Ah, I’m dreaming (". . . But I still dream").
The power of Thompson’s writing and performing are so compelling and brilliant that he brings a frightening character to his music - a character he never seems to fail to communicate to his audience. He is one of the most dynamic performers I have ever seen. So why is he never seen? So why is he so little heard. The man exists in mythic dimensions. As Griel Marcus pointed out, his only real peers are Van Morrison and Neil Young. But unlike those two iconoclastic deities, Thompson seems ever a rumor - an underground character hiding in some subterranean system of rooms, tunnels and mirrors. To experience him, you must descend to that sacred level, like a member of an ancient mystery cult. Not all can enter, and his initiates seem to breathe his name to one another almost as a code that the rest of the surface world can scarcely begin to recognize, let alone recognize the significance.
This new release has touched me deeply, and has triggered in me the desire to go back to the beginning - which is not the beginning, but only the recorded beginning, which is Fairport Convention in 1968. As I journey forward into the past, I will continue to absorb the new album and make commentaries on it as I go. The epic quantity of his production is immense. I only have about half of it, and I’m considered a fanatic. Let’s go back then, and follow the road this man has traveled the last 40 years.
I have just come across a magnificent BBC-produced documentary on RT, entitled A Solitary Life. It is available in seven different episodes on Youtube.com, and I thought it would be wonderful to place links to the different segments on here, as long as it is available. There is quite a bit of background, insight, and most importantly, music.
Video - A Solitary Life, part 1
http://youtube.com/watch?v=jCxdEc3gVwE
Fairport Convention: Fairport Convention [June 1968]
This debut album demonstrates that Marcus was quite right about Richard Thompson being "all there from the beginning." The very first song, "Time Will Show the Wiser," demonstrates Thompson’s extraordinary guitar fills with his unique style and melodic flair, fully developed at the ripe age of 18.
Video - Fairport Convention: "Time Will Show the Wiser"
http://youtube.com/watch?v=oTHgr19CaRk
As a matter of fact, Thompson’s guitar playing is all through the album, channeling through different styles, including jazz and blues, as does the band itself. This is a remarkably good and curiously cohesive album by a band that was very young and without any sort of fixed identity as of yet. Covers of songs by Joni Mitchell ("I Don’t Know Where I Stand" and "Chelsea Morning") and even obscure Bob Dylan (Jack O’Diamonds) place the band squarely in the camp of America’s folk rock movement. However, they aren’t American - and they don’t really sound that British either.
I keep reading comparisons of the group at this stage to Jefferson Airplane, but I don’t really hear it that much, except a few places. The band’s sound seems to reflect more the general mood of the time. With young, experimental bands forming all about England (Traffic, Fleetwood Mac, Jethro Tull, etc.), Fairport Convention seems to be simply another version of those eclectic combinations. There are parts which are quite memorable of the Velvet Underground - however more the sound of the Velvet Underground two years later (Loaded). At more fragile moments they remind one vaguely of Simon and Garfunkel. The playing is very tight, however, especially from Thompson and bassist Ashley Hutchings.
Vocally, Thompson turns in no solo turns, but can be audible in several places as a baritone backing voice. The lead vocals are handled by a certain Ian McDonald, a tenor with a slight, reedy tremelo, as well as lovely female vocals by someone not named Sandy Denny - a Miss Judy Dyble.
As far as compositions, there are a total of four songs co-written by Thompson: "If (Stomp),"Decameron," "Sun Shade," "The Lobster," and "It’s Alright Ma, It’s Only Witchcraft." (The last title surely must have come from Thompson’s head.) Although it is impossible to determine exactly what Thompson was responsible for in each of these, it is not difficult to discern, retroactively (so to speak), his presence in the totality, especially on the odd and creepy "The Lobster."
Interestingly, this album both represents its time as well as stands the test of it. Its membership would change quickly, as would its stylistic leanings, but I don’t think it is too presumptuous to contribute a vast deal of its coherence and its appeal to its lead guitar player.
Video - A Solitary Life, part 2
http://youtube.com/watch?v=2rZhALSnyhY
Fairport Convention: What We Did on Our Holidays [January 1969]
Okay, this one has Richard Thompson all over it - as composer, guitarist and general presence. Vocally, however, I don’t hear him, though he might be harmonizing at points. The chief male vocalist remains tenor Iain Matthews (Ian McDonald), and pleasant though he is, one wishes to push him away from the microphone, and drag up Richard to give the songs their proper depth of field.
Vocally, of course, this album offers much more, as this is the group’s recording debut of the magnificent Sandy Denny. What shall one say?!! She hits you right at the start of the record with her own "Frotheringay," and immediately Fairport Convention becomes her band. This voice, like all truly great voices in the rock/pop genre - and there are very few truly great voices - is filled with both authority and mystery. Denny’s elegant elegant, lilting voice resonates with lower overtones - subtones, you might say. It incorporates such a chilling combination of power and fragility that it makes you stop in your tracks and listen with a kind of hushed-awe wonder. There is the character of the tragic in her cadences, and I believe that one would have been fully aware of them in 1969, though not able to articulate it clearly, even without any backhand knowledge of the decline into alcohol and misadventure that culminated in her untimely death.
Sandy Denny, like Billie Holiday, Patsy Cline, Joni Mitchell and Janis Joplin (while sounding totally unlike any of them), not only re-defines what it is to be a female vocalist, but what it means to be female, re-casting the entire gender in her own powerful individuality. And in any patriarchal society like rock ‘n roll, this is no mean feat.
