip, who will then cut to my letter to him:
As the Birchmere gigs seem to have ended in An Exclusive Pam Winters Tribute, and we've heard Pam is away for some time, I'd like (after a short hesitation) to come forward with the story Pam mailed me after the first Birchmere concert. I pretty well know it's not done putting on private mails to the full list, but I think this mail really says it all: a proof of ultimate RT-fandom, that - maybe, in European circumstances - could only be equaled by Emanuelle from France. No offence meant to either of these female RT-lovers of the highest class. I think forwarding this to you all is worth the naughty sin. If you want to flame me for this, please do (but keep it off-list, please ;-)
Pam addressed her letter to me and to someone else on this list that I know of , but I think she was silently hoping I would forward it to the guys in RT's direct environment & I'm afraid I surely did.
Imagine, it's earlier this week. Just After Easter 2001. Pam Winters:
QUOTE:
Dear Flip:
I am too humiliated to approach Thompson Management with this tale directly. However, should it prove significant in the future, it would be best if the details were made clear. You may share them at your discretion. Herewith, my affidavit.
- - -
I do admit to bringing 11 (eleven) chocolate bunnies to the Birchmere this evening--Easter evening, April 15, 2001. They were not removed from my bag when it was searched (glanced at) by Birchmere officials.
Having gotten a seat within four yards of the stage, I was quite thrilled and perhaps a little giddy. I admit to having then freely, nay promiscuously, and certainly gleefully presented a number of these bunnies to various friends, strangers, and other folks at the concert, including one Simon Tassano.
I attest that the following conversation then took place: When Mr. Tassano asked, "Are you going to give a chocolate bunny to Richard?" I asked him if he would like me to give it to him to give to Mr. Thompson, or should I just follow through on my original plan of, and I quote, "lobbing it at him onstage." Mr. Tassano's reply, as I recall it, was, "Oh, yes, lob away: but make sure that you DON'T HIT THE GUITAR."
I swear that I was quite well-behaved throughout the concert and did not cause anything approaching a ruckus. I can call witnesses who will verify my account--oh, except that they were probably too busy gazing, slack-jawed, at the amazing Mr. Thompson to notice my demeanor.
I thought carefully about the bunny delivery, and at the beginning of the first encore, after judging the various trajectories and considering the placement of the folks in front of me, I forswore all lobbing activity and asked the nice woman seated between me and the stage to gently ease the aforementioned bunny onto the stage near Mr. Thompson's feet.
I was not responsible for the people around me who pointed at me extravagantly when Mr. Thompson held up the bunny with a smile and gleefully announced that he could "play all night if I had 50 more of these."
Most definitely, I deny ALL responsibility for what happened next, when, in a fit of Easter- and Thompson-induced euphoria, a friend (who shall remain nameless) pitched HER bunny in the general direction of Mr. Thompson, where a metallic BRZNNNGGK! suggested that it had hit at least two guitar strings. I do not believe that this bunny's velocity was enough to do any damage. Really, though, am I my friend's keeper? (Perhaps my friend needs a keeper.)
I do, finally, swear that I will never again bring chocolate bunnies to a Richard Thompson concert, even if it is Easter. I am relieved that no one was injured, that no harm seemed to have come to the guitar, and that Mr. Thompson was forgiving enough to join me in a post-concert chorus of "My Bunny Lies Over the Ocean." Nevertheless, I am mortified at what might have happened.
Respectfully submitted,
Pamela Murray Winters
P.S. I didn't even get a damn bunny of my own. Thompson got Bunny No. 10; I gave Bunny No. 11 to our waitress as part of the tip.
P.P.S. My friend the bunny-lobber had only one beer; I had only two beers, and one was stale. So alcohol did not factor into this incident.
P.P.P.S. I ought to have noted earlier that each bunny was sealed in a foil pouch. No one was flinging loose chocolate around or anything. I mean, at least not in my section of the Birchmere.
- - -
[I believe that it was two nights later, April 17, when I was called upon for a request and asked for "Don't Let a Thief Steal Into Your Heart." My listpal Scott kept talking about it on the list, and I replied to one of his messages:]
Not to sound ungrateful or anything (reminds me of the joke about the lost child with the punch line "He had a hat!"), but what I really miss is the coda that he sang at a St. Ann's show a few years ago--the one that goes something like
You're living in dreamland
And you're standing on quicksand
Won't you try try try to understand
Don't let a thief steal into your heart
That really made the song for me back then--I hadn't been a fan of it before that, but that performance, with its evangelical fervor, really knocked me out. I'm glad to hear him doing "Thief" again.
Pam (and again and again....)
New Orleans Jazz Fest, 2001
RT list, natch.
Criminy! Where is everyone who saw RT on Friday? Still out partyin'? (We're exhausted.)
He did a pretty short set--50 minutes, tops. Someone kept notes on the tunes (where are you?). He was mobbed by autograph seekers at the Virgin tent afterwards. (Sorry re typos...teeny portable keyboard.) Said he had to turn like a quarter of them away. I got to interview him, about which more later. (And I ate three of his strawberries and felt terribly guilty later.)
His set (electric) with Beausoleil--he was on for about half B's set--was wonderful. Very well received. The Times Picayune thinks he should play with B. more often. His pic was on the cover of Sat's T-P--color, above the fold.
Rob and I have to go out now and retrieve Grant's house keys from the transvestite Chinese restaurant where we had dinner last night. I shall leave NO tomorrow morning having missed several things I wanted to experience: a spaghetti and meatball po' boy and Louis Prima's grave among them. It's been a great trip, though.
Later:
Pam, in New Orleans
- - -
Amir wrote:
<>
Yeah, I love to sneak stuff like that in....
There's a restaurant in New York City that I've always wanted to go to. It's called Lucky Cheng's. The stunning waitstaff comprises lovely ladies who are not what they seem. So when we were in New Orleans, I was delighted to find a Lucky Cheng's in the French Quarter. We were seated by the window, and Rob was very amused by the people who passed and pointed--I guess the place is rather notorious. I was amused, too, until he suggested, "I wonder whether those people think you're a transvestite."
I got my amusement back when a somewhat long in the, er, tooth Britney Spears clone did a dance for us that included giving Rob a bit of a nuzzle. She also did a cartwheel that was pretty impressive--I could never do a cartwheel, and certainly not in a minidress.
Oh, the food was good, too. But the drinks were pretty deadly. I still don't know how I misplaced my hosts' keys, nor do I recall, precisely, how I ended up in Cafe du Monde with a big mug of black coffee and a pile of beignets to fight Rob over.
I have got to go back through the last week or more of mail...I don't recall seeing posts about RT's shows in Boston, Baltimore, or New Orleans and very little about the Harry Smith tribute (about which I desire to learn much, much more).
Pam (awfully tempted by the Iron Horse)
Criminy! Where is everyone who saw RT on Friday? Still out partyin'? (We're exhausted.)
He did a pretty short set--50 minutes, tops. Someone kept notes on the tunes (where are you?). He was mobbed by autograph seekers at the Virgin tent afterwards. (Sorry re typos...teeny portable keyboard.) Said he had to turn like a quarter of them away. I got to interview him, about which more later. (And I ate three of his strawberries and felt terribly guilty later.)
His set (electric) with Beausoleil--he was on for about half B's set--was wonderful. Very well received. The Times Picayune thinks he should play with B. more often. His pic was on the cover of Sat's T-P--color, above the fold.
Rob and I have to go out now and retrieve Grant's house keys from the transvestite Chinese restaurant where we had dinner last night. I shall leave NO tomorrow morning having missed several things I wanted to experience: a spaghetti and meatball po' boy and Louis Prima's grave among them. It's been a great trip, though.
Later:
Pam, in New Orleans
- - -
Amir wrote:
<
Yeah, I love to sneak stuff like that in....
There's a restaurant in New York City that I've always wanted to go to. It's called Lucky Cheng's. The stunning waitstaff comprises lovely ladies who are not what they seem. So when we were in New Orleans, I was delighted to find a Lucky Cheng's in the French Quarter. We were seated by the window, and Rob was very amused by the people who passed and pointed--I guess the place is rather notorious. I was amused, too, until he suggested, "I wonder whether those people think you're a transvestite."
I got my amusement back when a somewhat long in the, er, tooth Britney Spears clone did a dance for us that included giving Rob a bit of a nuzzle. She also did a cartwheel that was pretty impressive--I could never do a cartwheel, and certainly not in a minidress.
Oh, the food was good, too. But the drinks were pretty deadly. I still don't know how I misplaced my hosts' keys, nor do I recall, precisely, how I ended up in Cafe du Monde with a big mug of black coffee and a pile of beignets to fight Rob over.
I have got to go back through the last week or more of mail...I don't recall seeing posts about RT's shows in Boston, Baltimore, or New Orleans and very little about the Harry Smith tribute (about which I desire to learn much, much more).
Pam (awfully tempted by the Iron Horse)
McCarter Theatre, Princeton, NJ, October 30, 2001
Chris Bates said, "If we choose to see him (or any act, for that matter) more than biannually, this is something that we need to accept. The vast majority of his audience aren't like us, I imagine."
One hopes!
I've got to disagree with Kirk here on the quality of the McCarter show...although he's not the first person I've heard say that RT seemed to be phoning in bits of it. I found it energetic, fairly precise, and soulful throughout.
He did 22 songs, half of which were relatively new--not all new to those of us who see him all the time, of course. Three were from Mock Tudor (Cooksferry, Crawl Back, Dry My Tears). Five were as-yet-unrecorded Thompson compositions, included the already-oft-heard "My Daddy Is a Mummy." Two were covers from the Getty show. One, "Persuasion," was also relatively new (and gets better with each of RT's solo essays of it; I think at first he really missed having Teddy there).
Of the older (pre-MT) songs he did, only "Razor Dance" and "Turning of the Tide" were letdowns. (I admit to not caring much for ToTT, and I got a bit antsy at that point in the program.) His guitar work on "Shoot Out the Lights" and "Down Where the Drunkards Roll" was up to his usual high standards. SoTL revealed a rather elaborate, almost too-out-there conversation between high and low notes on the guitar, whereas Drunkards was sublimely beautiful, with bagpipe-like skirls that shimmered between a call to arms and a funeral lament. "Wall of Death" was quite different, as already discussed. "1952 Vincent Black Lightning" was...well, it was 1952 VBL, and therefore almost mandatory. (He didn't accept requests to do his other perennial, "Beeswing.")
I thought that, throughout the set, he took more chances, vocally, than I expected him to. Yeah, he screwed up some lyrics on "Razor Dance" (and rebounded fairly quickly), but it's been a long time since I've seen him do a show where he hasn't flubbed at least one lyric, and I don't hold it against him.
He left himself somewhat open to requests, though he didn't leave a lot of time for them.
I can't speak for the sound, since I was in an iffy seat for sound anyway (front and center--so I was getting a sort of echo from in back of me). (Am I complaining? Hell, no!)
I've seen him 20 or 30 times in the past couple of years; I've been to shows that were less than his best, and this didn't feel like one of them to me.
So Kirk, if you're sick of seeing him and want to get rid of those Englewood tickets.... :^)
Pam
One hopes!
I've got to disagree with Kirk here on the quality of the McCarter show...although he's not the first person I've heard say that RT seemed to be phoning in bits of it. I found it energetic, fairly precise, and soulful throughout.
He did 22 songs, half of which were relatively new--not all new to those of us who see him all the time, of course. Three were from Mock Tudor (Cooksferry, Crawl Back, Dry My Tears). Five were as-yet-unrecorded Thompson compositions, included the already-oft-heard "My Daddy Is a Mummy." Two were covers from the Getty show. One, "Persuasion," was also relatively new (and gets better with each of RT's solo essays of it; I think at first he really missed having Teddy there).
Of the older (pre-MT) songs he did, only "Razor Dance" and "Turning of the Tide" were letdowns. (I admit to not caring much for ToTT, and I got a bit antsy at that point in the program.) His guitar work on "Shoot Out the Lights" and "Down Where the Drunkards Roll" was up to his usual high standards. SoTL revealed a rather elaborate, almost too-out-there conversation between high and low notes on the guitar, whereas Drunkards was sublimely beautiful, with bagpipe-like skirls that shimmered between a call to arms and a funeral lament. "Wall of Death" was quite different, as already discussed. "1952 Vincent Black Lightning" was...well, it was 1952 VBL, and therefore almost mandatory. (He didn't accept requests to do his other perennial, "Beeswing.")
I thought that, throughout the set, he took more chances, vocally, than I expected him to. Yeah, he screwed up some lyrics on "Razor Dance" (and rebounded fairly quickly), but it's been a long time since I've seen him do a show where he hasn't flubbed at least one lyric, and I don't hold it against him.
He left himself somewhat open to requests, though he didn't leave a lot of time for them.
I can't speak for the sound, since I was in an iffy seat for sound anyway (front and center--so I was getting a sort of echo from in back of me). (Am I complaining? Hell, no!)
I've seen him 20 or 30 times in the past couple of years; I've been to shows that were less than his best, and this didn't feel like one of them to me.
So Kirk, if you're sick of seeing him and want to get rid of those Englewood tickets.... :^)
Pam
Pittsburgh, March 2002
Someday I'll have to fill in all the details--venues, dates, etc.--for some of these RT-list messages.
So I've come home to the veritable flood of messages about last night's Pittsburgh show. (Can you read my sarcasm?) OK, maybe the rest of you guys have lives to lead beyond the terminal and the feet of RT, so I'll won't whine too much. I'll try to keep my comments brief and hope that someone else elaborates.
Excellent show. Lots of newish material. I have the "official" set list and will herewith reproduce it, hoping against hope that I am not thereby preventing the nice man who gave it to me from ever bestowing such a gift again. Those of you who have seen RT's set lists and who have been keeping up with recent concert threads should be able to while away a happy hour figuring out these notes.
Running down the left of the long side of a 3 x 5 index card, graph ruled:
GETH
COLD X
CRAWL
OUTSIDE
DADDY
SLOTH
SIR PAT
[there is a bracket next to the latter two titles, and an underscore is
below them]
DESTINY
MADONNA
SO BEN
SHEN
OOPS!
[the last three are bracketed]
GHOST U
TIDE
[another underscore]
CANT W
PERSUASION
COOKS
DRUNKARDS
In the right-hand column, floating around near the Getty numbers:
DIM
FEEL
MIS
Then a box appears, bisected by a horizontal line. Above the line:
VINCE
AULD
Below it:
WALL
UNSEEN
He didn't keep to this set list. I think it contains some alternatives (we didn't get "Word Unspoken, Sight Unseen"...I knew that there was something I wanted to hear that I missed!) and we also got some requests ("Jimmy Shands").
Fine voice. Excellent mood. Wonderful, exploratory guitar...that attitude that suggests he could just stand there all day and play, whether we were there or not, if he deemed it appropriate. Nice suit jacket...but it's kind of long, isn't it? Sort of looked like he borrowed it from Dad.
One of the ballsiest things I've ever seen him do: He started to joke about the Taliban. Something like: "You know, many things that we think are bad have their good points." He seemed to back off this, maybe because he wasn't sure where it was going or because he lost his nerve or because the crowd wasn't responding as he expected. I was very aware of being not too far from the site in Pennsylvania where the plane that was headed for downtown Washington had been crashed, almost six months after the fact. I was also aware that I was hearing an avowed Muslim attempt a jibe that might really confuse some people. Maybe other people in the audience had these thoughts as well, and maybe he perceived their reactions.
The word "perverse" comes up a lot when it comes to RT. I know I use it pretty often, and in the Humphries bio, which I'm reading (at last I've dragged myself past page 96!), it comes up, especially in connection with Joe Boyd. But Boyd is also the person who was quoted as saying that back in the early days of Fairport, "My instinct was always to trust Richard in every possible situation. I would always say to myself that whatever Richard felt or wanted, or what his instincts were about something, were the ones that were apt to be right."
I couldn't agree more about Richard's musical instincts, insofar as allowing himself and being allowed to respond to them has created the musician he is today. I drove back from Pittsburgh listening to Richard provide Dylanesque backing to Ian Matthews, do oldies with the Bunch, and play long-legged electric guitar with the Golden Palominos. Last night I heard him take a Britney Spears hit and, as Rob put it when I burned up my cell-phone minutes enthusing to him about it, "find the song in there."
The timbre of Richard's voice is probably my single favorite thing about him as a musician, and it's the part over which he's had least control. But what he's done to imbue everything he touches with his own sound--while never grandstanding or grafting something on where it doesn't belong--is quite amazing, is entirely to his credit, and is certainly the result of a lot of concentration, work, and strongmindedness. It's not that he can do anything; it's that he can do anything he wants, and he wants the right things.
And the divine? Where does some higher being come in?
Oh, blah blah blah. Anyone else?
- - -
Duane said:
>I am drawing a blank on the second encore. What did he do? Anybody? I >don't think it was Wall of Death and I am certain it wasn't Words Unspoken >Sight Unseen. I really must start paying more attention... But by then I >was just grinning from the joy.
Wasn't that "Jimmy Shands," followed by "I Misunderstood"? He was ignoring strident requests for "Beeswing."
I could not make out the "Gethsemane" lyrics in my seat one meter from RT's shinbones, but that might have been because they weren't familiar. Or maybe the sound wasn't totally right yet. I know next to nothing about sound, but I bet that even after Simon and others have gotten everything set up where they want it, the presence of hundreds of sweaty bodies must affect the acoustics somewhat.
