Yesterday, April 3, was the singer-songwriter Richard Thompson’s 75th birthday. Thompson is renowned for two things, really: his extraordinary talent with a guitar and his ability to channel various styles and tell myriad stories in the short space of a song.
I’m not going to write here about his long career (starting with Fairport Convention when he was a teenager), his wonderful autobiography Beeswing, or anything about his personal life (since I know very little about his personal life). It is Thompson’s music that matters to me — I’ve seen him more times live than any other musician — and so here I’m just going to praise a few songs, with the hope of perhaps getting knowing nods of agreement from fellow fans and perhaps, if I’m lucky, convincing someone who’s never really listened to Richard Thompson to do so.
I adore two of his most famous songs, “Beeswing” and “1952 Vincent Black Lightning”, but since if you investigate Richard Thompson at all, you’ll encounter those two, I’m not going to say much except to mention my favorite performances of them. (Both are staples of his live shows. Audiences at this point expect them and are disappointed if both songs aren’t played.) My favorite recorded performance of “Beeswing” is the one on disc two of RT — The Life & Music of Richard Thompson, but that’s a rarity and it’s not streaming, so not helpful here. Instead, I’ll point to the version from the Acoustic Classics album, which I prefer to the original Mirror Ball album version because it’s unadorned: just voice and guitar, no cheesy violins in the background.
For “1952 Vincent Black Lightning”, you can’t go wrong — all the recordings of it I’ve heard are impressive, including the original from the marvelous Rumor and Sigh album. A particularly strong rendition is the 2012 Americana Music Awards performance available on YouTube. But truly, you can’t go wrong. It’s a song he’s performed a thousand times and yet still always brings to glorious life.
(I once heard somebody complain that “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” didn’t have enough about the motorcycle in it. Such folks should listen instead to “MGB-GT”, a gearhead rocker.)
Rumor and Sigh was the first Thompson album I listened to, so it holds a special place in my heart as the gateway to his world of wry weirdness. The opening track, “Read About Love”, is a lively rock song about a kid who wants to know about sex, but all the adults won’t talk to him about it, so he learns from teen mags, Hustler, and his big brother, who gives him a copy of what I’ve always assumed was Psychopathia Sexualis (“He gave me a book, the cover was plain/ Written by a doctor with a German name”). Armed by this education, he then goes and kidnaps a woman to test out how it all works. The song is entirely from this disturbed guy’s point of view. It’s a perfect little horror story, a cautionary tale about the consequences of ignorance and repression, and also a really upbeat, driving piece of music that can get audiences up and dancing.
Among my favorites of Thompson’s songs is “The Poor Ditching Boy”, originally recorded for his first solo album, Henry the Human Fly, which was a notorious flop on its release. (He wasn’t a great solo performer yet, but the album’s got good stuff on it.) My favorite version is from the 2004 Chrono Show album, an album which itself is a great overview of his career. “The Poor Ditching Boy” is a song with a lovely melody and a sad and even disturbing story — a common thing for Thompson, who once released two compilations titled Doom and Gloom from the Tomb. It’s a simple song in lots of ways, and that’s one of the things I find powerful about it. Something you likely won’t notice right away is how few direct rhymes there are: flood/blood, me/free, hill/will … and that’s it for end-rhymes, but the lyrics are full of slant rhymes and sounds playing off of each other, which is why it’s all so melodic and flowing. And the lyrics are just beautiful, rich with melancholy and loneliness, as well as another of those patented Thompson love stories, full of people who exploit each other on the way to destruction. (You don’t go to Richard Thompson songs if you want uplifting tales of the glorious power of love!) Love is so entwined with lust in Thompson’s songs that it becomes a kind of elemental force, even, itself, a death drive. As he sings in “The Poor Ditching Boy”, “The storm and the wind cut through to my skin/ But she cut through to my blood.” Wild and raging nature, love, blood — the basic ingredients of a lot of Thompson’s storytelling.
For a while, I said “Waltzing’s for Dreamers” (from 1988’s Amnesia album) was my favorite Richard Thompson song — another of his quiet ballads, something I’m a sucker for. It’s not his most musically or lyrically pyrotechnic song, but there’s a purity to it: it’s nothing more or less than a melancholy song from the point of view of someone sitting at a bar and getting lost in memories of better days. I gravitate more toward other of Thompson’s songs now, but for a few years there, “Waltzing’s for Dreamers” seemed to me about as good as a song can get, a Chekhovian character study in four minutes.
When it first came out in 2003, I really struggled with The Old Kit Bag album, though I’m not entirely sure why. Partly, it’s that I often prefer live recordings of Thompson to his studio albums, which can sometimes feel a little too polished for such a brilliantly spontaneous performer. (His mostly-improvised instrumental soundtrack for Werner Herzog’s film Grizzly Man is one studio album that feels perfect from start to finish — because of how improvised it was, I think.) But I kept coming back to Old Kit Bag and now it’s one of my favorites — “Gethsemane“, “Jealous Words”, “A Love You Can’t Survive“, and “Words Unspoken, Sight Unseen” are the highlights for me, as each in a different way allows him to show off his strengths, and include some of his best singing. Indeed, “A Love You Can’t Survive” is a real workout for a singer. I’ve seen him perform it live a couple of times and it’s impressive to see anyone who’s not a classically-trained singer sustain some of those notes — and he’s done it well into the traditional years of retirement.