Video - Fairport Convention: "Fotheringay"
http://youtube.com/watch?v=mzSIc9Ynsss
As mentioned before, Thompson plays more - quite brilliantly and eloquently - throughout the album. And though his songs begin to dominate, Denny is not (yet) used as a foil for his ironic, misanthropic imagery. In short, this is a great band that has yet to fully cohere, and the parts are not playing off of each other to create a definitive whole. But they’re still marvelous. Though the evidences of British/Celtic folk music are beginning to creep in ("Frotheringay," "She Moves Through the Fair"), on the whole the band still sounds like a talented eclectic aggregation. And on the whole, while this second offering is much stronger than its predecessor, it’s still seeking its voice. The resemblances to other bands of the day remain - including, yes, Jefferson Airplane, but reminding me more of The Byrds than anything else.
There is another Joni Mitchell cover here, "Eastern Rain," and this is a highlight, with Denny’s vocals and the band’s authoritive playing giving a decidedly new imprint to Mitchell’s singular style that re-appropriates it into a new dimension. Amazingly, the same can be said of the Dylan rarity, the beautiful "I’ll Keep It With Mine," which reaches an easy splendor that the Byrds had long since lost the ability to achieve with the Bard’s material.
But it’s the Richard Thompson songs that stick most in your gut. Here come the Griel Marcus-celebrated lines, "Take the sun from my heart/Let me learn to despise . . ." on "Tale in Hard Time," which could serve as the opening mantric evocation to the gloomy muse that pervades Thompson’s entire career. Even better is "Meet on the Ledge," already a masterpiece that presages such future jaw-droppers as "Wall of Death" and "When the Spell Is Broken."
As Marcus has remarked, there is no development in Richard Thompson, per se, as he arrived fully formed. And on What We Did on Our Holidays, that fully developed 20-year-old is already bleeding all over the disc.
Video - Fairport Convention: "Meet on the Ledge"
http://youtube.com/watch?v=t7BARo4bpsg
Fairport Convention: Unhalfbricking [July 1969]
This is where Fairport Convention simply steps up and becomes a great, legendary band. Irrelevant lead singer Iain Matthews is gone, and the group is now firmly dominated by Richard Thompson and Sandy Denny, along with a crack rhythm section. More importantly, the tentative wading into British folk now becomes a full dive, resulting in an album of uncanny breathtaking, show-stopping power, beginning with "Genesis Hall" - a Thompson-penned, Denny-sung classic. All the sources are familiar, distant in time, yet emotionally relevant, even desperate. The elegant, painful chorus, "Oh, oh, helpless and slow/And you don’t have anywhere to go," crushes the listener in a beautiful kind of hell that is obviously an inheritance of ages and ages past.
Video - Richard Thompson performing "Genesis Hall"
http://youtube.com/watch?v=wa569wY1HzE
The amplification and "rockinizing" of ancient folk forms - although most of them are new compositions, is achieved with such grace and ease that there is no discernible fusion line between the forms. The effect is of a collective unconsciousness that is manifesting itself in the present tense - and by implication, will continue unabated for as long as there are people to play and sing. The subterranean depths of an ever-cycling human tragedy (and comedy) are the lynchpins of Fairport Convention’s mature style - Joycean in their mood and depth, yet simple and straightforward in a horrifying way.
This is most noticable on "A Sailor’s Life," an eternal lament sung by Denny for her lover lost at sea. This traditional song, sad and elegaic, feels like it should end at the conclusion of the tale, where both lovers are lost. However, this is just the beginning of the eleven-minute opus, while the power of the band takes over like the inexorable power of the sea, straining heedlessly through the ages. It is difficult to describe the power of the playing here - especially Thompson’s guitar and the extraordinary attack of Martin Lamble’s drums. The sturdy modal music rocks ever onward, both covering up, as well as emphasizing the finality of the song’s tragedy, while universalizing it in time, suggesting it will continue to happen over and over throughout eternity.
Video - Fairport Convention, June Tabor, Richard Thompson performing "A Sailor's Tale"
http://youtube.com/watch?v=HYZeABbFZXc
How a band could reach a level of maturation like this is quite staggering. But as much talent is assembled here, including a genuine goddess like Sandy Denny, I must put the weight of the baleful credit on Richard Thompson. As time will ultimately show, this is essentially his muse speaking, as it will speak on for the next forty years and more. The style, the steel, the gashes and wounds are all his.
That is certainly not meant to minimize the other members and what is obviously the coalescence of a true commitment to ensemble playing that creates in the group a unified identification as a separate entity, more than the sum of its parts. But the central figures do shine, especially Denny. Her masterpiece, "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?," simultaneously fits in and virtually transcends everything else on the album - yet it still manages to sound a piece with all the genuflections of the band.
Video - Fairport Convention: "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?"
http://youtube.com/watch?v=n2xODjbfYw8
To talk of the band - Simon Nicol, Ashley Hutchings, Martin Lamble, along with Thompson and Denny - is essential. For Fairport Convention, at this cruicial point, anyway, is a unified and unique persona unto itself. The playing is so sympathetic, so organic, that the band is heard as essentially one entity, one voice. And this voice is so unique - as unique as the Velvet Underground, another group of the time of divergent personalities enfolding their various talents into one coherent vision.