Speaking of sweaty bodies...did I misinterpret things because of where I was sitting, or were the house lights on for most of the show? It seemed very bright.
So I've come home to the veritable flood of messages about last night's Pittsburgh show. (Can you read my sarcasm?) OK, maybe the rest of you guys have lives to lead beyond the terminal and the feet of RT, so I'll won't whine too much. I'll try to keep my comments brief and hope that someone else elaborates.
Excellent show. Lots of newish material. I have the "official" set list and will herewith reproduce it, hoping against hope that I am not thereby preventing the nice man who gave it to me from ever bestowing such a gift again. Those of you who have seen RT's set lists and who have been keeping up with recent concert threads should be able to while away a happy hour figuring out these notes.
Running down the left of the long side of a 3 x 5 index card, graph ruled:
GETH
COLD X
CRAWL
OUTSIDE
DADDY
SLOTH
SIR PAT
[there is a bracket next to the latter two titles, and an underscore is
below them]
DESTINY
MADONNA
SO BEN
SHEN
OOPS!
[the last three are bracketed]
GHOST U
TIDE
[another underscore]
CANT W
PERSUASION
COOKS
DRUNKARDS
In the right-hand column, floating around near the Getty numbers:
DIM
FEEL
MIS
Then a box appears, bisected by a horizontal line. Above the line:
VINCE
AULD
Below it:
WALL
UNSEEN
He didn't keep to this set list. I think it contains some alternatives (we didn't get "Word Unspoken, Sight Unseen"...I knew that there was something I wanted to hear that I missed!) and we also got some requests ("Jimmy Shands").
Fine voice. Excellent mood. Wonderful, exploratory guitar...that attitude that suggests he could just stand there all day and play, whether we were there or not, if he deemed it appropriate. Nice suit jacket...but it's kind of long, isn't it? Sort of looked like he borrowed it from Dad.
One of the ballsiest things I've ever seen him do: He started to joke about the Taliban. Something like: "You know, many things that we think are bad have their good points." He seemed to back off this, maybe because he wasn't sure where it was going or because he lost his nerve or because the crowd wasn't responding as he expected. I was very aware of being not too far from the site in Pennsylvania where the plane that was headed for downtown Washington had been crashed, almost six months after the fact. I was also aware that I was hearing an avowed Muslim attempt a jibe that might really confuse some people. Maybe other people in the audience had these thoughts as well, and maybe he perceived their reactions.
The word "perverse" comes up a lot when it comes to RT. I know I use it pretty often, and in the Humphries bio, which I'm reading (at last I've dragged myself past page 96!), it comes up, especially in connection with Joe Boyd. But Boyd is also the person who was quoted as saying that back in the early days of Fairport, "My instinct was always to trust Richard in every possible situation. I would always say to myself that whatever Richard felt or wanted, or what his instincts were about something, were the ones that were apt to be right."
I couldn't agree more about Richard's musical instincts, insofar as allowing himself and being allowed to respond to them has created the musician he is today. I drove back from Pittsburgh listening to Richard provide Dylanesque backing to Ian Matthews, do oldies with the Bunch, and play long-legged electric guitar with the Golden Palominos. Last night I heard him take a Britney Spears hit and, as Rob put it when I burned up my cell-phone minutes enthusing to him about it, "find the song in there."
The timbre of Richard's voice is probably my single favorite thing about him as a musician, and it's the part over which he's had least control. But what he's done to imbue everything he touches with his own sound--while never grandstanding or grafting something on where it doesn't belong--is quite amazing, is entirely to his credit, and is certainly the result of a lot of concentration, work, and strongmindedness. It's not that he can do anything; it's that he can do anything he wants, and he wants the right things.
And the divine? Where does some higher being come in?
Oh, blah blah blah. Anyone else?
- - -
Duane said:
>I am drawing a blank on the second encore. What did he do? Anybody? I >don't think it was Wall of Death and I am certain it wasn't Words Unspoken >Sight Unseen. I really must start paying more attention... But by then I >was just grinning from the joy.
Wasn't that "Jimmy Shands," followed by "I Misunderstood"? He was ignoring strident requests for "Beeswing."
I could not make out the "Gethsemane" lyrics in my seat one meter from RT's shinbones, but that might have been because they weren't familiar. Or maybe the sound wasn't totally right yet. I know next to nothing about sound, but I bet that even after Simon and others have gotten everything set up where they want it, the presence of hundreds of sweaty bodies must affect the acoustics somewhat.
Speaking of sweaty bodies...did I misinterpret things because of where I was sitting, or were the house lights on for most of the show? It seemed very bright.
Cropredy 2002 posts
As usual, my RT-list observations unfolded over several messages.
Ian West wrote, re Cropredy:
[[ Destiny (?) (with an extra long intro as Richard struggled to remember the first line)]]
No, this wasn't a forgotten line. Just as he began the song, the fog machines above the stage, which were probably affected by the moist weather, belched out a tandem blast of white smoke, as if a pair of bilious dragons were announcing a new pope. The one on stage left was particularly percussive, making a sort of blat! as it activated. Richard was apparently taken aback--really or mock-ly--and reacted to it for a few moments before sweeping right back into the intro.
Sorry if I'm repeating someone else's observation; I'm just slogging my way through all this lovely e-mail that came when I was away for two weeks (just got off the plane from Heathrow a couple hours ago).
- - -
Bill wrote, re "Oops":
[[I think OH gives the "What, you don't know the words" look to EVERY audience.At least, both times Ive seen him do it & I believe its been mentioned beforeby others. He seems to be quite amused by some audiences inabilty to sing the current pop hits when they frequently know the lyrics to century-old tunes.]]
OTOH, Rob and I have learned it from RT. Rob was whistling it in the Virgin check-in line (insert Britney joke here) at Heathrow yesterday. I kept trying to seed him with other songs on the mental jukebox ("Ironman") but ultimately succumbed as well.
I was in the photo pit (working for Dirty Linen--too bad I had only 200-speed film that night!) for half of RT's Friday set. Now there's an unusual experience--singing "Oooh baby baby" while crouching right at his feet, aiming that big lens up there. When I caught myself in the beginnings of a booty-wiggle, I realized my journalistic responsibility to tone it down a bit. But all y'all in the front were singing--I saw and heard you! What a kick! We in the pit were singing too. I was down there for "Who Knows Where the Time Goes" at the end of Friday's set...that was a pretty heady experience.
Jeez, it's amazing to be in a field full of people who treat "Poor Will" with screams of joy...it's like Cropredy is some alternate universe where RT gets to see what it'd be like if he had Springsteenian stardom. What must it be like to be center stage and have some 20,000 people singing one of your songs (MoTL) like it's a hymn, with impassioned belief?
Granted, John Barleycorn had a hand in people's responses. (We had a hilarious drunk next to us in Saturday's crowd, a man with a beautiful and earnest speaking voice, who was proclaiming that "Poor Will" "by rights should be like 'Smoke on the Water.'" He also gave a critical assessment of RT, the bulk of which I didn't hear, but which ended with "But he's just a bloody brilliant guitar player.") They ran out of 6X on Saturday, which was just as well for me; I'd limited my imbibing over the weekend and might have succumbed too deeply to the allure of those little brown jugs by the Fairport set, as usual. I made up for it, alas, on Sunday at the cricket...damn that Scrumpy Jack, whoever he is!
Of the five Cropredys (-ies?) I've attended, this may well have been my favorite. Some of the others were close to as satisfying, but the deciding factor would come down to friendship: the lovely sense of affection and comfort I felt this year, among new chums and old, close friends and acquaintances. I wish I'd met the folks I missed and spent more time with a few I saw only for a few minutes. I'm grateful to Chris Bates for scaring up some late-in-the-game Worcester tickets for me and Rob, and also to Martin Jonas and the impossibly beautiful and kind Nicola for hosting us in atmospheric (OK, wet) North Wales and taking us to the Beaumaris gig (no one has mentioned that someone in the crowd called out to RT that he should move to Wales, to which the California transplant replied, "What, with this weather?"). Also to Simon Tassano, if he's reading this, for continued personal kindnesses, ever-diligent RT-related work, and the patience to not just throw something at me when we kept running into each other again and again and again--I sure hope he doesn't think I'm stalking him.
Oh, yeah, I guess the weather really sucked, come to think of it. I've never gotten sunburned and drenched to the skin on the same day before. But what the hell. Those nice Cropredy stewards pushed our rental car out of the mud, and we didn't totally collapse from sunstroke, and a little trip through the car wash made us (I mean, our car) presentable for the Avis people, and we didn't get pneumonia as far as I can tell (cough cough)...and now I'm rambling enough to scare away even listmembers not named Gus....
Pam (really must try to sleep some more)
Ian West wrote, re Cropredy:
[[ Destiny (?) (with an extra long intro as Richard struggled to remember the first line)]]
No, this wasn't a forgotten line. Just as he began the song, the fog machines above the stage, which were probably affected by the moist weather, belched out a tandem blast of white smoke, as if a pair of bilious dragons were announcing a new pope. The one on stage left was particularly percussive, making a sort of blat! as it activated. Richard was apparently taken aback--really or mock-ly--and reacted to it for a few moments before sweeping right back into the intro.
Sorry if I'm repeating someone else's observation; I'm just slogging my way through all this lovely e-mail that came when I was away for two weeks (just got off the plane from Heathrow a couple hours ago).
- - -
Bill wrote, re "Oops":
[[I think OH gives the "What, you don't know the words" look to EVERY audience.At least, both times Ive seen him do it & I believe its been mentioned beforeby others. He seems to be quite amused by some audiences inabilty to sing the current pop hits when they frequently know the lyrics to century-old tunes.]]
OTOH, Rob and I have learned it from RT. Rob was whistling it in the Virgin check-in line (insert Britney joke here) at Heathrow yesterday. I kept trying to seed him with other songs on the mental jukebox ("Ironman") but ultimately succumbed as well.
I was in the photo pit (working for Dirty Linen--too bad I had only 200-speed film that night!) for half of RT's Friday set. Now there's an unusual experience--singing "Oooh baby baby" while crouching right at his feet, aiming that big lens up there. When I caught myself in the beginnings of a booty-wiggle, I realized my journalistic responsibility to tone it down a bit. But all y'all in the front were singing--I saw and heard you! What a kick! We in the pit were singing too. I was down there for "Who Knows Where the Time Goes" at the end of Friday's set...that was a pretty heady experience.
Jeez, it's amazing to be in a field full of people who treat "Poor Will" with screams of joy...it's like Cropredy is some alternate universe where RT gets to see what it'd be like if he had Springsteenian stardom. What must it be like to be center stage and have some 20,000 people singing one of your songs (MoTL) like it's a hymn, with impassioned belief?
Granted, John Barleycorn had a hand in people's responses. (We had a hilarious drunk next to us in Saturday's crowd, a man with a beautiful and earnest speaking voice, who was proclaiming that "Poor Will" "by rights should be like 'Smoke on the Water.'" He also gave a critical assessment of RT, the bulk of which I didn't hear, but which ended with "But he's just a bloody brilliant guitar player.") They ran out of 6X on Saturday, which was just as well for me; I'd limited my imbibing over the weekend and might have succumbed too deeply to the allure of those little brown jugs by the Fairport set, as usual. I made up for it, alas, on Sunday at the cricket...damn that Scrumpy Jack, whoever he is!
Of the five Cropredys (-ies?) I've attended, this may well have been my favorite. Some of the others were close to as satisfying, but the deciding factor would come down to friendship: the lovely sense of affection and comfort I felt this year, among new chums and old, close friends and acquaintances. I wish I'd met the folks I missed and spent more time with a few I saw only for a few minutes. I'm grateful to Chris Bates for scaring up some late-in-the-game Worcester tickets for me and Rob, and also to Martin Jonas and the impossibly beautiful and kind Nicola for hosting us in atmospheric (OK, wet) North Wales and taking us to the Beaumaris gig (no one has mentioned that someone in the crowd called out to RT that he should move to Wales, to which the California transplant replied, "What, with this weather?"). Also to Simon Tassano, if he's reading this, for continued personal kindnesses, ever-diligent RT-related work, and the patience to not just throw something at me when we kept running into each other again and again and again--I sure hope he doesn't think I'm stalking him.
Oh, yeah, I guess the weather really sucked, come to think of it. I've never gotten sunburned and drenched to the skin on the same day before. But what the hell. Those nice Cropredy stewards pushed our rental car out of the mud, and we didn't totally collapse from sunstroke, and a little trip through the car wash made us (I mean, our car) presentable for the Avis people, and we didn't get pneumonia as far as I can tell (cough cough)...and now I'm rambling enough to scare away even listmembers not named Gus....
Pam (really must try to sleep some more)
Northwest, January 2003
The Eugene tour was where I interviewed RT for the Paste article.
From the RT list.
I just got home on the red-eye not long ago. Nice, except for the part where I thought I was gonna die. But I digress.
Shouted requests were a big part of both the Spokane and Eugene shows. For whatever reason, the folks out there don't seem to have the timing we East Coasters do when it comes to this sort of thing--and a couple of them were very persistent. You know, RT would be tuning up for the next song, and someone would yell something, and he'd then go after it! He was very obliging. I wonder whether he wasn't/isn't excessively obliging. (Not that I didn't benefit from his accommodating nature, having scored a "Burns Supper" m'self.)
At which show did someone keep yelling "Head in a Sack!"? Eugene, I think. Wonderful to see Chris Warren in Spokane and Gary (and co.) in Albany (at last we see each other face to face!). And as always, Richard and his pal Simon.
Pam (Must Sleeeeep Now)
From the RT list.
I just got home on the red-eye not long ago. Nice, except for the part where I thought I was gonna die. But I digress.
Shouted requests were a big part of both the Spokane and Eugene shows. For whatever reason, the folks out there don't seem to have the timing we East Coasters do when it comes to this sort of thing--and a couple of them were very persistent. You know, RT would be tuning up for the next song, and someone would yell something, and he'd then go after it! He was very obliging. I wonder whether he wasn't/isn't excessively obliging. (Not that I didn't benefit from his accommodating nature, having scored a "Burns Supper" m'self.)
At which show did someone keep yelling "Head in a Sack!"? Eugene, I think. Wonderful to see Chris Warren in Spokane and Gary (and co.) in Albany (at last we see each other face to face!). And as always, Richard and his pal Simon.
Pam (Must Sleeeeep Now)
9:30 Club, May 2003--Washington Post review
Richard Thompson at 9:30: Divine Inspiration
He's been called a guitar god, but on Monday at the 9:30 Club, touring with a four-piece band in support of his just-released 'Old Kit Bag,' British folk-rocker Richard Thompson seemed to be drawing on a higher power.
The metal-stomp 'Pearly Jim,' about a money-grubbing guru, and the Middle Eastern-tinged 'Outside of the Inside,' a Taliban's-eye view of the West ('God never listened to Charlie Parker'), warned of false beliefs, 'Bank Vault in Heaven' questioned the notion of squandering today in favor of tomorrow, while the meditative, eerie 'Word Unspoken, Sight Unseen' portrayed a surrender to the mystery of love.
The concert was a revival meeting for hordes of Thompson's fans, who were accustomed to seeing him in more sedate venues. Ably backed by longtime sideman Pete Zorn on saxes, mandolin, guitar and vocals, propulsive young drummer Earl Harvin, and acoustic and electric bassist Rory McFarlane, Thompson also took solo acoustic turns on the yearning 'A Love You Can't Survive' and 'Missie How You Let Me Down,' and the crowd-pleasing motorcycle ballad '1952 Vincent Black Lightning.' But a string of mid-set rockers, including 'Bank Vault' and 'Shoot Out the Lights,' gave the ax aficionados the exploratory, emotional string work they craved. Thompson took 'Can't Win' to new heights, with a lengthy solo that shattered the repressive atmosphere set up by the song's mordant lyric.
Crisp sound threw every detail of the show into sharp relief, and Thompson's vocal articulation and range took him from low growls to plaintive, extended high notes with every word intact. The result was a show that was never holier-than-thou---just wholly satisfying.
--Pamela Murray Winters
He's been called a guitar god, but on Monday at the 9:30 Club, touring with a four-piece band in support of his just-released 'Old Kit Bag,' British folk-rocker Richard Thompson seemed to be drawing on a higher power.
The metal-stomp 'Pearly Jim,' about a money-grubbing guru, and the Middle Eastern-tinged 'Outside of the Inside,' a Taliban's-eye view of the West ('God never listened to Charlie Parker'), warned of false beliefs, 'Bank Vault in Heaven' questioned the notion of squandering today in favor of tomorrow, while the meditative, eerie 'Word Unspoken, Sight Unseen' portrayed a surrender to the mystery of love.
The concert was a revival meeting for hordes of Thompson's fans, who were accustomed to seeing him in more sedate venues. Ably backed by longtime sideman Pete Zorn on saxes, mandolin, guitar and vocals, propulsive young drummer Earl Harvin, and acoustic and electric bassist Rory McFarlane, Thompson also took solo acoustic turns on the yearning 'A Love You Can't Survive' and 'Missie How You Let Me Down,' and the crowd-pleasing motorcycle ballad '1952 Vincent Black Lightning.' But a string of mid-set rockers, including 'Bank Vault' and 'Shoot Out the Lights,' gave the ax aficionados the exploratory, emotional string work they craved. Thompson took 'Can't Win' to new heights, with a lengthy solo that shattered the repressive atmosphere set up by the song's mordant lyric.