It’s actually something quite interesting about Thompson: as a singer, he improves significantly as he enters middle-age and elderhood. One of the pleasures of listening to his recordings in chronological order is hearing him discover the range and power of his voice. (One turning point, I think, may be between the album version of “Calvary Cross” in 1974 and the epic November 1975 live performance of it. But his confidence and range as a singer developed throughout the 1980s and 1990s.) So many people of his generation destroyed their bodies and voices with a rocker’s lifestyle; he didn’t, and the result is a skilled singer almost unimaginable from his early recordings.
Thompson’s ability to transform a song — either his own or someone else’s — is perhaps second only to Bob Dylan’s. Check out the very different versions of “Guns Are the Tongue” on Sweet Warrior (or Live Warrior) and Acoustic Classics 2. On the original album version, it grows and grows until it’s a giant, full-band sonic explosion. The acoustic version is still powerful, still has a tremendous sense of growth and tragedy, but now the song allows more space for the story, which in some ways get buried by the music of the album version. The electric/acoustic binary is one that seems to fascinate Thompson; he based his underrated 1996 double-album You? Me? Us? on just that contrast.
One of the best Thompson shows I’ve seen was one where he didn’t perform any of his own songs. It was called 1,000 Years of Popular Music, and it was just Thompson and a percussionist/vocalist performing exactly what the title said. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to go to that show, as it just sounded kind of nuts, but friends were going, so I joined them, and it was revelatory. There’s a video of one of the performances, but it can’t capture the experience of being in the audience, knowing pretty much nothing about what to expect, and seeing the astonishing versatility, one song after another, few of them ever meant for solo guitar. It would be impressive as a stunt, but it wasn’t a stunt — it was good music! Even when it was absurd. Perhaps most then. (Gilbert & Sullivan. Britney Spears.)
As one of the creators of British folk-rock, Thompson can do it in reverse, too, taking a traditional song like “Loch Lomond” and turning it into an up-tempo rock song that is just pure fun. (When he did it with the French, Frith, Kaiser, Thompson group, he even put a Buddy Holly hiccup at the end.)
But my favorite of his transformations was of a classic Fairport Convention song, “Sloth”. This was not a song I ever paid a lot of attention to in its Fairport version, which spreads out into noodling like some of the early Pink Floyd songs, and isn’t really my sort of thing. And then at a solo show in Lebanon, NH, somebody asked for it during the time when he entertained requests. “‘Sloth’?!” he said, with apparent surprise and bewilderment. The audience laughed. It’s a sprawling electric song designed for a big group of musicians and multiple singers, not something he would ever play just himself and acoustic. Right? Surely the suggestion was a joke! He shrugged. “Let’s see…” he said, and began to tune the guitar. Then he started in on it, and it was overwhelmingly powerful. People were in tears. Eventually, he released a somewhat similar version of that interpretation on his Acoustic Rarities album, and though it’s not as powerful as what we saw that night in performance (how could it be?), it’s a wonderful reinterpretation. The version on Live from London gets closer to what I remember of the New Hampshire performance.
Thompson’s legacy will probably always be as a songwriter and acoustic guitarist, but he is a phenomenal electric guitarist and loves a big, loud rock song. Though that’s not generally my own favorite form for him, I want to acknowledge it here, because my love of the acoustic ballads risks misrepresenting him. I’ve already mentioned “MGB-GT”, but also want to bring in another from Rumor and Sigh: “Mother Knows Best”, which might be as close as he’s come to writing a punk song. It begins as something like a weird tale of a domineering mom, then becomes a witch story, then reveals it’s (at least in my interpretation!) an anti-nationalist allegory of oppressions in a place where the Statue of Liberty has become a zombie monster.
With that interpretation, a song released in 1991 becomes pretty relevant for our contemporary society.
Let’s not go out on such a caustic vision, however, much as I love it. (Me? Love a caustic vision? Quelle surprise!) Instead, let’s go way back to a very early song, “Genesis Hall”, which was originally recorded by Fairport and released as the first track of their extraordinary Unhalfbricking album (any album that gives you both “Genesis Hall” and “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?” is extraordinary!). In Beeswing, Thompson wrote:
“Genesis Hall” … was the name of a squat on Drury Lane in London, which had previously been a hotel. It was occupied by “hippies” — or at least that’s how they were described in the newspapers following their violent eviction by the police. I thought this was a subject worthy of a “protest” song, though the fact that my [police officer] father was still stationed at Covent Garden added some conflict to the narrative. (80)
A song like “Genesis Hall” was about current events, counter-cultural events, but expressed in the language of something more ancient, and that was always our intention. (256)
It’s a song he’s performed throughout his career, a song that has developed a certain gravitas in his later years. Here’s a lovely performance of it with Suzanne Vega and Loudon Wainwright looking on. “Genesis Hall” is a plea for compassion, a howl against the violence perpetrated in the world while recognizing the yearning for retributive violence.
As such it is — more than fifty years since it was first recorded — a song for our times.
When the rivers run thicker than trouble
I’ll be there at your side in the flood
T’was all I could do to keep myself
From taking revenge on your blood
Oh, oh, helpless and slow
And you don’t have anywhere to go…
