I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight (Part 4)

"The End of the Rainbow" - Alright, my first reaction to this song was, "This has just gone too far." Taking misanthropy and projecting it on a baby and claiming "There’s nothing to grow up for any more" seemed to me to unjustifiable, and just plain mean for mean’s sake. A declaration of universal suffering and nihilism for the human race is not an altogether unadmirable exercise, but unlike the other songs on the album, this one did not seem to contain any built-in paradox of specificity to point to in order to dramatize its point. A lullaby chanting the pointlessness of life to an infant seems a cheap shot, and all its points seemed unearned. The song seems to conjure misery simply for its own sake.

I was ready to write this one off as a misfire, but after several listenings, I seem to be getting caught up in the beauty of the melody, and the melancholy of the singer (Richard) seemed so genuine, that it suddenly struck me that the source of sadness in "The End of the Rainbow" lies not in the song but with the singer. It is the narrator’s pathetic prediction of pointlessness that is the true sadness and tragedy here. This child might grow up happy, healthy and prosperous, but it is the singer himself, with his total incapacity to imagine anything but sorrow and defeat that is the real casualty here. How crushed and embittered can a man be but to predict nothing but failure for an infant? How much has the world ground him down that he cannot see anything without such a fatalistically jaundiced eye.

I hear the song differently now. Its irony resides in Richard’s creation of the character of his singer who diverts the listener’s attention from subject matter to narrator. For this sleight of hand is done very unobtrusively and skillfully. A kinship relates to this and the narrator of "Withered and Died," but while the latter is being introspectively sorrowful, the former is projecting his utter disillusionment outward, blaming all his disappointments on the outside world.

The effect is absolutely devastating in its sadness, in its pathos. The song is a cry from the unredeemable, the permanently damaged psyche. In the end, this song is indeed the ultimate in bleakness - but not because its observations are true. It’s absolutely hopeless because of the individual’s vision of total defeat.

Beautifully simple and artlessly sung, "The End of the Rainbow" is perhaps this album of "doom and gloom’s" ultimate nadir of despair. And it is heartbreaking.


"The Great Valerio" -

High up above the crowd,
The Great Valerio is walking.
The rope seems hung from cloud to cloud,
And time stands still while he is walking.
His eye is steady on the target,
His foot is sure upon the rope.
Alone and peaceful as a mountain,
And certain as the mountain slope.

These words are placed together with great precision and delicate balance. Linda Thompson sings them exactly as measured and carefully as the acrobat who carefully puts one foot in front of the other, focusing in full measure to keep from falling. The melody is nearly monolodic, the movements away from the central tonic brief and rare, but in an odd modality that emphasis the vision’s strangeness and utter need for concentration.

Right from the beginning, "The Great Valerio," the album’s final song, achieves an extraordinary blend of action and sound that are inseparable - and mesmerizing. It is Linda’s greatest triumph as a vocalist - clear, emotionless, hauntingly deep, yet hopelessly empty - the amazing resonance of her voice becomes perfect projection for the song’s images and sense of emotional fragility. Richard’s acoustic accompaniment is likewise spare and simple, seemingly forming the rope on which her voice is walking, punctuated only occasionally by single bass notes that suggest a strange sense of fatality, and inevitability.

Fatalism itself, is the subject of the song, which by extension, the sum theme of I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight. As the metaphor of the acrobat is extended to the collective "we" of the audience - that is all of us - we move forward implacably, paradoxically knowing that even if we make it across the wire this time, who knows where we will be? The human condition does not allow for any assurance of destination, and the threat of tumbling remains a constant.
Yet still we move on. Why? Well, what is the alternative? This is all we can know how to do:
But we learn to watch together:

And feed on what we see above,
‘Till our hearts turn like the seasons,
And we are acrobats of love.

In relationships, as in the rest of life, we depend upon an unjustifiable sense of faith, even though we know that all around us is a void into which we may topple at any time. And if we read beyond the text, trusting in the logic of the situation (as well as the fatalism of the momentum of the music) in fact, inevitably, topple we must, past the wire of mortality.

Linda’s wide, broad voice reflects an awed, clear-eyed vision of this reality, this certainty. But we are not Valerio. We are "watchers." It is through imitation that we hope to negotiate with his skill. But even the greatest of rope-walkers may fall, and we fall far short of "the great hero." But for all of the attention given to him, "Who will help the tightrope walker/When he tumbles to the net?" Nobody - he’s on his own.

For in the last analysis, we can count on nobody. The Thompsons make this point crystal clear, as the final judgement is placed in Linda’s mouth, the putative voice of the observer/identifier:

I’m your friend until you use me,
And then be sure I won’t be there.

I won’t linger on any sense of prophecy in these words, as that is quite beside the point.
The point is in the understanding of the conditional nature of both love and life.

As Linda’s vocal ends, the great acrobat, who finally is oneself, is left dangling all alone and Richard repeatedly picks an indeterminate guitar figure until the song fades away, bringing a breathtaking ending to this, his greatest song so far, and thus to the end of this remarkable masterpiece of an album of doom, paranoia and fear.