Crisp sound threw every detail of the show into sharp relief, and Thompson's vocal articulation and range took him from low growls to plaintive, extended high notes with every word intact. The result was a show that was never holier-than-thou---just wholly satisfying.
--Pamela Murray Winters
May 2003 tour
RT-list post, titled "Missie, How I Let You Down." I'll try to find the corresponding Washington Post review.
So I've just gotten back from several days on the Thommo Trail. I may or may not write more about this later. If I do, it's sure to be subjective blather that you're free to delete. The meat of the shows has already been described by others quite well.
So I'm here, to throw my sorry self abjectly at your virtual feet.
Before leaving for Durham yesterday--was it just yesterday?--I wrote my review of the 9:30 show for the Washington Post. (I've been a stringer for the Post for a few months now, and it's the highest-profile gig I've ever had. I love it; they send me to all sorts of shows, the pay is good, and people I haven't heard from in years are calling to say they read my reviews.)
It was a difficult review to write. I could, and would, write a totally different one for y'all, here. Not formal, and definitely informed by the minute levels of aficionado-ism among us that Jon Cole described so well in his 9:30 review. And I was worried about gushing--I'm saying now, not for the first time, that that Post review is my last-ever review of RT, 'cause of my "detachment" problems. (I tend to get tempted back though.)
But I did what I thought was an OK job, and then I went to Durham. So I'm sitting in the third row center of the Carolina Theater last night, and RT begins the beautiful "Missie." And suddenly, I remember: In my review, I've used "Missie" as one of several examples of "acoustic" songs.
I squirmed through the rest of the song (still distracted somewhat by its beauty) and then literally bolted up the aisle to the lobby, cell phone in hand. I had to call a writer colleague to give me a Post editor's number; mine was in the car. I tried a couple numbers he gave me, but I got voice mail. It was something like 9:30.
Missing "Al Bowlly," I returned to the theater and managed some more of the how--after all, it was brilliant, no matter how upset I was--and was seriously diverted only once when I remembered that I'd also said that "Missie" was "solo." (I think that was what sent me out a second time to make some more calls--so I missed "Vincent.")
What had I been thinking? It's not like I didn't remember the 9:30 performance. Something just slipped, somehow; I was thinking of quieter, more contemplative songs and contrasting them against "Pearly Jim," etc.
Anyway, I called everyone at the Post except for Woodward and Bernstein, but it was too late--the incorrect info got in. And I'm just sick about it.
So I hope y'all will forgive me.
Pam
So I've just gotten back from several days on the Thommo Trail. I may or may not write more about this later. If I do, it's sure to be subjective blather that you're free to delete. The meat of the shows has already been described by others quite well.
So I'm here, to throw my sorry self abjectly at your virtual feet.
Before leaving for Durham yesterday--was it just yesterday?--I wrote my review of the 9:30 show for the Washington Post. (I've been a stringer for the Post for a few months now, and it's the highest-profile gig I've ever had. I love it; they send me to all sorts of shows, the pay is good, and people I haven't heard from in years are calling to say they read my reviews.)
It was a difficult review to write. I could, and would, write a totally different one for y'all, here. Not formal, and definitely informed by the minute levels of aficionado-ism among us that Jon Cole described so well in his 9:30 review. And I was worried about gushing--I'm saying now, not for the first time, that that Post review is my last-ever review of RT, 'cause of my "detachment" problems. (I tend to get tempted back though.)
But I did what I thought was an OK job, and then I went to Durham. So I'm sitting in the third row center of the Carolina Theater last night, and RT begins the beautiful "Missie." And suddenly, I remember: In my review, I've used "Missie" as one of several examples of "acoustic" songs.
I squirmed through the rest of the song (still distracted somewhat by its beauty) and then literally bolted up the aisle to the lobby, cell phone in hand. I had to call a writer colleague to give me a Post editor's number; mine was in the car. I tried a couple numbers he gave me, but I got voice mail. It was something like 9:30.
Missing "Al Bowlly," I returned to the theater and managed some more of the how--after all, it was brilliant, no matter how upset I was--and was seriously diverted only once when I remembered that I'd also said that "Missie" was "solo." (I think that was what sent me out a second time to make some more calls--so I missed "Vincent.")
What had I been thinking? It's not like I didn't remember the 9:30 performance. Something just slipped, somehow; I was thinking of quieter, more contemplative songs and contrasting them against "Pearly Jim," etc.
Anyway, I called everyone at the Post except for Woodward and Bernstein, but it was too late--the incorrect info got in. And I'm just sick about it.
So I hope y'all will forgive me.
Pam
9:30 Club, May 2003
RT-list post, titled "Word Unspoken"
Attending RT's 9:30 show, and preparing myself for the experience I wanted, took some work. I was determined to be right at the foot of the stage, as close as possible. I knew I would have to stand in line for a long time (I arrived at 4:40 and was the second person in line). It was raining and chilly. I chose my clothes carefully, particularly my shoes. I managed to park nearby so I could duck in and out of line to drop off my raincoat and make a stab at combing my hair.
I was particularly careful about my purse. I usually carry a great bag full of stuff I need, stuff I think I might need, and stuff that just makes its way in there. For 9:30, I packed the smallest purse I could find, one that hung off my shoulder, because I knew I would likely have to carry everything I needed and I wanted to be unencumbered.
I didn't think about the parallels between my preparation and "Word Unspoken, Sight Unseen" when I heard it that night, but I was particularly taken by that song's lyrics as I stood in the place I'd strived for, a few feet from the band's feet.
When I first heard the song, in a solo show some time ago, I thought it was about death--partly because of some otherworldliness in the music, and partly because of the imagery of taking down the trophies and other personal items, and "the walls washed clean." But there's a warmth in the chorus, a giving over of one's heart with an utter innocence that ought to be unnerving but somehow isn't. Or at least for me it isn't: Does anyone else think that this declaration that "I'm newborn to be your lover" will end in shattered dreams?
I was somewhat surprised to hear that the song was about a mail-order bride, but I can see it now. An idealized mail-order-bride situation, to be sure--not one that is likely to happen in real life--and somewhat squirm-inducing to me, as a woman, to imagine.
But Richard's songs are "about" something the way spring is "about" crocuses. Which is to say that one shouldn't limit oneself in experiencing them by aligning them with a vision of reality and overlooking the poetry in them.
I'm not expressing this very well, so I'll try to cut to the chase here: I experience this song as an image of surrender to something that brings hope. And it's totally within the moment; we don't know, really, how "if you'll have me, truly have me" will be answered. But it feels pure to me; it feels like it will turn out well.
Funny, though: "Pearly Jim" also involves giving yourself over to something else, and I think we know how that one turns out. Is it a coincidence that that song's title references the subject of the surrender, whereas "Word Unspoken, Sight Unseen" references the attitude, the process?
Pam (who knows only a very little about giving her heart)
Attending RT's 9:30 show, and preparing myself for the experience I wanted, took some work. I was determined to be right at the foot of the stage, as close as possible. I knew I would have to stand in line for a long time (I arrived at 4:40 and was the second person in line). It was raining and chilly. I chose my clothes carefully, particularly my shoes. I managed to park nearby so I could duck in and out of line to drop off my raincoat and make a stab at combing my hair.
I was particularly careful about my purse. I usually carry a great bag full of stuff I need, stuff I think I might need, and stuff that just makes its way in there. For 9:30, I packed the smallest purse I could find, one that hung off my shoulder, because I knew I would likely have to carry everything I needed and I wanted to be unencumbered.
I didn't think about the parallels between my preparation and "Word Unspoken, Sight Unseen" when I heard it that night, but I was particularly taken by that song's lyrics as I stood in the place I'd strived for, a few feet from the band's feet.
When I first heard the song, in a solo show some time ago, I thought it was about death--partly because of some otherworldliness in the music, and partly because of the imagery of taking down the trophies and other personal items, and "the walls washed clean." But there's a warmth in the chorus, a giving over of one's heart with an utter innocence that ought to be unnerving but somehow isn't. Or at least for me it isn't: Does anyone else think that this declaration that "I'm newborn to be your lover" will end in shattered dreams?
I was somewhat surprised to hear that the song was about a mail-order bride, but I can see it now. An idealized mail-order-bride situation, to be sure--not one that is likely to happen in real life--and somewhat squirm-inducing to me, as a woman, to imagine.
But Richard's songs are "about" something the way spring is "about" crocuses. Which is to say that one shouldn't limit oneself in experiencing them by aligning them with a vision of reality and overlooking the poetry in them.
I'm not expressing this very well, so I'll try to cut to the chase here: I experience this song as an image of surrender to something that brings hope. And it's totally within the moment; we don't know, really, how "if you'll have me, truly have me" will be answered. But it feels pure to me; it feels like it will turn out well.
Funny, though: "Pearly Jim" also involves giving yourself over to something else, and I think we know how that one turns out. Is it a coincidence that that song's title references the subject of the surrender, whereas "Word Unspoken, Sight Unseen" references the attitude, the process?
Pam (who knows only a very little about giving her heart)
Whitaker Center, Harrisburg, PA, July 29, 2003
RT-list post, titled "Penultimate Kit Bag"
The Whitaker Center in Harrisburg, PA, witnessed an excellent RT show tonight--or, rather, last night, at this hour (as well as possibly the highest proportion of listmembers at any RT gig).
The last two shows I've experienced--this one and Lupo's--were especially notable, to me, anyway, for "Can't Win," a particularly anger-fueled performance. For me--I really can't speak for anyone else here--it was a sort of prayerful catharsis; I really felt like something unearthly was happening when he played it. And I thought about how RT's music, in its way (and not a small way), has the power to make people free. Brothers and sisters (I know I'm going all Dave Carter on y'all, if only because I just saw fellow Carter fan Robin newly arrived on the list), if you've ever felt something freeing in Richard's music, give thanks in whatever way seems best. (I know he freed some people of nasty green pieces of paper at the merch booth.)
The reggae stuff was incredible, sprouting out of "Crawl Back" like volunteer plants. Pete Zorn just gets better and better. It's unjust to expect people NOT to sing along for "Wall of Death"--like expecting silence during the national anthem. And I sat behind someone, who shall remain nameless, whose obvious, kinetic enjoyment of the show could have been a manifestation of my own id, albeit with a better haircut.
I also wondered, for the first time, who is being petitioned to let him ride on the wall of death one more time. Tonight, I felt very strongly that I was making that request of Richard--wanting, no matter what happens inside or outside of me, to feel welcome to come back again and again to experience these shows.
For me, it was also a night of blood, toil, tears, sweat, broken glass, and sour cream donuts. I communed with listpals, felt irrationally and embarrassingly attracted to the tour bus, nearly became part of a Beltway accident, suffered existential doubts, shared secrets--yeah, just a normal night for me.
You know, I'd write more, but I think I'm actually typing in my sleep.
Y'all get on MapQuest or www.iflyswa.com or Orbitz and figure out the best way to get to Pittsburgh tonight, you hear? You can't miss this tour on its last show.
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz,
Pam
The Whitaker Center in Harrisburg, PA, witnessed an excellent RT show tonight--or, rather, last night, at this hour (as well as possibly the highest proportion of listmembers at any RT gig).
The last two shows I've experienced--this one and Lupo's--were especially notable, to me, anyway, for "Can't Win," a particularly anger-fueled performance. For me--I really can't speak for anyone else here--it was a sort of prayerful catharsis; I really felt like something unearthly was happening when he played it. And I thought about how RT's music, in its way (and not a small way), has the power to make people free. Brothers and sisters (I know I'm going all Dave Carter on y'all, if only because I just saw fellow Carter fan Robin newly arrived on the list), if you've ever felt something freeing in Richard's music, give thanks in whatever way seems best. (I know he freed some people of nasty green pieces of paper at the merch booth.)
The reggae stuff was incredible, sprouting out of "Crawl Back" like volunteer plants. Pete Zorn just gets better and better. It's unjust to expect people NOT to sing along for "Wall of Death"--like expecting silence during the national anthem. And I sat behind someone, who shall remain nameless, whose obvious, kinetic enjoyment of the show could have been a manifestation of my own id, albeit with a better haircut.
I also wondered, for the first time, who is being petitioned to let him ride on the wall of death one more time. Tonight, I felt very strongly that I was making that request of Richard--wanting, no matter what happens inside or outside of me, to feel welcome to come back again and again to experience these shows.
For me, it was also a night of blood, toil, tears, sweat, broken glass, and sour cream donuts. I communed with listpals, felt irrationally and embarrassingly attracted to the tour bus, nearly became part of a Beltway accident, suffered existential doubts, shared secrets--yeah, just a normal night for me.
You know, I'd write more, but I think I'm actually typing in my sleep.
Y'all get on MapQuest or www.iflyswa.com or Orbitz and figure out the best way to get to Pittsburgh tonight, you hear? You can't miss this tour on its last show.
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz,
Pam
Lupo's, Providence (show taped for DVD), July 23, 2003
A piece from the RT list, subject line "Love and Rockers"
After missing two Richard Thompson concerts in less than a week, I am being forced to recognize that I'm getting old. Perhaps this isn't so bad; I take solace in the immortal words of Prince, as sung by Richard Thompson on my CD player when I was stuck in the 17th traffic jam of a 12-hour day on the road:
Women, not girls, rule my world, I said they rule my world
Act your age, mama, not your shoe size, maybe we could do the twirl
You know, in China my shoe size is nearly the same as my age. But I digress.
A certain chronological awareness came upon me this morning just before 1 a.m., as I attempted to explain to the desk clerk at the Biltmore Hotel in Providence, RI, why I was checking in so late, why I had driven all the way to Rhode Island from Virginia, and (the unasked question) why I looked like I'd been doing heavy-metal-style headbanging for several sweaty hours. The clerk, with aged wisdom scarcely matched by the fuzz on his chin, offered up bromides about following your bliss. Then he sent me to my room.
I got into my car in Arlington, Virginia, just before 10 a.m. At around 6:40, with my gas-tank-empty light on, I wrestled the Escape into a tiny parking space two blocks from Lupo's, stepped out of the car, locked it up, heard Richard's voice, and broke into a run. It was a soundcheck of "Taxman." Half a dozen of us pressed against the doors in adoration.
I ended up front and center once more. So glad there was a rail around the stage; they should have made the roller-coaster announcement "Please hold onto the bar." The show was loud and wild and wonderful. This band has really jelled since the previous U.S. leg of the tour. Whether RT has made a conscious effort to bring Rory and Earl into the foreground more, or whether they've just asserted their musical ideas as they've gone along, I don't know.
RT was playing to the cameras a bit, I think. I'll bet that if someone didn't tell him "Open your eyes when you sing!" he must have thought of it himself. And his guitar solos were often stretched out in appealing, all-the-time-in-the-world fashion.
One thing I've noticed on this tour (after seeing five shows on it--so far) is that this live-band configuration favors RT's angrier side. I wanted to write about the Kimmel Center show last week with the words "blunt" and "brutal." Also "lacerating" and "metal." Last night had less abruptness, less confrontation, but fully as much indignation and passionate catharsis.
I was going to write about this last week, but I woke up the day after the show too sick to stick around for the next one in Philly. And the same thing happened today; I should be at Falcon Ridge right now, but I couldn't face it today. Too tired, post-virus, to hang around so far from home on the rest of a long-planned mini-vacation (which included a mere two RT shows). Too homesick for my husband (who has now caught the bug I had last week).
So I spent today in my car, Virginia bound, thinking about how The Old Kit Bag sounds to me now. I wondered whether, of all RT's albums, it's the one that sounds least like it could have been made by a person under 40. And I pondered its gentle, melancholy sweetness. It's not a downer, but it generates fewer laughs than any album he's made in a long time.
Whereas the band is excelling at portraying the release of pent-up anger--mostly in older barnburners like "Can't Win" and "Shoot Out the Lights"--OKB doesn't so much take aim at targets as get inside and deconstruct them. Only "Pearly Jim" comes close to attacking, but it does so by a rather theatrical description of a community laid waste by its attachment to a two-legged golden calf. (An R.D. Laing joke, for heaven's sake.)
I was thinking today about "First Breath" and how Marc and others have suggested that it and its ilk "appeal to the ladies." (That's not meant to be a direct quote from Marc, and if he's around I'm sure he'll come back and correct my paraphrase of his ideas.) How part of me gets all feministically riled at such an assertion (don't get me started on you guys and your "RT newbies and their wives" generalization!) and part of me thinks maybe straight guys don't get it (and straight women do) because it's such an erotic, mystical elixir (yeah, yeah, thus falling prey to generalization myself).
This spurred me to think of two other key ideas:
(1) Although RT is sometimes known for his songs about love gone bad, a great number of his strongest songs aren't about romantic relationships.
(2) OKB presents an uncommonly blame-free, almost fatalistic approach to romantic love. When it fails, there's no implication that either party is at fault; everyone involved is grown up enough to acknowledge human frailty and, perhaps, superhuman intervention. Not that they're cold-blooded about it. "I've Got No Right" is "Keep Your Distance" in different clothing--and is sadder and more passionate (though not necessarily a better song overall). "One Door Opens" and "First Breath" are back-to-back rides on that old Wheel that lesser songwriters like to spin: Love comes and goes in surprises and disguises, to be savored while it lasts, and sometimes humans can't do much about its forces.