The Velvets were focused on the substratum of the city and the subconscious of the modern inhabitants of Manattan. Fairport, on the other hand, is doing the same thing with a completely different emphasis on geography and time - taking the ageless folk consciousness of the British isles and importing it to the present day, finding just the right sounds, blends, the perfect modes of expression to communicate the universality and tragedy of their characters and themes. I have to bring up the Velvet Underground here, because, although they are so different, they are the only band I can profitably compare to Fairport Convention at this period, in terms of their style, experimentation, and most importantly, their commitment (and distance) to their emotional content. Both play very abstract and sophisticated musics. Both play with a sense of irony and distance. Yet, somehow, through the same space of intelligence and collective commitment, both achieve an astonishing immediacy of experience that makes the distant immediately alive and relevant for the listener. If the focus of the Velvet Underground is on the "outsider" in the modern rural world - the junkie, the prostitute, the transvestite, etc., whose immediacy of experience is brought so close to the listener as to make it his own, the subjects of Fairport Convention are the distant, abstracted lives long gone, breathed alive and relevant to become as real as one’s own experience. In both groups, the culmination of the experience of "the other" is transcended, absorbed and experienced, alchemically, "first-hand," as if the members of the group are singing about themselves. Fairport accomplishes precisely the same feat, not through sleight of hand, but through empathy.
Interestingly, all songs on Unhalfbricking are originals, with the exception of three Bob Dylan covers. (Four, if you include the bonus tracks.) Why Dylan? Of course, given the context of the time, the question is absurd. Dylan of course is the standard. And if Dylan is the last contemporary to be let go of, it is still vitally interesting and inspiring to hear Fairport’s take on the master’s complete control of his idiom. Of course, by 1969, it is a relevant question to ask, "which Dylan?" And we are treated to three different incarnations.
"Percy’s Song," from 1964’s The Times They Are a-Changin’, is of course Dylan the protest singer (which is really too restrictive a term for even this period in his career). But Dylan’s bleak American rural vision, sung from the dusky back road of a hillbilly troubadour, emerging in a sense from an unschooled, unknown’s subconcious, is here not so much transformed by Denny and the group as integrated into a wider circle of global significance. Interestingly, Sandy Denny does not alter Dylan’s Appalachian diction one iota, but she does not copy his dialect or sound - rather she remains appropriately, almost timelessly English, with the same tonal approach of "A Sailor’s Tale," or "Genesis Hall." The result is a heartbreaking equivalence of experience that displays both the song’s universality, as well as a supreme justification of the band’s methodology.
The following, and concluding song (on the original album) is the Basement Tape-era (1967) "Million Dollar Bash." The depth and resonance of this denser, harder-hitting excursion into the American subconsciousness is equivalently transformed to the British sphere where it makes just as much (or as little) sense. One wonders if Dylan is really necessary for the band at this point, as the originals are all so powerfully convincing. But I am glad that they are here, giving the listener at least one last reference to counterpoint the completeness of their transition to their mastery of their discovery of British folk rock. By so fully demonstrating their capacity to translate Dylan’s prophetic vision onto a different cultural field, they simultaneously justify both their decision to follow this new (yet infinitely old) path of electric minstrelsy, while demonstrating their complete absorption of the Dylanesque world of the mysteries of Americana, shedding new light on the possibilities of both sides of the Atlantic.
(A sad note: Soon after the recording of Unhalfbricking, a tragic traffic accident took the lives of both Martin Lamble - all of 19 years old, as well as Richard Thompson’s girlfriend. It is impossible to imagine the toll taken on these breathless young experimenters and their remarkable project. Amazingly, they continued on - and the impact of this sudden, violent intrusion of an uncontrollable reality into their lives and art must always remain a horrifying question of inexplicable speculation.)
Fairport Convention: Liege & Lief [December 1969]
I do not feel myself able to adequately discuss this album after only one listening. I’ll give it a couple of days and come back to it.
Well, I have spent more than a week and several listenings with this extraordinary album, and I feel as though I can finally address it. Upon first hearing, there seemed too much to absorb. My initial response was actually a kind of disappointment, in comparison to the experience of listening to Unhalfbricking. From their first album up to that one, their third, I could hear in Fairport Convention a continual sense of growth and experimentation, and with that seminal album, they had seemed to turn a corner - and the sound was the group maturing into its ultimate form. The sound of Leige and Lief, however, was the sound of the group, completely matured, addressing itself, once and for all, in what would be its singular, purposeful statement.
I recognized that on first listening - however, the authority of this document did not set easy with me. For one thing, the album is completely given over to what was now what we would call "British Folk Rock," a perfect synthesis of traditionalist ballads and instrumentals with the most mature contemporary development of the evolution of rock music. Wherefore, we have a genre that had never existed before, pouring out boldly, in secure of its power.
In contrast, the fusions on Unhalfbricking, as sophisticated as they are, still sit in the beaufiful, shifting world of experimentation. There is an aching in those songs, as they strive to be born, make effort to be realized. There exists something in the discovery of such songs as "Genesis Hall," and "A Sailor’s Tale."
Here, however, the songs are seemingly born fully blown, in full possession of their densities - remarkably focused, projected and controlled. And with the advent of full maturity, the loss of the blissful absorption and discovery of youth slips away, to be replaced by an adult persona that is no longer calling something into being, but simply "is," by dint of its own possession of itself.
One of the most distressing and confusing aspects of my first listening to this album was the apparent "shrinking" and total absorption of Richard Thompson himself - in both his writing and his playing. If the dominant theme of the preceding albums seemed to be increasingly something like "The Incredible Richard Thompson Band with Sandy Denny Singing," that sense is completely gone by the wayside. In truth, you can say that no one individual dominates in this group - here there is perfect balance.
No doubt one of the reasons for this is the (relative) absence of Richard Thompson songs. With only three exceptions, this is an album composed entirely of traditional material. (And those three exceptions are painstaking re-creations of the old ballad style, so perfectly accomplished that you would never know without liner credits that they were not traditionals themselves.)
