I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight (Part 5)

Of course, this begs the question of why someone would want to produce an album of doom, paranoia and fear - even if it is a masterpiece?

This has been, and will always remain (to one degree or another) Richard Thompson’s metier. As I have mentioned before, humor is also crucial to his work. Thompson remains good natured about his melancholy, and jokes about it - his special compilations for his fan clubs he has called Doom and Gloom from the Tomb.

One can always speculate about Thompson’s character and biography. This is always a tricky business with a creative writer in any idiom. Reviews about Thompson often trickle into his personal life - his loss of his young lover in the tragic Fairport van wreck, his later breakup with Linda, etc., all serve as fodder for personal readings of his songs. Thompson is always quick to point out that all such speculation is irrelevant rubbish, and that in his songwriting, he is always looking for a larger, more universal meaning.

I completely buy his argument. Beginning with Fairport Convention’s transition to British folk rock, Thompson has been enamoured with traditional songs - especially ballads. That the subject-matter and tone of much of this material is "dark" is unquestionable. There seems to be a constant in folk material that retains an obsession with death, murder, broken hearts, and the elusiveness of love that suggests that they are human constants. And of course they are. Why should they not be the source of much folk music that functions as an ongoing catharsis for the common people as did the ritualized Greek tragedy of Athens?

I belive that it is precisely in this vein that Thompson operates, where he feels the greatest sympathy for his particular muse. His debut incarnation as Henry the Human Fly took this perspective to a logical conclusion, where Thompson donned his mask to present a kind of universal persona. It was a brave, triumphant (though a commercial disaster) attempt at taking up a modern-day persona of the universal misanthrope/outcast who can observe the world’s tragedies more fully and completely than an active participant in society.

Stepping forward with his next project, with his new wife Linda, he seems to have dropped the necessity for hiding his identity behind such a character. But now, who is he? It appears to me that Thompson has merely moved outward, and begun shifting his personas to adjust to individual songs. The mordant narrator of "Calvary Cross" or "The End of the Rainbow" is not to be perceived as the real Richard Thompson than Henry was. Thompson is a creative artist, and in his songs, he creates dramatic personae to express the perspective of the narrator. Here, he has added his wife Linda as another voice that has the extraordinary ability of adopting the wider range of personas he creates. Is Linda Thompson the pathetic creature of "Has He Got a Friend for Me?" I don’t believe this is the natural stance of a woman of her beauty, talent and, presumably, confidence, any more than she is the saucy, vituperative "Little Beggar Girl." The Thompsons are clearly busy at playing theatre.

Still, why produce a nightmare album such as Bright Lights? Personally, I believe the world desperately needs nightmare albums. In such a context of the post-counterculture vacuum of 1974, with its inane commercial transposition of art into pure product, the one thing the record world needed most was someone to put some real horror and pain into it - if for no reason than to re-inject the sense of the real human against all the glitzy backdrop of what had become pure showbiz and saccharine idealizations.

It is in this cultural context that punk rock would soon emerge, bringing all its furious anger and promise of apocalypse down on the smug scene of the day. It was a necessary correction of course, a cultural god-send. Here, Richard and Linda Thompson delivered that threatening message a couple of years in advance. The style was much different from what punk would be, but its essence remains just as challenging. I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight is both a masterpiece of a singular vision, come of age through the experience of one young man, born out of the broken community of the late 1960s, informed by centuries of empathy, and set squarely, almost as a weapon (as much as a warning) against the complacent mood of his more laid-back, self-satisfied contemporaries. It also stands as a fulfilled prophecy of the chaos that was to come.

This approach - the full-fledged, muti-personaed figure of Richard Thompson as gloom-master, ironist and poet of the outrageous and dispossessed would remain constant up until the present day. This album is one of his earliest and greatest triumphs.

The significance of the presence (and equal billing) of Linda Thompson cannot be underestimated here. The vast new panoramas of human expression that opened up for Richard’s songwriting through the addition of the perspective of the female sex is incalculable. There is a new universality in this work, filled with a teeming cosmos of possibilities heretofore unconsidered. As an influence, Linda must have served, at the very least, as a very powerful muse, driving Richard to new depths of feeling and understanding. Whatever else specifically she contributed, we cannot know, other than the effect of her stunning voice.