Then, of course, round about the 15th stop in my Jersey Turnpike Service Center women's room mini-tour, I was thinking about the powerful effects of two OKB songs at the Lupo's show: "A Love You Can't Survive" and "Word Unspoken Sight Unseen," both of which are nominally about love affairs. The latter always sounded more like the travel plans of a hejirist (is that a word?) to me, and it's had a particularly luminous quality at the OKB tour shows, probably because it generally comes late in the set when everyone's defenses are totally worn down. But "Survive" is also about more than its plot (which some have found an inconsistent one). I think it's all about "bearing a scar" and being thus changed, wounded and seemingly visible. He doesn't say the love doesn't survive; he says "you can't survive" the love.
Anyway, I know I can't survive too many more of these road trips. They're just too peculiar. After last night's show, I was literally shaking and staggering, my head reeling. (I had one gin and tonic. ONE.) I have a hazy memory of conversationally pingponging off a bunch of people; I awoke this morning all insecure and weirded out and tired and rain-averse and homesick.
There's no place like home. But there's also no place like an RT show, dammit. Sometime earlier in my life, I must have eaten the seeds of one hell of a pomegranate.
Questions I wanted to ask RT last night but didn't get to (although I did say hi to him):
--Whose Mission chair is that on the OKB art?
--Did Wordsworth really have a tattoo?
--You said on the "My Life in CD" program that you like to spend time in Costa Rica. Do you know the name of the villa there that's in a remote area, made out of stone (including, I think, the furniture), has no windowscreens, and is available for rent? Seems like I read about it last spring, and now I can't find it.
--Did you have a lighting tech traveling with you on this tour?
--Have you read the new Harry Potter book? 'Cause it has a St. Mungo's in it.
--Where did you go during that "Can't Win" solo? 'Cause I'm glad you came back alive.
--Do you want to hear my joke? Driving on the hell that is Interstate 95 in Connecticut, I passed by the town of Mystic and was amused by the sign that said "Downtown Mystic." I pictured some old holy man holding court outside a Starbucks. So when you said "Pearly Jim" was about a guru and asked, "Do you have those around here?" I wanted to blurt out, "Sure, there's Downtown Mystic." You can use it if you want, but only in New England.
(Actually, getting back to a more topical note: When RT asked if there were any gurus around here, someone apparently yelled out "You!")
OK, guys, I'll stop blathering now, but I hope somewhere in here are a
couple of points worthy of discussion.
Pam
After missing two Richard Thompson concerts in less than a week, I am being forced to recognize that I'm getting old. Perhaps this isn't so bad; I take solace in the immortal words of Prince, as sung by Richard Thompson on my CD player when I was stuck in the 17th traffic jam of a 12-hour day on the road:
Women, not girls, rule my world, I said they rule my world
Act your age, mama, not your shoe size, maybe we could do the twirl
You know, in China my shoe size is nearly the same as my age. But I digress.
A certain chronological awareness came upon me this morning just before 1 a.m., as I attempted to explain to the desk clerk at the Biltmore Hotel in Providence, RI, why I was checking in so late, why I had driven all the way to Rhode Island from Virginia, and (the unasked question) why I looked like I'd been doing heavy-metal-style headbanging for several sweaty hours. The clerk, with aged wisdom scarcely matched by the fuzz on his chin, offered up bromides about following your bliss. Then he sent me to my room.
I got into my car in Arlington, Virginia, just before 10 a.m. At around 6:40, with my gas-tank-empty light on, I wrestled the Escape into a tiny parking space two blocks from Lupo's, stepped out of the car, locked it up, heard Richard's voice, and broke into a run. It was a soundcheck of "Taxman." Half a dozen of us pressed against the doors in adoration.
I ended up front and center once more. So glad there was a rail around the stage; they should have made the roller-coaster announcement "Please hold onto the bar." The show was loud and wild and wonderful. This band has really jelled since the previous U.S. leg of the tour. Whether RT has made a conscious effort to bring Rory and Earl into the foreground more, or whether they've just asserted their musical ideas as they've gone along, I don't know.
RT was playing to the cameras a bit, I think. I'll bet that if someone didn't tell him "Open your eyes when you sing!" he must have thought of it himself. And his guitar solos were often stretched out in appealing, all-the-time-in-the-world fashion.
One thing I've noticed on this tour (after seeing five shows on it--so far) is that this live-band configuration favors RT's angrier side. I wanted to write about the Kimmel Center show last week with the words "blunt" and "brutal." Also "lacerating" and "metal." Last night had less abruptness, less confrontation, but fully as much indignation and passionate catharsis.
I was going to write about this last week, but I woke up the day after the show too sick to stick around for the next one in Philly. And the same thing happened today; I should be at Falcon Ridge right now, but I couldn't face it today. Too tired, post-virus, to hang around so far from home on the rest of a long-planned mini-vacation (which included a mere two RT shows). Too homesick for my husband (who has now caught the bug I had last week).
So I spent today in my car, Virginia bound, thinking about how The Old Kit Bag sounds to me now. I wondered whether, of all RT's albums, it's the one that sounds least like it could have been made by a person under 40. And I pondered its gentle, melancholy sweetness. It's not a downer, but it generates fewer laughs than any album he's made in a long time.
Whereas the band is excelling at portraying the release of pent-up anger--mostly in older barnburners like "Can't Win" and "Shoot Out the Lights"--OKB doesn't so much take aim at targets as get inside and deconstruct them. Only "Pearly Jim" comes close to attacking, but it does so by a rather theatrical description of a community laid waste by its attachment to a two-legged golden calf. (An R.D. Laing joke, for heaven's sake.)
I was thinking today about "First Breath" and how Marc and others have suggested that it and its ilk "appeal to the ladies." (That's not meant to be a direct quote from Marc, and if he's around I'm sure he'll come back and correct my paraphrase of his ideas.) How part of me gets all feministically riled at such an assertion (don't get me started on you guys and your "RT newbies and their wives" generalization!) and part of me thinks maybe straight guys don't get it (and straight women do) because it's such an erotic, mystical elixir (yeah, yeah, thus falling prey to generalization myself).
This spurred me to think of two other key ideas:
(1) Although RT is sometimes known for his songs about love gone bad, a great number of his strongest songs aren't about romantic relationships.
(2) OKB presents an uncommonly blame-free, almost fatalistic approach to romantic love. When it fails, there's no implication that either party is at fault; everyone involved is grown up enough to acknowledge human frailty and, perhaps, superhuman intervention. Not that they're cold-blooded about it. "I've Got No Right" is "Keep Your Distance" in different clothing--and is sadder and more passionate (though not necessarily a better song overall). "One Door Opens" and "First Breath" are back-to-back rides on that old Wheel that lesser songwriters like to spin: Love comes and goes in surprises and disguises, to be savored while it lasts, and sometimes humans can't do much about its forces.
Then, of course, round about the 15th stop in my Jersey Turnpike Service Center women's room mini-tour, I was thinking about the powerful effects of two OKB songs at the Lupo's show: "A Love You Can't Survive" and "Word Unspoken Sight Unseen," both of which are nominally about love affairs. The latter always sounded more like the travel plans of a hejirist (is that a word?) to me, and it's had a particularly luminous quality at the OKB tour shows, probably because it generally comes late in the set when everyone's defenses are totally worn down. But "Survive" is also about more than its plot (which some have found an inconsistent one). I think it's all about "bearing a scar" and being thus changed, wounded and seemingly visible. He doesn't say the love doesn't survive; he says "you can't survive" the love.
Anyway, I know I can't survive too many more of these road trips. They're just too peculiar. After last night's show, I was literally shaking and staggering, my head reeling. (I had one gin and tonic. ONE.) I have a hazy memory of conversationally pingponging off a bunch of people; I awoke this morning all insecure and weirded out and tired and rain-averse and homesick.
There's no place like home. But there's also no place like an RT show, dammit. Sometime earlier in my life, I must have eaten the seeds of one hell of a pomegranate.
Questions I wanted to ask RT last night but didn't get to (although I did say hi to him):
--Whose Mission chair is that on the OKB art?
--Did Wordsworth really have a tattoo?
--You said on the "My Life in CD" program that you like to spend time in Costa Rica. Do you know the name of the villa there that's in a remote area, made out of stone (including, I think, the furniture), has no windowscreens, and is available for rent? Seems like I read about it last spring, and now I can't find it.
--Did you have a lighting tech traveling with you on this tour?
--Have you read the new Harry Potter book? 'Cause it has a St. Mungo's in it.
--Where did you go during that "Can't Win" solo? 'Cause I'm glad you came back alive.
--Do you want to hear my joke? Driving on the hell that is Interstate 95 in Connecticut, I passed by the town of Mystic and was amused by the sign that said "Downtown Mystic." I pictured some old holy man holding court outside a Starbucks. So when you said "Pearly Jim" was about a guru and asked, "Do you have those around here?" I wanted to blurt out, "Sure, there's Downtown Mystic." You can use it if you want, but only in New England.
(Actually, getting back to a more topical note: When RT asked if there were any gurus around here, someone apparently yelled out "You!")
OK, guys, I'll stop blathering now, but I hope somewhere in here are a
couple of points worthy of discussion.
Pam
Birchmere, "Chrono Show," November 3, 2003
It took me several RT-list messages to get all my thoughts out, as you'll see.
[In response to Patti's "Wow wow wow!"] I second those "wow"s--y'all won't believe the set list, which I know was jotted down by at least one member of the Greater Capital Area Richard Thompson Appreciation Society and Pesto-Eating Guild (GCARTASPEG)--and ask here: OK, does anyone have extra tickets to Princeton anymore? 'Cause I'm about ready to cave in and hit the road after tonight.
- - -
I had a theory about the songs RT was playing last night at the Birchmere--especially the new and obscure ones.
It seemed to me that RT took great relish in choosing these particular songs and tunes because of the opportunities they provided for his fingers to dance on the strings.
(I've worked on the last half of that sentence for a while--I'm normally a spontaneous writer, all first drafts--and I'm still not happy with it. It's more than just his fingers, you know? But I'll move on.)
He got to play around with a lot of tune snippets in "Nobody's Wedding" and "Walk Awhile" and a whole trad tune in "Choice Wife." The new songs, too, seemed built on jigs and strathspeys (I was too mesmerized to count beats, though). I think he wanted to go back there to explore musical (and perhaps emotional) territories he'd left behind, places he was now ready to revisit.
He's resisted this before, you know, scorning the old stuff, chafing at Fairport connections, reticent about his youth. Very much someone who wants to look forward. And last night he not only sang about boyhood--and sang the songs of his boyhood--he even talked about that time a little bit, at least to a few people after the show.
Of course, those stories and songs, and the emotions with which they're imbued, could well be fictions. We don't know where the hair ends and the toupee begins, to paraphrase RT.
I can say that, for me and for others among my friends, this was more than just a chance to hear the oldies. This was an unusual encounter with an artist who seemed to have things he needed to say--for his sake, maybe, but certainly for art's sake.
(Sorry for the length of this message.)
- - -
I think this IS the retro show. He called us "you retro people" or something like that near the end, when we acclaimed him for all the rare stuff.
Incidentally, the shocker for me was "I'll Regret It All in the Morning," which, as I told my spouse, wins my vote not only for darkest RT song (or at least one of the darkest) but for RT song that's least appropriate for a wedding.
Rob is sure he's heard "Jack of Diamonds" before. I reminded him we heard it at Cropredy the other year (with band backing), and maybe that's it, but then someone else at the show said he thought he'd heard it acoustic before. Anyone know whether/when he's played it acoustically?
Pam (who will go away now, really)
[In response to Patti's "Wow wow wow!"] I second those "wow"s--y'all won't believe the set list, which I know was jotted down by at least one member of the Greater Capital Area Richard Thompson Appreciation Society and Pesto-Eating Guild (GCARTASPEG)--and ask here: OK, does anyone have extra tickets to Princeton anymore? 'Cause I'm about ready to cave in and hit the road after tonight.
- - -
I had a theory about the songs RT was playing last night at the Birchmere--especially the new and obscure ones.
It seemed to me that RT took great relish in choosing these particular songs and tunes because of the opportunities they provided for his fingers to dance on the strings.
(I've worked on the last half of that sentence for a while--I'm normally a spontaneous writer, all first drafts--and I'm still not happy with it. It's more than just his fingers, you know? But I'll move on.)
He got to play around with a lot of tune snippets in "Nobody's Wedding" and "Walk Awhile" and a whole trad tune in "Choice Wife." The new songs, too, seemed built on jigs and strathspeys (I was too mesmerized to count beats, though). I think he wanted to go back there to explore musical (and perhaps emotional) territories he'd left behind, places he was now ready to revisit.
He's resisted this before, you know, scorning the old stuff, chafing at Fairport connections, reticent about his youth. Very much someone who wants to look forward. And last night he not only sang about boyhood--and sang the songs of his boyhood--he even talked about that time a little bit, at least to a few people after the show.
Of course, those stories and songs, and the emotions with which they're imbued, could well be fictions. We don't know where the hair ends and the toupee begins, to paraphrase RT.
I can say that, for me and for others among my friends, this was more than just a chance to hear the oldies. This was an unusual encounter with an artist who seemed to have things he needed to say--for his sake, maybe, but certainly for art's sake.
(Sorry for the length of this message.)
- - -
I think this IS the retro show. He called us "you retro people" or something like that near the end, when we acclaimed him for all the rare stuff.
Incidentally, the shocker for me was "I'll Regret It All in the Morning," which, as I told my spouse, wins my vote not only for darkest RT song (or at least one of the darkest) but for RT song that's least appropriate for a wedding.
Rob is sure he's heard "Jack of Diamonds" before. I reminded him we heard it at Cropredy the other year (with band backing), and maybe that's it, but then someone else at the show said he thought he'd heard it acoustic before. Anyone know whether/when he's played it acoustically?
Pam (who will go away now, really)
Thursday, October 30, 2008
McCarter Theatre, Princeton, NJ, October 28, 2008
From the RT list.
This was not an easy day to travel. As I type from the comfort of my hotel room, I nevertheless hear the wind outside the window, sometimes whirring nervously like the first tent zipper of morning, other times groaning like gothic death.
The McCarter felt extra cozy, extra safe, tonight. It was a sort of shelter against the chill of unfriendliness, expediency, commerce, all the ugly dull things and the ominous winds that knock against our souls out there in the not-in-the-presence-of-art world. Never mind that not all the off-the-cuffs were truly off the cuff, that I knew all the punchlines in "Hots for the Smarts," that there were few set list surprises relative to the current tour. This show was a warm, good thing, like coffee in the brightness of an all-night store amid a late-night drive.
Scribbling in my notebook before the show, I worried, "It's a fragrant crowd, a rattle-your-jewelry crowd." I misjudged them. I should have recalled my experience with Philadelphia/New Jersey audiences: engaged, enthusiastic, sometimes a little liquored up.
The guy next to me had never seen Richard before. I kept seeing him out of the corner of my eye, transfixed. I leaned over to him after the opener, "I Feel So Good," and quipped, "Don't worry. It gets better." At the end of the show, he was too choked up to put into words, other than to say how emotional he found it.
Man, I take so much for granted. We who go to a lot of these shows take them for granted, I think.
I felt myself crawl up inside one of the songs tonight, during a long solo, to listen to a couple of motifs chattering with each other, back and forth, like birds speaking a language I only thought I understood. Here I am now, and I can't even remember which song it was, to share it with you. I was in that forest, and I'm out of it now.
This was one of those nights that I didn't mind at all that RT was playing "1952 Vincent Black Lightning"; in fact, I anticipated it. I really got it tonight, the power of the story, in a way I haven't in a long time. Same with "Beeswing," which he dedicated to someone named Barbara ("May I call you Barb?") for her birthday. The people around me leaned forward, chins on fists, drawn in by every turn of the page of these stories.
There's a comfort in these tales, and yet tonight there seemed to be a newness, fueled by some divine energy. I choose to think of it as love, sappy as that may sound. It's the overwhelming, life-giving energy of people who really wanted to be there, who really felt that music and appreciated what has become an annual tradition. That energy, and the energy which burns through Richard's art like the flame on a perfect wick, constant and true.
Surprises? Well, I didn't expect "She Twists the Knife Again" or "Dimming of the Day." And I didn't expect to smile so much that my jaws would be sore, which is what I'm feeling right now.
Pam
This was not an easy day to travel. As I type from the comfort of my hotel room, I nevertheless hear the wind outside the window, sometimes whirring nervously like the first tent zipper of morning, other times groaning like gothic death.
The McCarter felt extra cozy, extra safe, tonight. It was a sort of shelter against the chill of unfriendliness, expediency, commerce, all the ugly dull things and the ominous winds that knock against our souls out there in the not-in-the-presence-of-art world. Never mind that not all the off-the-cuffs were truly off the cuff, that I knew all the punchlines in "Hots for the Smarts," that there were few set list surprises relative to the current tour. This show was a warm, good thing, like coffee in the brightness of an all-night store amid a late-night drive.
Scribbling in my notebook before the show, I worried, "It's a fragrant crowd, a rattle-your-jewelry crowd." I misjudged them. I should have recalled my experience with Philadelphia/New Jersey audiences: engaged, enthusiastic, sometimes a little liquored up.
The guy next to me had never seen Richard before. I kept seeing him out of the corner of my eye, transfixed. I leaned over to him after the opener, "I Feel So Good," and quipped, "Don't worry. It gets better." At the end of the show, he was too choked up to put into words, other than to say how emotional he found it.
Man, I take so much for granted. We who go to a lot of these shows take them for granted, I think.