While Unhalfbricking was a connection between two worlds, Liege and Lief is a complete world unto itself, with no acknowledgement whatsoever that its concept is anything less than a complete organic statement. This can bring on a problem, however - first of all in perception. Whereas before, Fairport Convention seemed to be asking, "what if things were like this," now they are declaring, "this is what we are" - which is a very different prospect indeed. For in declaring themselves to be something of their own contrivance, it invites us to look at the group as imposters. And as Dylan had well known and demonstrated, the world holds no pity for folk imposters, and the real imposter is the only the artist being untrue to himself. The question that one ponders as one listens - once again and once again - is that does the group pull it off? What makes Liege and Lief truly one of the greatest albums of its time, is that they do. Rarely has a group set a standard so high (one thinks of the Beatles and Sgt. Pepper’s, and of course, the Band) and actually has the talent and substance to achieve it.
Fairport announces its challenge with the very first song on the record, "Now Come All Ye," which is listed as a joint composition between Ashley Hutchings and Sandy Denny. It is a kind of make-believe world, where the group announces itself, in true Sgt. Pepper fashion, to be precisely what it is not: that is a band of "rolling minstrels." "No, you’re not," you want to say. "You’re a bunch of English hippies with electric guitars and amps."
But such is the challenge here. In absorbing the spirit of the ageless troubadours of a pre-industrial island that is now decidedly post-everything, can this conjuring truly be relevant, or in fact even possible? As the glad and happy stomping of the group goes through heedlessly, Denny introduces each member, leaving out his name, allowing him to be a universal component of what is truly an ageless tradition.
What is being attempted here, and I believe accomplished, is a genuine shift in psychological attitude and projection. For Fairport isn’t merely playing games and putting on costumes. In evoking the timeless styles, traditions and themes of their native culture and not just grafting them onto a modern form, but organically absorbing their content is nothing short of pure alchemy. On first listening, one will like "Come All Ye," or one will not - but it will not convince anyone. The song is the album’s anthem and statement of purpose. Whether it succeeds cannot be assessed until the entire project is taken in and assessed.
Video - Fairport Convention: "Come All Ye"
http://youtube.com/watch?v=EV44H7IyB10
The next song, a hushed ballad entitled "Reynardine," finds the band purposefully muted - almost at a standstill - while Denny sings the enigmatic lyrics of a seduction. Or rather, does the song sing her? Here, as throughout the album, Sandy Denny sounds absolutely possessed. This is the voice of a ghost - ethereal, lightly adorned, almost a whisper in the back of the consciousness. This is not one woman, but many women - perhaps all women - singing of their own experiences of maidenhood lost, with no apparent emotion, but rather with a kind of fatalism that makes its experience archetypal. Is it a lament? A celebration? Has she been ensnared by the devil? Or is she simply succumbing to fate as part of nature? What will be her fate? It is impossible to tell. The song transfixes the eternal in a moment and one must bring their own meaning to bear on it.
By the next song, "Matty Groves," Fairport proves that they are steadfastly in control and that they are capable of making this material live. This long ballad in minor pounds away mercilessly with a grind comparable (once again) only to the Velvet Underground, but to vastly different (or are they?) purposes. The hard, interlocking bass of Hutchings with the relentless pounding of new drummer Dave Mattacks, locks the rest of the ensemble (Thompson and Simon Nicol on restless electric guitars, plus Dave Swarbrick - now a full-time member - on electric fiddle) in a seemingly endless lockstep grip which is devised as the time and textural frame of the tale. It is also the propulsion of the story itself, once again making the narrative seem inevitable in both space and time.
The song tells the classic story of the troubadour - that of true love (or at least desire), against the backdrop of the artificial reality of class-arranged marriage. The heroine - if so we may call her - first casts her eyes on the beautiful young peasant, Matty Groves, in church. Hence her defiance is abstracted as largely as it can be, as her decision is to rebel not only against her husband, but ultimately, his justifier, God himself. Knowing her husband is away and will not return that night, she seduces Matty and takes him to her bed. Meanwhile, one of her husband’s servants overhears the plot and swiftly runs to warn his master. Once the husband returns, the deed has been consummated, but he arrives in time to find Matty and his wife in a naked, sleeping embrace. He rouses Matty and forces him to a duel against his will, then slays him. He then takes his wife, asking her who now she prefers? Her reply? "I’d rather a kiss from dead Matty’s lips than you or your finery." The husband, enraged kills her immediately. Then he orders them to be buried together, but with his wife on the top, as she was of higher class.
Sandy Denny’s voice is harder here, but still detached - she will not comment on the proceedings. There is no emotional judgement pushed into the story, but only the bare commentary itself. If there is one quality that you could attribute her extraordinary vocalization it is a kind of unwavering sternness - a commitment to the truth of the situation, an insistence that it be told properly, just as it happened. That she shares the rebellious perspective of the wife is revealed as their words converge on the line stated above. Indeed, this is the voice of the wife - and of all wives who renounce themselves as possessions and take hold of their own identity and fate as individuals.
Video - Fairport Convention: "Matty Groves"
http://youtube.com/watch?v=p2YYJEmDRhI
The tale is long and the emerging power is overwhelming. But once over, the band does not rest there, but rises up in an instrumental coda of commentary which is simultaneously celebratory and savage, finally laying to rest on a rumble of acoustic guitar and electric fiddle (which a year or so later would eloquently serve as the model for the ending of the Who’s "Baba O’Reilly").
The first side ends quietly and poignantly with Thompson’s only solo composition on the album, the brief and frosty "Farewell, Farewell," which could certainly be a folk song of indeterminate age. Sung softly by Denny, the song takes Dylan’s archetypal drifter and places him in a much larger context of place and time, making his path of chosen alienation even more universal.