For in the end, Richard and Linda Thompson, a mythical artistic continuum of two opposites, carries much more authority and power than one single voice could ever bring. It’s not just so much that there is greater contrast in sound and perspective - it is the power of the presentation of man and wife as joint presenters, partners in this bleak vision that makes it all the more scarifyingly real.

Ultimately, what makes I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight so unsettling and yet so appealing, is that underneath all the pain and fear, one can palpably sense the love between these two people and the singularity of their mission together. The fact that they are presented as co-equals, bonded by love both personal and social, is strange kind of challenge in itself - a challenge to the listener in the context of his or her own relationships. If these two are so seemingly at one together, why is it that they each sound so desperately alone?

This is a drama that we shall follow for the next few years. Its greatest irony is that this remarkable duo did not receive much critical and public attention until the relationship between them ruptured irretrievably. Because of this foreknowledge, it is impossible for us to view the Richard & Linda albums objectively - they seem so full of self-fulfilling prophecy. That should not be a fetish or a facile romanticization of their work. If anything, it is a challenge to the listener to (as Richard Thompson insists), to drive the biographical references out of our minds.
It is a mental act of attempted separation that we must undergo to listen to any Richard Thompson - and to some degree it is impossible. But active listening is part of the creative process. The dialectic between the songs and the creators/performers are part of a fuzzy blurr that is the essence of all mimetic art. How close is the mirror being held up to nature? More importantly, how much of ourselves can we see in that reflection?

BONUS TRACKS
The British Import version of I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight on the Island label (the original label on which the album was released) includes three bonus tracks - live cuts of the Richard & Linda Thompson band (featuring John Kirkpatrick, Pat Donaldson and Dave Mattacks) was recorded at The Roundhouse in London, September 7, 1975. The recording quality is extraordinarily good, and the cuts give a hungry fan a sense of what it might have been like to see this incredible duo in their glory days - particularly in a small venue. One can only call out for "more, more, more, . . ."

"I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight" - This is a nice, raw, kick-ass version of the song, which is the way it should be. Matthews’ drums are propulsive as hell, as is Richard’s hot Strat. The magic of Kirkpatrick’s accordian swirls all around the proceedings. One really wishes for a guitar solo that will push the song further, but Linda carries the day with a tough vocal that does not sacrifice any of the pathos of the original.

"Together Again" - "This is an old Buck Owens song that’s called "Together Again." Or Untogether Again." We finally get to hear the country & western influence on Richard Thompson directly. The attack is aggressive, huge and authentically affectionate. Linda gives it her best Patsy Cline here, but comes off sounding a bit tentative. Not so for Richard, who delivers a massive, mind-blowing solo that would have certainly got him ridden out of Nashville on a rail. (By the way, mentioning country music, what was that we were asking about why anyone would produce morose songs . . . .?)

"Calvary Cross" - Well, this just blows the album version right out of the water. This song was made for the stage. On the studio version, Richard knows that he’s written something exceptional, and you can hear him struggling to find it, to get it down on tape. Here, live, he discovers it, almost ready-made. He sings it like he inhabits it. The spare, brutal instrumentation is direct and effective. And most importantly, the end leads to a long guitar solo that pushes the meaning of the song to a sense of non-conclusion that words will forever escape. This is our first exposure, I think, to Richard’s soloing at length. Appropriate to both the theme and the structure, he plays and repeats simple figures, leaning over them to inspect them, stuck as they are in the repetition and grind of the chords. He tries different variations, but nothing seems to evolve. Finally, at a seeming point of desperation, he launches into a massive series of running, charging notes that are seemingly fighting their way out of the song, but keep being driven back by the confining structure. He retreats, attacks another way, takes another route, attacking the borders of the repeating harmony with frightening rapidity and odd turns and twists. Although their styles differ dramatically, I can think of no other guitarists to compare this to than a kind of cross between the bleak expressionism of Neil Young with the twisted, unending logic of Frank Zappa. In other words, he sounds like no one else but Richard Thompson, and what has hitherto been somewhat subdued is made manifest: here is one of the great masters of the electric guitar - and he is unleashed.