I felt myself crawl up inside one of the songs tonight, during a long solo, to listen to a couple of motifs chattering with each other, back and forth, like birds speaking a language I only thought I understood. Here I am now, and I can't even remember which song it was, to share it with you. I was in that forest, and I'm out of it now.
This was one of those nights that I didn't mind at all that RT was playing "1952 Vincent Black Lightning"; in fact, I anticipated it. I really got it tonight, the power of the story, in a way I haven't in a long time. Same with "Beeswing," which he dedicated to someone named Barbara ("May I call you Barb?") for her birthday. The people around me leaned forward, chins on fists, drawn in by every turn of the page of these stories.
There's a comfort in these tales, and yet tonight there seemed to be a newness, fueled by some divine energy. I choose to think of it as love, sappy as that may sound. It's the overwhelming, life-giving energy of people who really wanted to be there, who really felt that music and appreciated what has become an annual tradition. That energy, and the energy which burns through Richard's art like the flame on a perfect wick, constant and true.
Surprises? Well, I didn't expect "She Twists the Knife Again" or "Dimming of the Day." And I didn't expect to smile so much that my jaws would be sore, which is what I'm feeling right now.
Pam
Linda Thompson, Fashionably Late (Washington City Paper, August 23, 2002)
Faithful in Her Fashion
By Pamela Murray Winters
Fashionably Late
Linda Thompson
Rounder
The cover of Richard and Linda Thompson's 1982 LP, Shoot Out the Lights, shows a room in the aftermath of an upheaval. The wallpaper is torn and streaked by burn marks. A bare bulb swings across the ceiling, lighting the space with a sickly yellow. A man sits in the corner, laughing with his mouth but not his eyes. Above him, on the wall to his right, hangs a portrait of an enigmatic woman, lips parted and unsmiling.
Twenty years later, on the cover of Linda Thompson's Fashionably Late, that same woman sits on a floor, near a similar corner, in a calmly lit room. The carpet looks pricey. The walls are painted dove-gray. The woman's gaze is still direct and solemn. And above her, against the wall to her right, stands an easel holding a gold frame, ascending beyond our vision.
Who's in the picture? In the avid community of Richard Thompson fans--please don't call it a cult--the question has occupied much speculation since the news of his ex-wife's first album in 17 years.
England's answer to George Jones and Tammy Wynette invited life-vs.-art questions two decades ago, when they embarked on their first American tour, in support of Shoot Out the Lights, in the midst of a marital cataclysm. Linda had struggled with vocal problems since the first of her three pregnancies, spent several years of her marriage in an ascetic and paternalistic Muslim commune, and taken the news--a few months before the tour--of her husband's new lover with a rage that was most remarkable for its unbridled visibility. (She has said that she hit Richard over the head with his own guitar, frequently tripped him onstage, and trashed enough dressing rooms to be called "worse than the Sex Pistols.") That the album's sad, desperate songs ("Man in Need," "Walking on a Wire," "Don't Renege on Our Love") predated the couple's breakup made them no less gripping--especially when they were performed by a pair of stellar talents in extremis.
So it's understandable that fans of both Thompsons want that gilt edge to hold Richard's head. In fact, Linda's ex frames Fashionably Late, not the other way around. He plays guitar and sings backing vocal on the opening track, "Dear Mary"; the closer, "Dear Old Man of Mine," features Linda, accompanied only by children Teddy and Kamila Thompson, toasting "the man...Singing like he's got a gun to his head.../It was long ago that I said goodbye to that dear old man of mine." The Fashionably Late publicity machine, knowing its audience, is milking this "reunion" for all it's worth. And Linda has happily complied with the roman a clef readers, telling the New York Daily News, "I was thinking at one point of putting brackets after each song saying who they were for."
The most influential Thompson man on this album is not Richard, however, but 26-year-old Teddy, who wrote or co-wrote six of Fashionably Late's 10 tracks and sings or plays on five of them. Signed to, then dropped from, the Virgin Records roster with barely enough time in between to eke out a creditable solo album two years ago, Teddy has most recently been seen in the touring band of fellow folkie offspring Rufus Wainwright. Not yet having managed Rufus' trick of a reputation independent of his parents', Teddy has, happily for us, capitulated to his genes and given some quality time to Mum.
On "Evona Darling"--by Lal Waterson, a member of yet another folk dynasty--Teddy and Linda's eerily similar voices are entwined in a languid, Everlyesque duet. And on his own "All I See," Teddy and Wainwright sibs Rufus and Martha replicate the ensemble-vocal strength they displayed on Rufus' excellent Poses. But Teddy is most valuable on Fashionably Late as half of a songwriting team with his mother, displaying the family gift for ready-made oldies: the lilting Americana harmonies of "Dear Mary"; the doomy "Nine Stone Rig," on which guitarist John Doyle and double-bassist Danny Thompson pluck their strings into a smoky haze; and the perfectly composed aural daguerreotype "Miss Murray," featuring Doyle, British wunderkind singer Kate Rusby, and a Geoff Muldaur arrangement for fiddle-player Richard Greene and accordionist Van Dyke Parks.
Much of the new album's success, in fact, comes from Linda's surrounding herself with members of her extended musical family: guitarist Martin Carthy and his fiddler daughter Eliza, who bring spunk to the no-boys-allowed "Weary Life" ("Better to be single than be a married wife"); string arranger Robert Kirby, who worked with Linda's old boyfriend Nick Drake and here gives "Paint & Powder Beauty" a woozy elegance; and WNYC's chief concert recording engineer, Ed Haber, who also produced Linda's retrospective Dreams Fly Away in 1996. Haber's modus operandi as producer is to stay out of the way as much as possible: Fashionably Late's tracks are pristinely simple, with a coffeehouse-stage freshness.
If this seems like a lot of name-dropping, it's only fair: Linda has gotten through this record, and through the whole of the post-Richard era, with more than a little help from her friends. For much of the past 20 years, she has been unable to sing because of hysterical dysphonia, an inelegantly named condition in which, as she puts it, "you open your mouth and nothing happens." She managed a 1985 solo album, One Clear Moment, before retiring from the music business. Only recently has she ventured onto the stage again. Pere Ubu's David Thomas literally held her hand through performances of his road-trip song cycle Mirror Man.
Although age, and perhaps disuse, have left their marks on Linda's vocals, all of the hallmarks of her sound are here: the Lalique coolness; the occasional rough edges, perfectly appropriate to "Nine Stone Rig" and "Miss Murray"; and those shiver-inducing low notes, which turn almost funereal on "Dear Old Man of Mine." On "Paint & Powder Beauty," co-written with Rufus Wainwright, Linda even essays some Billie Holiday-style bent notes--and it turns out that heartbroken jazz is a torch she was born to carry.
Linda's vocal problems are apparently the only reason this album had to wait until 2002. There's nothing here that sounds more modern than the work she did with Richard, circa 1975. "Paint & Powder Beauty" is unusual only because jazz balladry is one of the few musical paths the Thompsons left untrod. Indeed, Thompsons fans will find much that is familiar: Northumbrian smallpipes, crumhorns, and accordions, as well as old whores, dying lovers, and deadpan humor. Although Linda's voice hasn't quite been frozen in time, the spirit of her music from three decades ago has been preserved.
So is Fashionably Late a swan song or a new beginning? As strong as it is, it won't make Linda a crossover star; it's still going to end up in the Folk bin. Those busy publicists are preaching to the choir. Dysphonia already has a high-profile survivor in Diane Rehm, and Linda and Richard aren't exactly Angelina and Billy Bob. Ultimately, though, none of that matters: Fashionably Late comes off as the album Linda Thompson made for Linda Thompson. It's not about competing with a gaggle of aggressively marketed songstresses, most of them younger, slicker, and tooled for country or pop. And it's not about who's in the frame. It's about who holds the floor.
By Pamela Murray Winters
Fashionably Late
Linda Thompson
Rounder
The cover of Richard and Linda Thompson's 1982 LP, Shoot Out the Lights, shows a room in the aftermath of an upheaval. The wallpaper is torn and streaked by burn marks. A bare bulb swings across the ceiling, lighting the space with a sickly yellow. A man sits in the corner, laughing with his mouth but not his eyes. Above him, on the wall to his right, hangs a portrait of an enigmatic woman, lips parted and unsmiling.
Twenty years later, on the cover of Linda Thompson's Fashionably Late, that same woman sits on a floor, near a similar corner, in a calmly lit room. The carpet looks pricey. The walls are painted dove-gray. The woman's gaze is still direct and solemn. And above her, against the wall to her right, stands an easel holding a gold frame, ascending beyond our vision.
Who's in the picture? In the avid community of Richard Thompson fans--please don't call it a cult--the question has occupied much speculation since the news of his ex-wife's first album in 17 years.
England's answer to George Jones and Tammy Wynette invited life-vs.-art questions two decades ago, when they embarked on their first American tour, in support of Shoot Out the Lights, in the midst of a marital cataclysm. Linda had struggled with vocal problems since the first of her three pregnancies, spent several years of her marriage in an ascetic and paternalistic Muslim commune, and taken the news--a few months before the tour--of her husband's new lover with a rage that was most remarkable for its unbridled visibility. (She has said that she hit Richard over the head with his own guitar, frequently tripped him onstage, and trashed enough dressing rooms to be called "worse than the Sex Pistols.") That the album's sad, desperate songs ("Man in Need," "Walking on a Wire," "Don't Renege on Our Love") predated the couple's breakup made them no less gripping--especially when they were performed by a pair of stellar talents in extremis.
So it's understandable that fans of both Thompsons want that gilt edge to hold Richard's head. In fact, Linda's ex frames Fashionably Late, not the other way around. He plays guitar and sings backing vocal on the opening track, "Dear Mary"; the closer, "Dear Old Man of Mine," features Linda, accompanied only by children Teddy and Kamila Thompson, toasting "the man...Singing like he's got a gun to his head.../It was long ago that I said goodbye to that dear old man of mine." The Fashionably Late publicity machine, knowing its audience, is milking this "reunion" for all it's worth. And Linda has happily complied with the roman a clef readers, telling the New York Daily News, "I was thinking at one point of putting brackets after each song saying who they were for."
The most influential Thompson man on this album is not Richard, however, but 26-year-old Teddy, who wrote or co-wrote six of Fashionably Late's 10 tracks and sings or plays on five of them. Signed to, then dropped from, the Virgin Records roster with barely enough time in between to eke out a creditable solo album two years ago, Teddy has most recently been seen in the touring band of fellow folkie offspring Rufus Wainwright. Not yet having managed Rufus' trick of a reputation independent of his parents', Teddy has, happily for us, capitulated to his genes and given some quality time to Mum.
On "Evona Darling"--by Lal Waterson, a member of yet another folk dynasty--Teddy and Linda's eerily similar voices are entwined in a languid, Everlyesque duet. And on his own "All I See," Teddy and Wainwright sibs Rufus and Martha replicate the ensemble-vocal strength they displayed on Rufus' excellent Poses. But Teddy is most valuable on Fashionably Late as half of a songwriting team with his mother, displaying the family gift for ready-made oldies: the lilting Americana harmonies of "Dear Mary"; the doomy "Nine Stone Rig," on which guitarist John Doyle and double-bassist Danny Thompson pluck their strings into a smoky haze; and the perfectly composed aural daguerreotype "Miss Murray," featuring Doyle, British wunderkind singer Kate Rusby, and a Geoff Muldaur arrangement for fiddle-player Richard Greene and accordionist Van Dyke Parks.
Much of the new album's success, in fact, comes from Linda's surrounding herself with members of her extended musical family: guitarist Martin Carthy and his fiddler daughter Eliza, who bring spunk to the no-boys-allowed "Weary Life" ("Better to be single than be a married wife"); string arranger Robert Kirby, who worked with Linda's old boyfriend Nick Drake and here gives "Paint & Powder Beauty" a woozy elegance; and WNYC's chief concert recording engineer, Ed Haber, who also produced Linda's retrospective Dreams Fly Away in 1996. Haber's modus operandi as producer is to stay out of the way as much as possible: Fashionably Late's tracks are pristinely simple, with a coffeehouse-stage freshness.
If this seems like a lot of name-dropping, it's only fair: Linda has gotten through this record, and through the whole of the post-Richard era, with more than a little help from her friends. For much of the past 20 years, she has been unable to sing because of hysterical dysphonia, an inelegantly named condition in which, as she puts it, "you open your mouth and nothing happens." She managed a 1985 solo album, One Clear Moment, before retiring from the music business. Only recently has she ventured onto the stage again. Pere Ubu's David Thomas literally held her hand through performances of his road-trip song cycle Mirror Man.
Although age, and perhaps disuse, have left their marks on Linda's vocals, all of the hallmarks of her sound are here: the Lalique coolness; the occasional rough edges, perfectly appropriate to "Nine Stone Rig" and "Miss Murray"; and those shiver-inducing low notes, which turn almost funereal on "Dear Old Man of Mine." On "Paint & Powder Beauty," co-written with Rufus Wainwright, Linda even essays some Billie Holiday-style bent notes--and it turns out that heartbroken jazz is a torch she was born to carry.
Linda's vocal problems are apparently the only reason this album had to wait until 2002. There's nothing here that sounds more modern than the work she did with Richard, circa 1975. "Paint & Powder Beauty" is unusual only because jazz balladry is one of the few musical paths the Thompsons left untrod. Indeed, Thompsons fans will find much that is familiar: Northumbrian smallpipes, crumhorns, and accordions, as well as old whores, dying lovers, and deadpan humor. Although Linda's voice hasn't quite been frozen in time, the spirit of her music from three decades ago has been preserved.
So is Fashionably Late a swan song or a new beginning? As strong as it is, it won't make Linda a crossover star; it's still going to end up in the Folk bin. Those busy publicists are preaching to the choir. Dysphonia already has a high-profile survivor in Diane Rehm, and Linda and Richard aren't exactly Angelina and Billy Bob. Ultimately, though, none of that matters: Fashionably Late comes off as the album Linda Thompson made for Linda Thompson. It's not about competing with a gaggle of aggressively marketed songstresses, most of them younger, slicker, and tooled for country or pop. And it's not about who's in the frame. It's about who holds the floor.
Front Parlour Ballads, Washington City Paper, August 19, 2005
Richard Strange
By Pamela Murray Winters
Front Parlour Ballads
Richard Thompson
Cooking Vinyl
A few years ago, I interviewed Richard Thompson for an article that was never published. Unexpectedly, the session turned into a sort of diatribe on the business the then-52-year-old had been a part of since he was a teenager in the groundbreaking British folk-rock band Fairport Convention. On being a “cult artist,” he said that two-thirds of working musicians are cult artists, because the industry doesn’t support them. He spoke at length of the arrogance of rock musicians, how they lose touch with reality. And I’m pretty sure that the words “back-stabbing bastards” were used.
“Pretty sure,” I say, because all I have now are some notes scribbled down later, after a tape-recorder malfunction. But history bears out Thompson’s disenchantment with the mainstream: Not long before the interview, he’d left longtime home Capitol Records, and since his departure, he’s released two strong, idiosyncratic, and resolutely indie studio albums, 2003’s The Old Kit Bag and the new Front Parlour Ballads.
That Thompson, in a nearly 40-year recording career, has never had a hit record is ultimately a saving grace. Already free of a sense of obligation to his audience beyond being himself, over and over, Thompson seems to have found even more freedom in departing from the style-making and profit-siphoning of the music industry. It never really knew how to market his eclectic arrangements, expressive but low-wankage guitar playing, and shy-lad persona, anyway.
Front Parlour Ballads, he’s been joking at recent shows, was made with “a minimal budget—reflected in the abysmal sound quality but not reflected in the exorbitant cover price.” He’s right about the budget, at least: The album was recorded in his garage studio, with Thompson playing, as the liner notes coyly state, “several things.” There’s only the occasional presence of percussionist Debra Dobkin to indicate something Thompson didn’t feel himself capable of doing.
“A Solitary Life,” the 11th of the disc’s 13 tracks, would seem, by title, to represent this middle-aged muso, diddling with guitars, mandolin, accordion, and sundry muses in the comfort of his own home. In fact, it’s a deceptively breezy look at the road not taken. “Sometimes I long for the solitary life,” he sings, then envisions a workaday alter ego whose career becomes less appealing, verse by verse, from “a serious hobby in the garden shed”—pretty much what Thompson himself has indulged with this album—to a death by “a steady, reliable tumour.” It’s the second-least-surprising tune on Ballads, definitely the most Dylan-influenced, and one of the most extroverted.
“Let It Blow,” the rousing opener, is the most predictable. The tale of a tabloid-grabbing romance, marriage, and divorce doesn’t have much original to offer save Thompson’s delight in his own wordplay. He puts the bride’s family in New Zealand, thus allowing someone to be “speedin’ from distant Dunedin,” but returns the failed groom to England so that, while the bride plots “revenge,” his eye can “stray to the ample bustier of a novelty dancer from Penge.” It’s a fine three-fifths of a limerick, but it wears out its welcome over the repeated listenings an album like this one demands.
Geography is always important to this California-dwelling expatriate—how must he have felt when Del McCoury, adapting his “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” for bluegrass, changed “Box Hill” to “Knoxville”? —and it’s used most effectively on Ballads in “Old Thames Side.” Here Thompson’s protagonist can pinpoint where he fell in love, as his beloved stood “by Custom House Landing/ Like Venus risen out of the water.” A song of naked emotion and breathtaking simplicity, “Old Thames Side” also contains a frequent Thompson motif, of a tongue-tied man overcome with emotion: “I searched for a phrase to capture your ways/That’s a task that will always defeat me.”