The second side opens with "The Deserter," a British ballad of a soldier who escapes his regiment, is captured and punished, escapes and is captured again. He is about to be executed, when Prince Albert rides up and orders his life to be spared as he’ll "make a fine soldier for queen and country." His doom is thus sealed no matter where he turns. One’s first impulse is to view this as a basically "political" song in a Brechtian sense, and while it certainly works quite well that way, it also resonates with that grim sense of fatalism that grips so many old folk songs and stories. The presence of the old Germanic wyrd, that inescapable force of fate and destiny that encompasses all is certainly present here.
The next piece, "Medley," is a purely instrumental set of traditional jigs, waltzes and reels, impeccably and excitingly done. It’s probably impossible to say with hindsight, after nearly 40 years of familiarity with this form, just how extraordinary and unique it was to hear these ancient Celtic melodies fired through with electricity and drums for the first time. And though it’s been done many times since, I doubt the exuberance of the performance has ever been outdone. There’s simply something so thrilling about discovery - and here Fairport, as a group, discovers not only the compatibility of the old and the new, but a natural meld. Here they open a door where the playing is not of the nostalgic - certainly not of novelty - but of the absolutely timeless. Up to the second in modern conception and playing modern rock, the band grabs the old forms, and without embellishment, discovers their eternal relevance and joy. Nor has the experiment aged a day. This is simply music that can be played forever and still sound fresh, fulfilling all the promises of the "Come All Ye" album opener. These could be 200-year-old (or more) musicians raised from the dead who (once shown how to plug in their amps) slam the immediacy of their celebratory dance of the earth into whatever century they happen to find themselves.
"Tam Lin," follows, and this ethereally beautiful, ancient Celtic faery story serves as the true center of the album. I would like to take and research this amazing tale, for its roots are certainly very deep in pre-Christian lore, and is a song that has been sung for many a century.
The story concerns a young maiden (Janet, in this version), who, against warnings, visits a certain "Carter Hall," where she begins to pick roses. Confronted by the master of the Hall, Tam Lin, an elfin-grey creature, appears and rebukes her, whereby she re-asserts her right to do exactly as she may. Once returned home, she is discovered by her father to be pregnant. He pleads to her to marry one of his knights, but Janet will have none of it. She returns to Carter Hall, where Tam Lin tells her that he was once an earthly knight, but is being held captive by the queen of faeries. That night is Halloween, and he instructs Janet to pull him from his horse as he passes. The faerie who possesses him will change him into many animal forms, but she must not fear and hold him fast. Finally, he will be transformed back into a "naked knight." Janet does this, hides him in her cloak and steals away with him, to the Faerie Queen’s curses.
As I say, I do not know the source or original form of this tale or its context. One can tell its antiquity, however, not only from the fairy context, but from the heroic actions of the female, who fights and wins against the forces of nature itself. Here, in the conspiracy of love, the realm of the supernatural is outwitted - which suggests a 13th-century type of vision of the troubadours. The presence of knights certainly shows its date, and as it is Irish (or Welsh?) in origin, it may appear a bit later. The original Celtic tale is lost, or rather "hidden" in the translation, but its sense of ancient wonder suffuses it fully.
The band here, is at their peak, with their arrangement and performance. Slashing guitar chords punctuate the narrative, and a driving, repeating motif, accented by drums, forces the tale along with extraordinary drama. Sandy Denny sings as if absolutely possessed - detached, yet enraptured by the tale, Janet’s defiance and resolution becomes her own. She could be singing another language - perhaps an unknown language - and she would still carry the same power. This long song, with its continual repetition of verse structure, never for an instant becomes dull. The band, with a couple of instrumental breaks, simply rides the song and the story like a wild stallion, and desperation, culminating in ultimate victory, permeates every second.
Video: Fairport Convention: "Tam Lin"
http://youtube.com/watch?v=tJrLgOS7VO0
With this album then, Fairport Convention has successfully re-created themselves as an altogether new type of band of extraordinary power and authority. Unfortunately - or perhaps inevitably - this triumph would be the last for this particular set of musicians, as Denny would leave the band thereafter, along with co-founder Ashley Hutchings (to found an even more traditionalist folk-rock group, Steeleye Span). Thompson would depart after one more album. Strangely, the group persists, with different personnel, even to today - more as an institution or a stylistic ensemble than a defined set of individuals. But the band members would take what they learned here and apply it to their respective musical pathways throughout their lives.
This is truer of no-one more than the remarkable genius of Richard Thompson. Liege & Lief’s last song, arguably its greatest, though sounding as authentically pure and as old as anything on the record, is a collaboration between Thompson and David Swarbrick. "Mad Man Michaelf," this soft, gentle ballad of murder and madness, sensitively styled by Denny, is crafted of what will become the essence of Thompson’s art. In the brief story, "Mad Man Michael" is taunted by a raven that his true love will die by his own hand. In anger, he stabs the raven, who disappears, and is replaced by the bleeding body of his lover at his feet. This horrific tale is carried by what is probably the most beautiful of any on an album of filled with beautiful melodies.
What is peculiarly Thompson-esque about the song, though, is not simply its roots in traditional songstry (of which he is a master), but that implicit recognition that the all-embracing power of fate (or wyrd) is situated precisely in the psyche of the victim himself. It is that knowledge and that power that will give to Richard Thompson’s future work the key to all its horrific power.
The last lines of the song reflect his characteristically frightening distance that ironically connects the listener directly into the heart of the "grave and constant in human suffering" (to quote James Joyce) that we all as mortals possess as our mutual inheritance and complicity:
"For his own true love is flown into every flower grown
And he must be the keeper of the garden."
Video - Fairport Convention reunion - performing Liege & Lief, 2007:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=iizZGDDiS4s
Fairport Convention: Full House [July 1970]
Alas, she’s gone. And with the departure of Sandy Denny goes one of the greatest rock bands of the period. Not that this still isn’t a kick-ass band at the peak of their powers. But they’ve lost their voice, and all those guys, with all their wizardry and inspiration just can’t replace that transcendent focus.
This is still a fabulous album, with lots of traditional instrumental, and quasi-traditional original songs. The reason for owning the album, however, is the epic "Sloth," possibly Fairport’s greatest single accomplishment. This Swarbrick/Thompson-penned number gloomily, slowly, majestically unites a minstrelry tradition with expansive, exploratory guitar rock. The only comparable piece I can think of is Neil Young’s initial excursions with Crazy Horse the year before (Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, 1969) and of course the sonic discoveries of the Grateful Dead (i.e., "Dark Star"), but this is much more ominous and controlled.
The song could be 300 years old and filled with the fatalism of the eternality and casual nature of war ("Just a roll on your drum . . ."). We really get to hear Thompson’s voice for the first time here, and it is unschooled, unprincipled - an everyman’s baritone, and somehow the conveyance of the doom of entrapment, combined with stoic acceptance makes the fit just right.
Better still are the long, interlocking, modulating guitar excursions that tie the verses together into a horrific predestination of hell. We have Thompson the musician fully on display here, and there is no question that he is one of the great masters of the machine - clearly on a par with Clapton or (more idiosyncratically) Robert Fripp. It is his personal vision, though, just as much or more than his technique that turns his workouts into journeys of sheer transcendence and doom.
Video - Fairport Convention: Sloth, parts 1 & 2
http://youtube.com/watch?v=s3ttWjLAcV4
http://youtube.com/watch?v=J_0pXDIuyTA
Thompson would leave the group himself after this album, and the group would carry on, somehow, up until today (given one lengthy hiatus). What he left behind, however, was a legacy of a (mostly) unseen, unheard, unknown contributions to an extraordinary confluence of traditions, left for individuals of subsequent generations to continually, shockingly, rediscover. Let "Sloth" itself stand for that one great masterwork at the height of rock eclecticism that is eternally hidden. Its secrecy fits its nature to a tee.
And as for Thompson, he would take all that Fairport was along with him on his ever-more-idiosyncratic journey, constructing his hellish replication of daily life in the confines of the shadows.
Video - Fairport Convention: "Now Be Thankful"
http://youtube.com/watch?v=QsyRF_i1PSs
Video - Fairport Convention: "Sir Patrick Spens"
http://youtube.com/watch?v=bGVqMK_wZtA
Video - Fairport Convention, Live 1970
http://youtube.com/watch?v=H4_QnaqCQp0
Richard Thompson: Starring as Harry the Human Fly [April 1972]
Holy shit.
This may not be Richard Thompson’s greatest album, but this, his debut as a solo artist is probably his most important. For it is here that we find the character Thompson would assume in its first essential manifestation, and the effect is powerful and shocking. Notorious for its lack of sales (it was reputedly the lowest-selling album in the history of Warner Brothers on its American release), it was heard by very few. But the few that heard it must have had the bizarre sense that a madman on the street had grabbed them and begun singing the madness in his head into their faces as prophecy. It’s that strange - and just that effective. Probably too much so, as anyone who would hear it would likely request that it be turned off immediately, running away just as quickly as they could get away from that selfsame lunatic if he had actually accosted them on the street.
For Thompson has found not just a style, but a persona here - much as Tom Waits would about that same time in his American street-hipster idiom. The Richard Thompson presented here is distinctly English, however, and an eternal representative of Britain’s past brought into the here and now. He is the madcap on the periphery of society, the fool blaring away at the back of the fair as if he were the star of the show, oblivious to the fact that no one is paying attention to him. He is loony lone drummer you meet on the highlands, leading his imaginary parade to victory or destruction, god knows which. He is the shouter on the streets, proclaiming the end of the world, or at least the end of whatever everybody else is taking for granted so comfortably.
Ultimately, he is that voice at the back of your mind that won’t shut up, insisting that all your achievements, possessions and ego-attachments are unreal, unjustified, and ultimately delusional. No wonder nobody wanted to listen to him. As a matter of fact, when you come to think of it, it’s no wonder that so few people know of him even today. For everything that he has done since this album is nothing but a refinement of this concept. There is nothing like the shock of hearing it in its raw, earliest incarnation however.
No question Richard Thompson is a strange bugger. But he’s not this strange. As mentioned before, Thompson is playing a role here, assuming an archetypal identity while fusing traditional British folk music with what can only be called a post-modern rock temperament. Oddly enough, on the first couple of listenings, I kept thinking of David Bowie’s Hunky Dory (1971), to which this album has no stylistic affinities whatsoever. Yet here was Thompson, forging his persona right alongside Bowie’s self-creation of the plastic spaceman-rocker "Ziggy Stardust." There can be no question that there was something in the zeitgeist in early ‘70s Britain that made it conducive to manipulation with imagery and playing the image against itself. Thompson’s "Harry the Human Fly" is just another aspect of Bowie’s "Ziggy." But whereas the latter was a self-proclaimed rock ‘n’ roll messiah, embraced by millions and suffering dying for their sake, "Henry" remained the Old Testament prophet that nobody really wanted to listen to. He wasn’t bringing "good news."
The concept must have been strangely off-putting to anyone who actually did happen to come across it at the time. Richard appears on the cover, acoustic guitar in hand, wearing a giant fly’s head. If he is the eternal "fly on the wall," he is also a pest. He knows too much - much more than you want to hear, and his apparition suggests disease. That the disease comes from the very things that you consume is something that most people would rather not be bothered with. Better to shoo him off.