Directness and intimacy are part of the new album’s allure, which may be why “Let It Blow” makes for such a misleading leadoff. Throughout the album, Thompson’s voice often seems to be at a conversational or even confiding pitch; the instruments are freer of effects than they are in the concerts at which sound man/road manager/Ballads co-producer and mixer Simon Tassano sits behind the boards. On this collection of “small songs,” Thompson seems freer, too—to take chances, even to fail.
In contrast to the assurance with which he tackles “A Solitary Life,” “Let It Blow,” and “Old Thames Side,” he nearly falters on several attempts at art song. “How Does Your Garden Grow?”—plucked from both Satie and Sondheim—offers a melody that’s hard to follow and lyrics that don’t quite jell; right in the middle is a highly impressionistic guitar solo that’s perilously close to inaccessibility. Here, and on “Precious One,” which demands a vocal range Thompson can barely muster, you get the idea that maybe someone else ought to have been let into the garage. “Cressida,” on the other hand, is a near-perfect oratorio, constructed of single syllables, free of adjectives, embroidered by a gracefully plucked acoustic guitar, and sung in a voice that would astonish anyone who remembered the stammering boy from Fairport or the taciturn presence behind rich-throated ex-wife Linda.
In some ways, Ballads is all about finding that voice, about Thompson stretching himself—not always with complete success, but always with the raw emotion that once was present only in his electric solos. “My Soul, My Soul,” the album’s longest track at just over five-and-a-half minutes, offers all of Thompson’s gifts in fruition, even a bit of electric guitar in an otherwise all-acoustic collection. In a furious search for someone—lover, muse, goddess?—Thompson casts out seemingly random images: “The way she crimps her curls/The way she calls that hog/...The way she bangs the wall/The way she walks the dog.”
Again, words seem to defeat him as strings, accordion, and Dobkin’s tribal rhythms gallop along in some reverse hegira, a quest for a Mecca that might mean rebirth or annihilation. “She gave me my party favours,” he wails. “But nothing was sweet enough.” He caps the final word with a mad “ahhh!” Then his knife-edged electric slices through with the old Thompsonian abandon. Add in a persistent, nearly whispered chant of “My soul, my soul, my soul,” and you’ve got the stuff Thompson fans have been waiting for since his foray into Sufism 30 years ago: holy fire, earthy funk.
“Miss Patsy,” the only track on Ballads that’s really a ballad, likewise offers a questing Thompson, this time in a familiar, almost twee folky setting. In succession, our antihero is held for a ransom never paid, seduced by a religious cult, and subjected to an extreme makeover that lands him in prison. I’m not going to swear that this is a metaphorical representation of Thompson’s own career—dogged by the limitations of Fairport-style folk-rock, a too-literal approach to faith, and the cluelessness of industry weasels—but it sure makes for an intriguing pattern. “Row, Boys, Row” also suggests the demands of the “shark-filled sea” of the music business, or of any corrupt institution. “Seven years of bad luck,” Thompson sings. “Should have read the small print.”
The man who unexpectedly ranted about arrogance and backstabbing and the rest of the godawful biz is fully present here—but not with bitterness or even much regret. After all, he’s a lucky guy: He can go to his home office and turn out a narrow, deep product, with no obligation to brandish his lengthy résumé. Front Parlour Ballads is surprising, challenging, and, above all, peculiar. For Richard Thompson, that’s a fine compliment.
By Pamela Murray Winters
Front Parlour Ballads
Richard Thompson
Cooking Vinyl
A few years ago, I interviewed Richard Thompson for an article that was never published. Unexpectedly, the session turned into a sort of diatribe on the business the then-52-year-old had been a part of since he was a teenager in the groundbreaking British folk-rock band Fairport Convention. On being a “cult artist,” he said that two-thirds of working musicians are cult artists, because the industry doesn’t support them. He spoke at length of the arrogance of rock musicians, how they lose touch with reality. And I’m pretty sure that the words “back-stabbing bastards” were used.
“Pretty sure,” I say, because all I have now are some notes scribbled down later, after a tape-recorder malfunction. But history bears out Thompson’s disenchantment with the mainstream: Not long before the interview, he’d left longtime home Capitol Records, and since his departure, he’s released two strong, idiosyncratic, and resolutely indie studio albums, 2003’s The Old Kit Bag and the new Front Parlour Ballads.
That Thompson, in a nearly 40-year recording career, has never had a hit record is ultimately a saving grace. Already free of a sense of obligation to his audience beyond being himself, over and over, Thompson seems to have found even more freedom in departing from the style-making and profit-siphoning of the music industry. It never really knew how to market his eclectic arrangements, expressive but low-wankage guitar playing, and shy-lad persona, anyway.
Front Parlour Ballads, he’s been joking at recent shows, was made with “a minimal budget—reflected in the abysmal sound quality but not reflected in the exorbitant cover price.” He’s right about the budget, at least: The album was recorded in his garage studio, with Thompson playing, as the liner notes coyly state, “several things.” There’s only the occasional presence of percussionist Debra Dobkin to indicate something Thompson didn’t feel himself capable of doing.
“A Solitary Life,” the 11th of the disc’s 13 tracks, would seem, by title, to represent this middle-aged muso, diddling with guitars, mandolin, accordion, and sundry muses in the comfort of his own home. In fact, it’s a deceptively breezy look at the road not taken. “Sometimes I long for the solitary life,” he sings, then envisions a workaday alter ego whose career becomes less appealing, verse by verse, from “a serious hobby in the garden shed”—pretty much what Thompson himself has indulged with this album—to a death by “a steady, reliable tumour.” It’s the second-least-surprising tune on Ballads, definitely the most Dylan-influenced, and one of the most extroverted.
“Let It Blow,” the rousing opener, is the most predictable. The tale of a tabloid-grabbing romance, marriage, and divorce doesn’t have much original to offer save Thompson’s delight in his own wordplay. He puts the bride’s family in New Zealand, thus allowing someone to be “speedin’ from distant Dunedin,” but returns the failed groom to England so that, while the bride plots “revenge,” his eye can “stray to the ample bustier of a novelty dancer from Penge.” It’s a fine three-fifths of a limerick, but it wears out its welcome over the repeated listenings an album like this one demands.
Geography is always important to this California-dwelling expatriate—how must he have felt when Del McCoury, adapting his “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” for bluegrass, changed “Box Hill” to “Knoxville”? —and it’s used most effectively on Ballads in “Old Thames Side.” Here Thompson’s protagonist can pinpoint where he fell in love, as his beloved stood “by Custom House Landing/ Like Venus risen out of the water.” A song of naked emotion and breathtaking simplicity, “Old Thames Side” also contains a frequent Thompson motif, of a tongue-tied man overcome with emotion: “I searched for a phrase to capture your ways/That’s a task that will always defeat me.”
Directness and intimacy are part of the new album’s allure, which may be why “Let It Blow” makes for such a misleading leadoff. Throughout the album, Thompson’s voice often seems to be at a conversational or even confiding pitch; the instruments are freer of effects than they are in the concerts at which sound man/road manager/Ballads co-producer and mixer Simon Tassano sits behind the boards. On this collection of “small songs,” Thompson seems freer, too—to take chances, even to fail.
In contrast to the assurance with which he tackles “A Solitary Life,” “Let It Blow,” and “Old Thames Side,” he nearly falters on several attempts at art song. “How Does Your Garden Grow?”—plucked from both Satie and Sondheim—offers a melody that’s hard to follow and lyrics that don’t quite jell; right in the middle is a highly impressionistic guitar solo that’s perilously close to inaccessibility. Here, and on “Precious One,” which demands a vocal range Thompson can barely muster, you get the idea that maybe someone else ought to have been let into the garage. “Cressida,” on the other hand, is a near-perfect oratorio, constructed of single syllables, free of adjectives, embroidered by a gracefully plucked acoustic guitar, and sung in a voice that would astonish anyone who remembered the stammering boy from Fairport or the taciturn presence behind rich-throated ex-wife Linda.
In some ways, Ballads is all about finding that voice, about Thompson stretching himself—not always with complete success, but always with the raw emotion that once was present only in his electric solos. “My Soul, My Soul,” the album’s longest track at just over five-and-a-half minutes, offers all of Thompson’s gifts in fruition, even a bit of electric guitar in an otherwise all-acoustic collection. In a furious search for someone—lover, muse, goddess?—Thompson casts out seemingly random images: “The way she crimps her curls/The way she calls that hog/...The way she bangs the wall/The way she walks the dog.”
Again, words seem to defeat him as strings, accordion, and Dobkin’s tribal rhythms gallop along in some reverse hegira, a quest for a Mecca that might mean rebirth or annihilation. “She gave me my party favours,” he wails. “But nothing was sweet enough.” He caps the final word with a mad “ahhh!” Then his knife-edged electric slices through with the old Thompsonian abandon. Add in a persistent, nearly whispered chant of “My soul, my soul, my soul,” and you’ve got the stuff Thompson fans have been waiting for since his foray into Sufism 30 years ago: holy fire, earthy funk.
“Miss Patsy,” the only track on Ballads that’s really a ballad, likewise offers a questing Thompson, this time in a familiar, almost twee folky setting. In succession, our antihero is held for a ransom never paid, seduced by a religious cult, and subjected to an extreme makeover that lands him in prison. I’m not going to swear that this is a metaphorical representation of Thompson’s own career—dogged by the limitations of Fairport-style folk-rock, a too-literal approach to faith, and the cluelessness of industry weasels—but it sure makes for an intriguing pattern. “Row, Boys, Row” also suggests the demands of the “shark-filled sea” of the music business, or of any corrupt institution. “Seven years of bad luck,” Thompson sings. “Should have read the small print.”
The man who unexpectedly ranted about arrogance and backstabbing and the rest of the godawful biz is fully present here—but not with bitterness or even much regret. After all, he’s a lucky guy: He can go to his home office and turn out a narrow, deep product, with no obligation to brandish his lengthy résumé. Front Parlour Ballads is surprising, challenging, and, above all, peculiar. For Richard Thompson, that’s a fine compliment.
Paste feature (very long), 2003
Richard Thompson: Plunging the Knife in Deeper
(credited to "Pamela Winters," but it's me, with the Murray)
Paste magazine, issue 4, 2003
It’s a typically English tableau: On a summer afternoon, on a green field under mackerel skies, a man in white swings a cricket bat at an oncoming ball. Sometimes, missing, he runs to retrieve it, tosses it back to the bowler, then resumes his position, waiting.
Variations on the cricket-white theme pepper the sports field in Cropredy, Oxfordshire. Most are worn by the village team, which is about to play its annual match against a side made up of members and friends of the band Fairport Convention.
Few Fairporters can be found on the field. The festival commemorating the band’s 35th anniversary ran late last night, and the post-concert celebrations later still; some of the lads are probably still celebrating.
But Richard Thompson, a founding member of the group, has his eye on the ball. He hits more than he misses. If practice doesn’t make perfect, it nonetheless makes this good-natured game just a little more accomplished.
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Later on, the skies will open up. Rain attaches itself to Thompson like—well, like lazy journalists attach themselves to clichés. It’s generally in the first paragraph of a Thompson-related story that the reader encounters “doom,” “gloom” or both. The alleged darkness of his vision may be the most famous thing about this relatively fame-free artist.
But come upon him fresh, at the turn of the last century—via his last album for Capitol (1999’s Mock Tudor), his new album on Cooking Vinyl/spinART (The Old Kit Bag, released in the U.K. in February and due in the States in May), a handful of limited-release live CDs and a string of concert performances that keep him on the road over half the nights of the year—and you’ll notice more sunshine than cloud cover. His recent live concerts included songs he’d written for an upcoming children’s album. (Then again, “My Daddy Is a Mummy” kills off Pops in line three before engaging in a lively review of embalming techniques.) And the vibrant spirit of his compositions of the last several years makes it easier to get beyond the dour reputation of this man in black (it’s a stage thing, he says; dark clothes “don’t show the stains”). What with the kids’ songs, the onstage jokes and the smile-smile-smile of his new album’s title, is he whistling through the graveyard, grinning while the bombs rain down?
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“I’m just a happy person,” he says. We are in the greenroom du jour, in the basement of the McDonald Theatre in Eugene, Ore., a few hours before a January solo show. He’s a genial host and a thoughtful interviewee, courteous but exacting, and prone to slip from earnest revelation into defensive humor in an eyeblink.
He divides himself between his visitor and his guitar, playing at some old familiar tune he describes as “a Mary Lou Williams version of Dvorak.” He’s not distracted; he’s just multitasking. Happy to set the guitar down when he’s asked a question; happy to pick it up again when attention turns from him.
About his jovial stage presence, he acknowledges: “I think humor on stage is a kind of a weapon, actually.” His interviewer, who, it must be said, has seen him well over 100 times, can be glimpsed in the audience in two concert broadcasts recorded in two different countries and has Thompson trivia taking up room in the cerebellum perhaps better given to bank account numbers and children’s birth dates, says, “I’ve seen that in interviews with you before.”
Thompson goes playful—pitch raised, eyes wide. “Or it was somebody else, perhaps. Whitesnake. Or Rolf Harris!” Earnest again: “I think humor’s useful for switching—I think it’s good because it’s supposed to be entertainment, music. It’s a lot to ask people to sit through an hour and a half, two hours of music that’s all one mood, where things never get light and bubbly. So I think it just helps the audience attention span, and it helps to soften up the audience, too, in a sense. They’re more relaxed, and therefore you can kind of plunge the knife in when they’re not looking.”
To my shocked laugh, he quickly and sincerely adds: “I mean that in kind of a positive way.”
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Richard John Thompson was born on April 3, 1949, and grew up in London with his parents and older sister. He was a sickly, shy child with a serious stammer. (Later, he would be quoted as saying, “I took up music so I wouldn’t have to talk to people.”) His father was a policeman—a “dour Scot,” Thompson’s mother once said, who loved music and bought his son his first guitar.
By his early teens, he was hanging around his sister’s boyfriends, getting them to teach him guitar techniques. Soon he was playing in local bands with schoolmates. One of these bands became Fairport Convention, a rock band (ca. 1967) turned folk-rock band (ca. 1969) turned musical institution/semi-dysfunctional family (after Thompson left).
Inspired by the music of Bob Dylan and The Byrds, by his father’s record collection and by his own muse, the teenage Thompson began writing songs and also creating many of the group’s musical arrangements. He has been credited with Fairport’s unusual setting of Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” and with the jazzy 5/4 arrangement of bandmate Sandy Denny’s “Autopsy.” His interest in Cajun music led to the song “Cajun Woman”; across the ocean, a kid named Michael Doucet listened in wonderment to this group of Brits reinterpreting his heritage for youth-culture consumption and started pondering ways to start his own folk revival, which would eventually lead to BeauSoleil.
Fairport, too, moved further into reclaiming its British roots, particularly after folksinger Denny joined after the group’s first album. The young band took up the traditional song “A Sailor’s Life” for its 1969 album Unhalfbricking, with Thompson and fiddler Dave Swarbrick creating waves of electric tumult.
Just before the release of Unhalfbricking, on the road to promote the upcoming album, the band suffered a tragedy. In the early hours of May 12, 1969, while driving back from a gig with most of Fairport in the van, the driver began to doze off. Thompson was sitting up front with his girlfriend Jeannie Franklyn. The van left the M1 motorway and tumbled over an embankment to land on a golf course. Nearly everyone was thrown from the vehicle. Franklyn and drummer Martin Lamble were killed.
The members of Fairport recovered as well as could be expected; some wounds ran deep. Denny, who was not in the van at the time, became even more skittish about traveling than before. She left the group within a year, along with bassist Ashley Hutchings, who suffered severe facial injuries. But while pulling themselves together that summer, the Fairporters created the landmark folk-rock album Liege and Lief. Among a bounty of electrified ballads, mostly culled from the Cecil Sharp House folk archives, is a melancholy Thompson/Swarbrick number, “Crazy Man Michael.” In Thompson’s lyrics, a raven taunts Michael that “your true love will die by your own right hand”; when Michael, angered, kills the bird, he finds that it was his lover, transformed. The final stanza shows him as “keeper of the garden” where he has lost his love, limited to whistling “the simplest of tunes.”
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Thompson’s music, actually, is quite simple—in the way that, say, Citizen Kane and La Gioconda are simple and Ulysses and Two Virgins are not. There are take-home tunes, clever but understated lyrics, and a surprising lack of self-indulgent wankage for someone so often deemed a guitar god.
But subtlety doesn’t necessitate impotence. Getting back to knifing one’s audiences, Thompson clarifies: “I think you almost want people’s defenses to be down, so that they’ll let you wash over them with whatever the subject matter is. And because as a songwriter you’re trying to really hit the audience just below the conscious level.”
In a concert setting, Thompson says, the jokes and lighter songs serve a purpose: “You want [the audience] to not have preconceived notions. And if the mood switches a lot, then that breaks up their preconceptions. But you can’t do that with an album. Not as much, anyway.”
A song called “God Loves a Drunk” appeared on his 1991 album Rumor and Sigh, but I first heard it in an August 1990 performance at Bumbershoot, a Seattle arts festival. Thompson, alone onstage with an acoustic guitar, called out: “Do we have any drunks in the audience this evening?” To scattered laughter and cheers, he continued: “This one’s for all the drunks!” The first line, “Will there be any bartenders up there in heaven?” was met with giggles, claps and one cry of “You rock!” By the end of the song—which knocks propriety (“Does crawling and wage-slaving win you God’s love?”) in favor of inebriation (“God loves a drunk, although he’s a fool, oh he wets in his pants and he falls off his stool”)—the audience was stunned into near-silence.