The persona that Thompson presents here, and as I said before, would remain in a modified format throughout his career has its roots squarely in Fairport Convention. Fairport themselves, as a group, were a conceit - the conjuring up of a band of roving English minstrels, suddenly plugged into amps and microphones was inherently ridiculous, and as such, was a theatrical piece as much as a musical statement. It just happened to be filled with extraordinary musicians, of which Thompson was one. But just what was Thompson’s "character" in the little drama? Now we know.
We should have known sooner. The twisted, demented and often damning lyrics that appeared under his credits on songs were a dead giveaway that he was the mad one, the source of the group’s sense of irony and perhaps the key to its ultimate triumph of the form.
On Henry, Thompson steps to the side, and takes if from there. These are all original songs, all sounding exactly like traditional British folk music. And the voice? Jesus, the voice! Over the years, Thompson would take this ragged instrument and hone it into a force of powerful, deep expression. Much as the same way Bob Dylan had done, Thompson would take an inelegant voice of the people and make it sing with and intimacy and elegance unmatched by more conventional vocal "talents."
Here, however, there is no moderation. It just howls, barely in tune, no conscious regard for whether or not it is "pretty" or even listenable. Over the decades, Thompson’s voice would age like wine - like Johnny Cash or Neil Young, it would come to carry the power and authority of clarity and vision. But here it just wails. And in no small measure, this is what gives it its power.
Now for the songs:
"Roll Over Vaughn Williams" - Simply one of the most arresting, powerful, shocking and scarifying annunciations ever to kick of a debut album. This is Thompson as a true ranter, a mad bard stomping across the waste land of modern-day England - or the world for that matter. He’s the creepy prophet on the street corner holding his "The End Is Near Sign," and he’s heading your direction. As a minstrel, his message is even more frightening, and the insistent stomp of the music, along with the conviction in his voice is more than enough to place it in the back of you’re mind that he just might be right.
Gentle ladies, gentlemen,
Waiting ‘til the dance begins,
Carefully we come to speak
A word for you to hear.
If you listen, if you should,
We won’t be misunderstood,
But don’t expect the words to ring
Too sweetly on the ear . . .
Live in fear.
Live in fear.
Live in fear.
That the threat is undefined makes it ever so much terrifying in its universality. What is it? It doesn’t really matter what the specific trouble is - what Thompson is really singing about is Joyce’s "grave and constant in human suffering." It is the function of the prophet, the minstrel, the madman - essentially the artist - to bring this to the forefront of human consciousness, where it is usually buried behind some artificial positivistic construction of the mind. Thompson attacks our defense mechanisms directly:
Is it painful, is it right?
Does it keep you warm at night?
Fool your friends and fool yourself,
The choice is crystal clear.
If you break it on your knee,
Better men might disagree.
Do you laugh or do you stick
Your finger in your ear?
Thompson’s adopted voice is so pungent and potent here - a wailing, lower class brawl that celebrates the common British dialect like nothing else until the Sex Pistols and the Clash would break out of the slums with their own "rantings" a couple of years later. In this sense, historically, Thompson can be seen as a "true" prophet, both of style and nihilistic content.
But the specific link to traditional English minstrelsy is carried over from Fairport Convention and locked firmly to the rock attack that Thompson help them forge in their inspired fusion of forms. From here on out, for the next thirty-plus years and going, Richard Thompson would appropriate that selfsame amalgam to his own dark and ominous vision. What is so appealing here is the freshness of the concept, the absolute lack of the careful sophistication in his vocalization that he would develop later.
The big electric slab of sound is incredible, though, and here we first get the full force of Thompson’s "second voice," the searing electric guitar solo that will push his meaning beyond mere comprehension and inscribe all of its terrifying implications directly on the nerves and psyche. Here, he mimics a bagpipe sound in a swirling reel of notes that emphatically will not let up, letting you feel the insects of destiny swirling around your head.
The title is an encapsulation of what is emerging as Thompson’s sheer genius and clarity of conception. The play on "Roll Over Beethoven" posits Thompson’s position as the new Chuck Berry, specifically for England. But this "new" Chuck Berry is a far cry from the great liberator of 1950s youth - he is a not-so-veiled threat to all complacent acceptance of a refined society that has grown too old and complacent and probably needs to be burned down.
This song gets the project off to an incredible start.
"Nobody’s Wedding" - This acoustic jollity is a true madman’s celebration of joyous purposelessness. The lyrics are almost pure Lewis Carroll: ("Didn’t hear the words of the Bible being read/When it’s nobody’s wedding, nobody’s wed.") The odd chord changes accentuates Thompson’s gift for creating beautiful, traditional-sounding melody and twisting it around a pole until it simultaneously undermines itself in irony and celebration. As matter of fact, the question occurs - are we ironically skewing a celebration, or taken a step further - are we really celebrating an irony? The tension between these poles is held so perfectly in order that every thought and emotion carries its own contradiction and we simply don’t know how to react. The brilliance of this method of songwriting, seemingly so off-handed and simple is positively unnerving - and exhilarating.
This wonderful celebration of nothing is capped by the popular traditional reel, "Marie’s Wedding," played off cheerfully by accordion and fiddle, fading off into the night where "Everybody came to nobody’s wedding."
Transcendent insanity and bliss . . .
"The Poor Ditching Boy" - This mournful acoustic waltz sounds as if it were being whined away in a back alley. The open guitar tuning and gentle fiddle accompaniment supports a message of a kind desolation that may or may not come from a woman.
The tale begins in winter:
Was there ever a winter so cold and so sad,
The river too weary to flood?