“It’s a slightly worrying song, ’cause it kind of attacks the audience,” Thompson, a longtime teetotaler, muses. “Attacks audience values. Which I think is good. ‘Cold Kisses’ is another one.” In that song, from 1996’s you?me?us?, the narrator digs around in his girlfriend’s underwear drawer for photos of her old lovers (“got to see how I measure up to them all.”). “People don’t really talk about it, but it’s a thing that people do quite a lot that they would never admit to. So if you put that into a song, it kind of unsettles the audience—but in a good way—but then the story goes in.”
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When Thompson, in 1986’s “Long Dead Love,” wrote: “Somebody's walking, oh somebody's walking / There on the grave of our love …Why don't they just let it die and fade and grow cold again?” he protested the muckraking of his 10-year marriage to Linda Thompson, which ended in 1982. People are still getting out the shovels, particularly in light of Linda’s 2002 release Fashionably Late, her first album in almost two decades.
Thompson and Linda (née Peters) met through mutual friend Sandy Denny, before first Denny and then Thompson (in 1971) left Fairport Convention for solo careers. Linda had a career of her own—jingles, Elton John demos, the folk circuit—but now she would give voice to Richard’s words. And it was a superb voice. Mellow, capable of snowy obliqueness or passionate warmth at turns, it sounded even better when paired with her husband’s rough-hewn baritone. The couple recorded six albums together—most critical successes, all commercial flops—before their breakup.
Two extramusical elements of that time—the Muslim Thing and the Divorce Thing—get rehashed more often than the Thompsons’ creations get played. The couple’s adoption of Sufism—which Richard has described as less a conversion than a recognition (he told biographer Patrick Humphries, “I just thought, ‘Oh, this is actually who I’ve always been’”) took them out of the musical world for a time, in part because Richard was unsure how to reconcile his art with his faith. (He attempted to become an antiques dealer.)
Linda had other problems, as the primary caretaker of their eventual three children. The couple’s marriage was stormy. Their return to the music business after two years lessened some of the pressures, but Richard’s announcement that he had fallen in love with an American woman was the final blow to the marriage—but not the career.
It was 1982. The Thompsons’ third child had been born; Richard had told Linda that the marriage was over—and the couple, incredibly, followed through on an engagement to tour the States behind their album Shoot Out the Lights. The tour cemented their reputations among American fans, many of whom had sought out Fairport and Thompson albums with bloodhound tenacity in those pre-Internet times. Ilana Pelzig Cellum, a New York-based freelance recording engineer who got to know Richard around that time, recalls: “When I recorded him at Folk City in ’82 [for Small Town Romance], he was astonished at how many people knew his songs.”
He eventually married his newfound love, Nancy Covey, but he spent a lot of time in New York after the breakup, dropping in on shows by his ex-Fairport bandmates Simon Nicol and Dave Swarbrick. Cellum says she and fellow engineer Ed Haber “got to know him pretty well. It was a hard time for him.”
Simon Tassano came on board as tour manager and soundman during what became known as “the divorce tour.” He’s been Thompson’s right-hand man ever since. “When I first knew Richard, he wouldn’t say boo to a goose onstage, and now he’s the consummate entertainer and has the audience exactly where he wants them virtually 99 percent of the time. And it still grows, in my opinion.”
Time, work and solitude have shaped the onstage Thompson, says Tassano. “When you’re out there doing it all that time, especially when you’re by yourself up there and it’s not a band, you’ve really got to connect with the audience in between as well. And I think necessity has brought about [the naturally shy Thompson’s ease on stage]. When it was Richard and Linda, obviously he was going through a tough time in his life, with emotions and all that kind of stuff, but then as he became just Richard and moved on, he just became stronger, I guess.”
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In Eugene, I joke that I won’t ask him what his latest songs are about because I know he won’t tell me anyway. I’m surprised when he goes on to discuss what they mean to him.
Take, for example, The Old Kit Bag’s opening track, “Gethsemane,” a song named for a town named for a place of betrayal: “It’s the story of a person, a relative of mine, who grew up in a very idyllic childhood—tremendous freedom, what you want for children, that sense of freedom, running through the woods, sailboats out on the river. That thing where as a kid you just disappear for the whole of a summer’s day and come back at evening and your parents know you’re OK. So he had a great childhood, but as he got older, life became more disappointing. Nothing quite lived up to that. And parental expectations—he could never live up to parental expectations. So life became harder, and he began to drink a lot, and he got really ill. …So it’s a boy’s song, about the responsibility of maleness.”
Coming from a man whose 1982 “A Man in Need” took an upbeat approach to familial desertion, that might be hard for some to swallow. There are women who knew him during his first marriage who won’t listen to his music now, who can’t forgive what he did to Linda, even though he and Linda seem to have made their own peace with matters.
Asked about the treatment of her gender in his songs, colleague Cellum allows: “There always seems to be a distrustful, misogynistic element there.” She admits that it makes her uncomfortable before quickly stressing that it’s not at all evident in the way he behaves toward her. When she says, “You wish Richard was better about women,” she means as a songwriter.
Thompson, a 53-year-old white, heterosexual Englishman, writes what he knows. “Everybody has a hard time, be you male or female,” he says. “There are problems, crises and rites of passage.”
He has five children, four now grown: a son from an early relationship, two daughters and a son (musician Teddy Thompson) with Linda, and another son with Nancy Covey. How does he feel he’s done in preparing his sons for the responsibility of maleness? “Having what I would consider to be a difficult and traumatic childhood doesn't automatically make me a great father who knows how to bring up boys. With my two oldest [sons], I've had a lot of catching up to do, because I wasn't there enough in the early years. I probably try too hard to do the right thing, and that doesn't work very well … it's been easier with my youngest, and I've been able to be more consistent.
“But the songs are a different world, and I don't know how they relate to the real world. They are probably closer to the demons of my youth than anything to do with my kids.”
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Thompson has fought those demons by devoting himself to his music. By 1982, he began more solo touring and recording. By the ’90s, he had taken solo and band tours all over the world, and he was as well-known in the States—which has been his primary home for some time now—as in his native England.
Says avant-garde guitarist Henry Kaiser, who has worked with Thompson numerous times: “An amazing thing about RT that I get to see offstage, that most fans would not get to see, is how hard he works. He works hard at songwriting. He works hard at conceiving new things on guitar and new ways to play. RT never rests on his laurels. He is never lazy. He works hard at growth and pushes himself to try new things. He does not choose the easiest paths.”
Thompson certainly didn’t choose an easy path when he identified himself as a Muslim. He remains a deeply spiritual man, though after a fairly intense discussion of some Islamic themes, he murmurs, “I’d rather people didn’t know about my religious beliefs, ‘cause I think it gets in the way. I’d rather that wasn’t a barrier. If I could start again, I would never say anything about it.”
Because it’s already out on the table, he’s had some heavy responsibilities since Sept. 11. “I got hate mail. But most people that I knew were bending over backwards to try and be understanding. My experience was mostly that people were aware that Islam was something that they really didn’t know much about, and they wanted to find out.”
He is especially quick to rail against fundamentalism of all stripes, notably in the Taliban’s dismissal of Western civilization, which Thompson touches on in The Old Kit Bag’s “Outside of the Inside”: “God never listened to Charlie Parker / Charlie Parker lived in vain …Wash away his monkey music / Damn his demons, damn his pain.”
“I certainly don’t like Christian fundamentalists, and I certainly don’t like Muslim fundamentalists. Probably the worst scenario is where the two collide. Which is a possibility, right? But I think of fundamentalists as basically ignorant. They have their small amount of knowledge which gives them a very superior attitude to other people. And it gives them their little bit of power.
“The person in the song is not someone who listens to their conscience. [It’s] someone who does it by the book. It’s the accountant mindset toward the spiritual. And the end of the song says, ‘when I get to heaven, I won’t know I’m there.’ If you can’t see paradise in this world, how will you see it in the next world?”
For Thompson, “the idea is that you worship God; you’re not worshipping religion. There’s no compulsion in Islam. In what’s called the din”—a sort of contract between the individual and God—“it’s like the life transaction. There’s no compulsion to anybody else.
“The Saudis have prayer police who go out and hit you over the head if you’re aren’t doing the prayer at prayer time and this kind of stuff. This is real Spanish inquisition stuff. It’s the imposition of religion.”
That said, he’s adamantly opposed to the military action that was looming on the horizon when we last spoke. In fall 2002, at several solo shows in the Northeast, he sang Phil Ochs’ “I Ain’t Marching Anymore” along with a new verse about the folly of going to war for oil. A number of audience members tried to shout him down, argued among themselves during and after the show, or stormed out—“which is all good,” Thompson avows. “That’s all I was trying to do, was to get people to talk! Get people to debate, instead of this idea that it’s unpatriotic to challenge the White House at the moment.”
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It might be easy to think that today’s Thompson is streamlined, serene. His live sound is slicker: Tassano, who has worked with him for 21 years, mans the soundboard with an eagle eye. Thompson handles his fans, many of them almost terrifyingly worshipful, with ease—maybe because they’re his bread and butter, but also because, Thompson says, “I’m glad to have people listen to me.” He’s less fazed than he used to be by the Thompson-is-God types: “It’s only strange if you invest in it. Which I’ve never done.”
And his latest album could be called simpler than some of its predecessors. The Old Kit Bag was recorded with a trio consisting of Thompson, bassist Danny Thompson, and percussionist Michael Jerome, with occasional backing vocals from Judith Owen. “That was one of the manifesto decrees of the album,” he says; “we’ll do it as a three-piece, and we’ll use everybody on every track. So we’ll pick tracks that, regardless of how quiet they get and how acoustic they are, everyone’s still gonna be playing on something. Just to give it a kind of unity.” There are a few overdubs—Thompson plays accordion, dulcimer, harmonium and mandolin as well as the expected guitars. “That doesn’t imply a lot of skill!” he laughs. “It just implies convenient things lying around that any fool can have a go at.”
This self-deprecation, like his music, like his humor, is a tool he wields to unsettle. In speaking with him over the years, in settings formal and otherwise, I’ve experienced three or four moments when it seems I've been let in on an intimate revelation, an unguarded comment. But later the happy man with the quick knife appears again. The more I talk with him, the more I learn about him—and the more I realize I don’t really know him at all.
As he picks through shards of memory, images of passersby, hidden photographs, for the elements of his musical alchemy, he uses himself in strange ways: appearing with startling honesty, then disappearing in a puff of smoke.
In Eugene, as my recorder clicked off, he commented: “The tape always ends on the truth.” But whatever truth he’d claimed was on the tape leader, words lost forever.
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If there is an archetypal Richard Thompson character, it’s a man who can’t clear his throat to speak, who stands poised for a great leap, toes tightening, heart beating.
He makes his leaps in those rare extended electric solos, seldom captured on tape. His playing, whether acoustic or electric, is exploratory; you experience him listening to himself. When soloing, he travels the strings, setting up initially dissonant series of notes that resolve themselves, over and over, in unexpected ways. The tension builds, sexually, spiritually—a delicious, disturbing anticipation, ecstatic release, a peaceful return to earth with eyes yet on the sky.
This divine music is among the risks that Thompson forsook for that brief period in the ’70s when he thought it more holy to sell antiques.
He knows the power of what he does: “Music’s something that brings people together. Music’s a great force for good. You could set out to play dark, evil music, but mostly it’s various versions of bringing light from dark. People go away from a concert happy, usually. That’s because it removes the barriers.
“People tell me my songs are sensual, or that they put you in the there and then, but I think that's as often untrue as it is true—because there are different intentions in the writing.”
He knows what his songs mean to him, and he’s open to them being heard differently, though he still thrives on the connection: “Sometimes someone will come up after a concert and they’ll say, ‘I really get that song, I really understand that, that means a lot to me,’ and that’s fantastic. For me that’s the best feeling … the idea that you’ve communicated something to somebody else and they’ve got it, they’ve got through whatever the language is, whatever the medium, they’ve managed to decode it.”
To him, many of his songs are about taking risks. About longtime favorite “Wall of Death,” he says, “I suppose that song is a memo to self. It’s a song to me—it’s just to remind me how I should live, that I should take risks, that I should be on the edge. That I should be the guy who walks down the street muttering to himself, that that’s OK.”
The intoxicating “First Breath,” on The Old Kit Bag, serves a similar purpose: “Another memo to self: Grasp with both hands what’s left of your life.”
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When Michael Jerome was hired to play drums on the tour supporting the 1999 release Mock Tudor, he’d never heard of Richard Thompson. A friend told him: “He pushes the boundaries enough to make it interesting.”
Part of the success of Thompson’s music, says Jerome, is that it’s “all the mind of Richard. He can give direction if he needs to, but the fun of it is he hardly does it.” “I think Richard absolutely knows his own mind and he is unswayable,” says Cellum. “I’m sure he’ll listen to all the comments, but it’s his own vision. And that’s why he makes things that last … I would hate to have to try to change his mind! It’s not that he’s rigid, so much—it’s that he has his own path.”
“Let the man get out there and do exactly what he wants, as far as I’m concerned,” says Tassano. “That’s the best way.”
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He likes sport, this typically British man. He coaches his youngest son’s soccer team. He suffers occasional pain from tennis elbow—brought on by guitar work, yes, but also by pounding the courts. A few years ago, at the Cropredy reunion festival, he didn’t play any music but dutifully showed up for the post-festival cricket, helping the musicians’ team finally win a game against the villagers.
And in his youth, he studied archery. I know a little about that sport as well. And I know that Richard Thompson knows that when you're aiming at a target, you don't look at the arrow.
(credited to "Pamela Winters," but it's me, with the Murray)
Paste magazine, issue 4, 2003
It’s a typically English tableau: On a summer afternoon, on a green field under mackerel skies, a man in white swings a cricket bat at an oncoming ball. Sometimes, missing, he runs to retrieve it, tosses it back to the bowler, then resumes his position, waiting.
Variations on the cricket-white theme pepper the sports field in Cropredy, Oxfordshire. Most are worn by the village team, which is about to play its annual match against a side made up of members and friends of the band Fairport Convention.
Few Fairporters can be found on the field. The festival commemorating the band’s 35th anniversary ran late last night, and the post-concert celebrations later still; some of the lads are probably still celebrating.
But Richard Thompson, a founding member of the group, has his eye on the ball. He hits more than he misses. If practice doesn’t make perfect, it nonetheless makes this good-natured game just a little more accomplished.
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Later on, the skies will open up. Rain attaches itself to Thompson like—well, like lazy journalists attach themselves to clichés. It’s generally in the first paragraph of a Thompson-related story that the reader encounters “doom,” “gloom” or both. The alleged darkness of his vision may be the most famous thing about this relatively fame-free artist.
But come upon him fresh, at the turn of the last century—via his last album for Capitol (1999’s Mock Tudor), his new album on Cooking Vinyl/spinART (The Old Kit Bag, released in the U.K. in February and due in the States in May), a handful of limited-release live CDs and a string of concert performances that keep him on the road over half the nights of the year—and you’ll notice more sunshine than cloud cover. His recent live concerts included songs he’d written for an upcoming children’s album. (Then again, “My Daddy Is a Mummy” kills off Pops in line three before engaging in a lively review of embalming techniques.) And the vibrant spirit of his compositions of the last several years makes it easier to get beyond the dour reputation of this man in black (it’s a stage thing, he says; dark clothes “don’t show the stains”). What with the kids’ songs, the onstage jokes and the smile-smile-smile of his new album’s title, is he whistling through the graveyard, grinning while the bombs rain down?
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“I’m just a happy person,” he says. We are in the greenroom du jour, in the basement of the McDonald Theatre in Eugene, Ore., a few hours before a January solo show. He’s a genial host and a thoughtful interviewee, courteous but exacting, and prone to slip from earnest revelation into defensive humor in an eyeblink.
He divides himself between his visitor and his guitar, playing at some old familiar tune he describes as “a Mary Lou Williams version of Dvorak.” He’s not distracted; he’s just multitasking. Happy to set the guitar down when he’s asked a question; happy to pick it up again when attention turns from him.
About his jovial stage presence, he acknowledges: “I think humor on stage is a kind of a weapon, actually.” His interviewer, who, it must be said, has seen him well over 100 times, can be glimpsed in the audience in two concert broadcasts recorded in two different countries and has Thompson trivia taking up room in the cerebellum perhaps better given to bank account numbers and children’s birth dates, says, “I’ve seen that in interviews with you before.”
Thompson goes playful—pitch raised, eyes wide. “Or it was somebody else, perhaps. Whitesnake. Or Rolf Harris!” Earnest again: “I think humor’s useful for switching—I think it’s good because it’s supposed to be entertainment, music. It’s a lot to ask people to sit through an hour and a half, two hours of music that’s all one mood, where things never get light and bubbly. So I think it just helps the audience attention span, and it helps to soften up the audience, too, in a sense. They’re more relaxed, and therefore you can kind of plunge the knife in when they’re not looking.”
To my shocked laugh, he quickly and sincerely adds: “I mean that in kind of a positive way.”
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Richard John Thompson was born on April 3, 1949, and grew up in London with his parents and older sister. He was a sickly, shy child with a serious stammer. (Later, he would be quoted as saying, “I took up music so I wouldn’t have to talk to people.”) His father was a policeman—a “dour Scot,” Thompson’s mother once said, who loved music and bought his son his first guitar.
By his early teens, he was hanging around his sister’s boyfriends, getting them to teach him guitar techniques. Soon he was playing in local bands with schoolmates. One of these bands became Fairport Convention, a rock band (ca. 1967) turned folk-rock band (ca. 1969) turned musical institution/semi-dysfunctional family (after Thompson left).
Inspired by the music of Bob Dylan and The Byrds, by his father’s record collection and by his own muse, the teenage Thompson began writing songs and also creating many of the group’s musical arrangements. He has been credited with Fairport’s unusual setting of Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” and with the jazzy 5/4 arrangement of bandmate Sandy Denny’s “Autopsy.” His interest in Cajun music led to the song “Cajun Woman”; across the ocean, a kid named Michael Doucet listened in wonderment to this group of Brits reinterpreting his heritage for youth-culture consumption and started pondering ways to start his own folk revival, which would eventually lead to BeauSoleil.
Fairport, too, moved further into reclaiming its British roots, particularly after folksinger Denny joined after the group’s first album. The young band took up the traditional song “A Sailor’s Life” for its 1969 album Unhalfbricking, with Thompson and fiddler Dave Swarbrick creating waves of electric tumult.
Just before the release of Unhalfbricking, on the road to promote the upcoming album, the band suffered a tragedy. In the early hours of May 12, 1969, while driving back from a gig with most of Fairport in the van, the driver began to doze off. Thompson was sitting up front with his girlfriend Jeannie Franklyn. The van left the M1 motorway and tumbled over an embankment to land on a golf course. Nearly everyone was thrown from the vehicle. Franklyn and drummer Martin Lamble were killed.
The members of Fairport recovered as well as could be expected; some wounds ran deep. Denny, who was not in the van at the time, became even more skittish about traveling than before. She left the group within a year, along with bassist Ashley Hutchings, who suffered severe facial injuries. But while pulling themselves together that summer, the Fairporters created the landmark folk-rock album Liege and Lief. Among a bounty of electrified ballads, mostly culled from the Cecil Sharp House folk archives, is a melancholy Thompson/Swarbrick number, “Crazy Man Michael.” In Thompson’s lyrics, a raven taunts Michael that “your true love will die by your own right hand”; when Michael, angered, kills the bird, he finds that it was his lover, transformed. The final stanza shows him as “keeper of the garden” where he has lost his love, limited to whistling “the simplest of tunes.”
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Thompson’s music, actually, is quite simple—in the way that, say, Citizen Kane and La Gioconda are simple and Ulysses and Two Virgins are not. There are take-home tunes, clever but understated lyrics, and a surprising lack of self-indulgent wankage for someone so often deemed a guitar god.
But subtlety doesn’t necessitate impotence. Getting back to knifing one’s audiences, Thompson clarifies: “I think you almost want people’s defenses to be down, so that they’ll let you wash over them with whatever the subject matter is. And because as a songwriter you’re trying to really hit the audience just below the conscious level.”
In a concert setting, Thompson says, the jokes and lighter songs serve a purpose: “You want [the audience] to not have preconceived notions. And if the mood switches a lot, then that breaks up their preconceptions. But you can’t do that with an album. Not as much, anyway.”
A song called “God Loves a Drunk” appeared on his 1991 album Rumor and Sigh, but I first heard it in an August 1990 performance at Bumbershoot, a Seattle arts festival. Thompson, alone onstage with an acoustic guitar, called out: “Do we have any drunks in the audience this evening?” To scattered laughter and cheers, he continued: “This one’s for all the drunks!” The first line, “Will there be any bartenders up there in heaven?” was met with giggles, claps and one cry of “You rock!” By the end of the song—which knocks propriety (“Does crawling and wage-slaving win you God’s love?”) in favor of inebriation (“God loves a drunk, although he’s a fool, oh he wets in his pants and he falls off his stool”)—the audience was stunned into near-silence.
“It’s a slightly worrying song, ’cause it kind of attacks the audience,” Thompson, a longtime teetotaler, muses. “Attacks audience values. Which I think is good. ‘Cold Kisses’ is another one.” In that song, from 1996’s you?me?us?, the narrator digs around in his girlfriend’s underwear drawer for photos of her old lovers (“got to see how I measure up to them all.”). “People don’t really talk about it, but it’s a thing that people do quite a lot that they would never admit to. So if you put that into a song, it kind of unsettles the audience—but in a good way—but then the story goes in.”
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When Thompson, in 1986’s “Long Dead Love,” wrote: “Somebody's walking, oh somebody's walking / There on the grave of our love …Why don't they just let it die and fade and grow cold again?” he protested the muckraking of his 10-year marriage to Linda Thompson, which ended in 1982. People are still getting out the shovels, particularly in light of Linda’s 2002 release Fashionably Late, her first album in almost two decades.
Thompson and Linda (née Peters) met through mutual friend Sandy Denny, before first Denny and then Thompson (in 1971) left Fairport Convention for solo careers. Linda had a career of her own—jingles, Elton John demos, the folk circuit—but now she would give voice to Richard’s words. And it was a superb voice. Mellow, capable of snowy obliqueness or passionate warmth at turns, it sounded even better when paired with her husband’s rough-hewn baritone. The couple recorded six albums together—most critical successes, all commercial flops—before their breakup.
Two extramusical elements of that time—the Muslim Thing and the Divorce Thing—get rehashed more often than the Thompsons’ creations get played. The couple’s adoption of Sufism—which Richard has described as less a conversion than a recognition (he told biographer Patrick Humphries, “I just thought, ‘Oh, this is actually who I’ve always been’”) took them out of the musical world for a time, in part because Richard was unsure how to reconcile his art with his faith. (He attempted to become an antiques dealer.)
Linda had other problems, as the primary caretaker of their eventual three children. The couple’s marriage was stormy. Their return to the music business after two years lessened some of the pressures, but Richard’s announcement that he had fallen in love with an American woman was the final blow to the marriage—but not the career.
It was 1982. The Thompsons’ third child had been born; Richard had told Linda that the marriage was over—and the couple, incredibly, followed through on an engagement to tour the States behind their album Shoot Out the Lights. The tour cemented their reputations among American fans, many of whom had sought out Fairport and Thompson albums with bloodhound tenacity in those pre-Internet times. Ilana Pelzig Cellum, a New York-based freelance recording engineer who got to know Richard around that time, recalls: “When I recorded him at Folk City in ’82 [for Small Town Romance], he was astonished at how many people knew his songs.”
He eventually married his newfound love, Nancy Covey, but he spent a lot of time in New York after the breakup, dropping in on shows by his ex-Fairport bandmates Simon Nicol and Dave Swarbrick. Cellum says she and fellow engineer Ed Haber “got to know him pretty well. It was a hard time for him.”
Simon Tassano came on board as tour manager and soundman during what became known as “the divorce tour.” He’s been Thompson’s right-hand man ever since. “When I first knew Richard, he wouldn’t say boo to a goose onstage, and now he’s the consummate entertainer and has the audience exactly where he wants them virtually 99 percent of the time. And it still grows, in my opinion.”
Time, work and solitude have shaped the onstage Thompson, says Tassano. “When you’re out there doing it all that time, especially when you’re by yourself up there and it’s not a band, you’ve really got to connect with the audience in between as well. And I think necessity has brought about [the naturally shy Thompson’s ease on stage]. When it was Richard and Linda, obviously he was going through a tough time in his life, with emotions and all that kind of stuff, but then as he became just Richard and moved on, he just became stronger, I guess.”
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In Eugene, I joke that I won’t ask him what his latest songs are about because I know he won’t tell me anyway. I’m surprised when he goes on to discuss what they mean to him.
Take, for example, The Old Kit Bag’s opening track, “Gethsemane,” a song named for a town named for a place of betrayal: “It’s the story of a person, a relative of mine, who grew up in a very idyllic childhood—tremendous freedom, what you want for children, that sense of freedom, running through the woods, sailboats out on the river. That thing where as a kid you just disappear for the whole of a summer’s day and come back at evening and your parents know you’re OK. So he had a great childhood, but as he got older, life became more disappointing. Nothing quite lived up to that. And parental expectations—he could never live up to parental expectations. So life became harder, and he began to drink a lot, and he got really ill. …So it’s a boy’s song, about the responsibility of maleness.”
Coming from a man whose 1982 “A Man in Need” took an upbeat approach to familial desertion, that might be hard for some to swallow. There are women who knew him during his first marriage who won’t listen to his music now, who can’t forgive what he did to Linda, even though he and Linda seem to have made their own peace with matters.
Asked about the treatment of her gender in his songs, colleague Cellum allows: “There always seems to be a distrustful, misogynistic element there.” She admits that it makes her uncomfortable before quickly stressing that it’s not at all evident in the way he behaves toward her. When she says, “You wish Richard was better about women,” she means as a songwriter.
Thompson, a 53-year-old white, heterosexual Englishman, writes what he knows. “Everybody has a hard time, be you male or female,” he says. “There are problems, crises and rites of passage.”
He has five children, four now grown: a son from an early relationship, two daughters and a son (musician Teddy Thompson) with Linda, and another son with Nancy Covey. How does he feel he’s done in preparing his sons for the responsibility of maleness? “Having what I would consider to be a difficult and traumatic childhood doesn't automatically make me a great father who knows how to bring up boys. With my two oldest [sons], I've had a lot of catching up to do, because I wasn't there enough in the early years. I probably try too hard to do the right thing, and that doesn't work very well … it's been easier with my youngest, and I've been able to be more consistent.
“But the songs are a different world, and I don't know how they relate to the real world. They are probably closer to the demons of my youth than anything to do with my kids.”
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Thompson has fought those demons by devoting himself to his music. By 1982, he began more solo touring and recording. By the ’90s, he had taken solo and band tours all over the world, and he was as well-known in the States—which has been his primary home for some time now—as in his native England.
Says avant-garde guitarist Henry Kaiser, who has worked with Thompson numerous times: “An amazing thing about RT that I get to see offstage, that most fans would not get to see, is how hard he works. He works hard at songwriting. He works hard at conceiving new things on guitar and new ways to play. RT never rests on his laurels. He is never lazy. He works hard at growth and pushes himself to try new things. He does not choose the easiest paths.”
Thompson certainly didn’t choose an easy path when he identified himself as a Muslim. He remains a deeply spiritual man, though after a fairly intense discussion of some Islamic themes, he murmurs, “I’d rather people didn’t know about my religious beliefs, ‘cause I think it gets in the way. I’d rather that wasn’t a barrier. If I could start again, I would never say anything about it.”
Because it’s already out on the table, he’s had some heavy responsibilities since Sept. 11. “I got hate mail. But most people that I knew were bending over backwards to try and be understanding. My experience was mostly that people were aware that Islam was something that they really didn’t know much about, and they wanted to find out.”
He is especially quick to rail against fundamentalism of all stripes, notably in the Taliban’s dismissal of Western civilization, which Thompson touches on in The Old Kit Bag’s “Outside of the Inside”: “God never listened to Charlie Parker / Charlie Parker lived in vain …Wash away his monkey music / Damn his demons, damn his pain.”
“I certainly don’t like Christian fundamentalists, and I certainly don’t like Muslim fundamentalists. Probably the worst scenario is where the two collide. Which is a possibility, right? But I think of fundamentalists as basically ignorant. They have their small amount of knowledge which gives them a very superior attitude to other people. And it gives them their little bit of power.
“The person in the song is not someone who listens to their conscience. [It’s] someone who does it by the book. It’s the accountant mindset toward the spiritual. And the end of the song says, ‘when I get to heaven, I won’t know I’m there.’ If you can’t see paradise in this world, how will you see it in the next world?”
For Thompson, “the idea is that you worship God; you’re not worshipping religion. There’s no compulsion in Islam. In what’s called the din”—a sort of contract between the individual and God—“it’s like the life transaction. There’s no compulsion to anybody else.
“The Saudis have prayer police who go out and hit you over the head if you’re aren’t doing the prayer at prayer time and this kind of stuff. This is real Spanish inquisition stuff. It’s the imposition of religion.”
That said, he’s adamantly opposed to the military action that was looming on the horizon when we last spoke. In fall 2002, at several solo shows in the Northeast, he sang Phil Ochs’ “I Ain’t Marching Anymore” along with a new verse about the folly of going to war for oil. A number of audience members tried to shout him down, argued among themselves during and after the show, or stormed out—“which is all good,” Thompson avows. “That’s all I was trying to do, was to get people to talk! Get people to debate, instead of this idea that it’s unpatriotic to challenge the White House at the moment.”
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It might be easy to think that today’s Thompson is streamlined, serene. His live sound is slicker: Tassano, who has worked with him for 21 years, mans the soundboard with an eagle eye. Thompson handles his fans, many of them almost terrifyingly worshipful, with ease—maybe because they’re his bread and butter, but also because, Thompson says, “I’m glad to have people listen to me.” He’s less fazed than he used to be by the Thompson-is-God types: “It’s only strange if you invest in it. Which I’ve never done.”
And his latest album could be called simpler than some of its predecessors. The Old Kit Bag was recorded with a trio consisting of Thompson, bassist Danny Thompson, and percussionist Michael Jerome, with occasional backing vocals from Judith Owen. “That was one of the manifesto decrees of the album,” he says; “we’ll do it as a three-piece, and we’ll use everybody on every track. So we’ll pick tracks that, regardless of how quiet they get and how acoustic they are, everyone’s still gonna be playing on something. Just to give it a kind of unity.” There are a few overdubs—Thompson plays accordion, dulcimer, harmonium and mandolin as well as the expected guitars. “That doesn’t imply a lot of skill!” he laughs. “It just implies convenient things lying around that any fool can have a go at.”
This self-deprecation, like his music, like his humor, is a tool he wields to unsettle. In speaking with him over the years, in settings formal and otherwise, I’ve experienced three or four moments when it seems I've been let in on an intimate revelation, an unguarded comment. But later the happy man with the quick knife appears again. The more I talk with him, the more I learn about him—and the more I realize I don’t really know him at all.
As he picks through shards of memory, images of passersby, hidden photographs, for the elements of his musical alchemy, he uses himself in strange ways: appearing with startling honesty, then disappearing in a puff of smoke.
In Eugene, as my recorder clicked off, he commented: “The tape always ends on the truth.” But whatever truth he’d claimed was on the tape leader, words lost forever.
- - -
If there is an archetypal Richard Thompson character, it’s a man who can’t clear his throat to speak, who stands poised for a great leap, toes tightening, heart beating.
He makes his leaps in those rare extended electric solos, seldom captured on tape. His playing, whether acoustic or electric, is exploratory; you experience him listening to himself. When soloing, he travels the strings, setting up initially dissonant series of notes that resolve themselves, over and over, in unexpected ways. The tension builds, sexually, spiritually—a delicious, disturbing anticipation, ecstatic release, a peaceful return to earth with eyes yet on the sky.
This divine music is among the risks that Thompson forsook for that brief period in the ’70s when he thought it more holy to sell antiques.
He knows the power of what he does: “Music’s something that brings people together. Music’s a great force for good. You could set out to play dark, evil music, but mostly it’s various versions of bringing light from dark. People go away from a concert happy, usually. That’s because it removes the barriers.
“People tell me my songs are sensual, or that they put you in the there and then, but I think that's as often untrue as it is true—because there are different intentions in the writing.”
He knows what his songs mean to him, and he’s open to them being heard differently, though he still thrives on the connection: “Sometimes someone will come up after a concert and they’ll say, ‘I really get that song, I really understand that, that means a lot to me,’ and that’s fantastic. For me that’s the best feeling … the idea that you’ve communicated something to somebody else and they’ve got it, they’ve got through whatever the language is, whatever the medium, they’ve managed to decode it.”
To him, many of his songs are about taking risks. About longtime favorite “Wall of Death,” he says, “I suppose that song is a memo to self. It’s a song to me—it’s just to remind me how I should live, that I should take risks, that I should be on the edge. That I should be the guy who walks down the street muttering to himself, that that’s OK.”
The intoxicating “First Breath,” on The Old Kit Bag, serves a similar purpose: “Another memo to self: Grasp with both hands what’s left of your life.”
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When Michael Jerome was hired to play drums on the tour supporting the 1999 release Mock Tudor, he’d never heard of Richard Thompson. A friend told him: “He pushes the boundaries enough to make it interesting.”
Part of the success of Thompson’s music, says Jerome, is that it’s “all the mind of Richard. He can give direction if he needs to, but the fun of it is he hardly does it.” “I think Richard absolutely knows his own mind and he is unswayable,” says Cellum. “I’m sure he’ll listen to all the comments, but it’s his own vision. And that’s why he makes things that last … I would hate to have to try to change his mind! It’s not that he’s rigid, so much—it’s that he has his own path.”
“Let the man get out there and do exactly what he wants, as far as I’m concerned,” says Tassano. “That’s the best way.”
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He likes sport, this typically British man. He coaches his youngest son’s soccer team. He suffers occasional pain from tennis elbow—brought on by guitar work, yes, but also by pounding the courts. A few years ago, at the Cropredy reunion festival, he didn’t play any music but dutifully showed up for the post-festival cricket, helping the musicians’ team finally win a game against the villagers.
And in his youth, he studied archery. I know a little about that sport as well. And I know that Richard Thompson knows that when you're aiming at a target, you don't look at the arrow.
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