The storming wind cut through to my skin,
But she cut through to my blood.
The blame lies on the woman throughout the choruses ("With her scheming, idle ways/She left me poor enough."). But the cumulative effect on this character goes way beyond what one would suspect of mere heartbreak:
I would not be asking, I would not be seen
A-beggin’ on mountain or hill.
I’m ready and blind with my hands tied behind,
I’ve neither a mind or a will.
Could ever a woman destroy a man so utterly? The song seems to simply take it for granted that faith, once so sincerely and youthfully offered, when betrayed, has the power to reduce the mind and the will to utter helplessness. It can lead one to such a disillusionment of life that he is literally at the mercy of a world which only wishes to exploit:
It’s bitter the life of the poor ditching boy,
He’ll always believe what they say.
They tell him it’s hard to be honest and true,
Does he mind if he doesn’t get paid?
The song cuts deeper than the narrative first implies. Is this the state of man itself? If it really is so "hard to be honest and true," can this be only the province of the simpleton who does not possess "scheming, idle ways?" Is he ever digging ditches for free, alienated from a caring heart?
The song’s structure suggests that it was love’s disappointment that undid the boy so savagely. But looked at in another way, it seems possible that innocence is always doomed to an eternal fatality of opportunistic appropriation, whether in relationships or in society.
Here, Richard Thompson is delivering on the promise of "Roll Over Vaughn Williams." This is simply one of the greatest folk songs I’ve ever heard in my life. Nobody else but Dylan can approach these depths with such economy and ease. The difference is that Thompson sounds like these things are actually happening to him!
"Shaky Nancy" - Another somber acoustic ballad, albeit with muscular bass and drums. The only thing I can think to compare this sound to is Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush (1970) and the contemporaneous Harvest (1972). But the feel is so British and distinct that you could not make an accusation of copying styles. Given Thompson’s past with Fairport Convention, any similarities are obviously a case of parallel development.
Here’s another portrait of a casualty. Thompson doesn’t tell us what happened to her, what makes her so "shaky," but it’s clear that it’s deeply imbedded in her soul.
Nancy went walking, gone for the day,
When she comes back she’s been two years away.
There’s still a tear in her eye
Who’ll say a prayer for Nancy?
The singer can’t console or woo her, so he finally throws himself into her lot completely:
I’ll go to sleep
And dream sweet dreams of Nancy.
Perhaps it’s good enough, at the end of the day, for simple resignation and empathy. Perhaps that’s really all the best we can hope for - either from ourselves and others.
"The Angels Took My Racehorse Away" - We return to rock and roll here with this joyously absurd lament for the singer’s late steed. Foul play is suspected: ("I believe it was that bookmaker from Crail/I believe he put one in her pail.") The singer’s bereavement sounds sincere enough - but if we listen closely, we’ll discern the real reason for the pain of loss:
And I believe (I believe) every sporting man will cry,
I believe (I believe) to see his income pass him by.
This was indeed a beloved horse. "She won the Lanark Silver Bell and she stole every heart away." The singer pictures "a racecourse in the sky," where "steward, lord and groom are calling her name." Thus the hope for monetary victory transcends even death. The song is funny, of course, but the pathetic image of man’s ultimate desire for transcendence residing in a bit of pot luck may be the most sadly pathetic image on what is already a very bleak album.
Thompson turns in another stunning guitar solo on this one, and the jauntiness of the tune carries one beyond the irony to a kind of sad victory.
(A wonderful note here: both Sandy Denny and Linda Peters (soon to be Thompson) provide backup vocals on this track, but they’re limited to the harmonized words, "I believe," in refrain to Thompson’s yowl. Now that’s funny.)
"Wheely Down" - Side one ends with this chanted, warbled tale with a tune right out of ye Olde English Earthe itself. The only thing that belies its modernity is Thompson’s rattling electric guitar strings that makes it appear that the song appears out of a fibrous tangle of loose telephone wires. An repeated open fourth banged on a piano is the only accompaniment, as the singer begins painting his vision right out of Joyce: the voluptuous body of a woman lying on a hill merge and become one.
The land/lady flourishes, and there is much rejoicing in this vision of nature. Finally, she/it become populated, and is the source of life.
The vision cannot endlessly endure, however: All things must change within the earth.
For the worms will eat the miller’s wheel
And the rats will eat the grain.
Man’s warlike efforts fail to the kick
of drums:
And the armies of deliverance
Are run into the ground . . .
In the end, all nature decays - be it the land or fertile female flesh. The song ends with the image of a hungry falcon circling overhead, as the piano fades away, leaving the initial electronic throbbing. Life comes from chaos, breeds, dies, then returns to the surrounding chaos. The pulsing momentum of the song has been the march of destiny, and now it as an end.
This song is a small masterpiece. If you haven’t been quite certain until now, this crazy little bugger is a genius. A particularly morbid genius, no doubt - but still a genius.
"The New St. George" - St. George is the traditional patron saint of England, and is surely celebrated in song, though I am unfamiliar with with any specific tune to which the title might refer. In this song, the original tune is being replaced by a new one, which is a workers’ call to action and unity. It is anthemic in nature, religious in the sense of abandoning an old tradition of favoritism and privilege and creating a new one based upon the working class. It sounds as it could actually have been an old British Socialists’ rallying song.
Freedom was your mother,
Fight for one another,
Leave the factory, leave the forge,
Dance to the new St. George.
But is this song really in harmony with a socialists’ or workers’ movement - or is it posited against them, in view of something larger? Are trade union leaders being referred to in these lines:
Don’t believe pretenders
Who say they would defend us.
While they flash their teeth and wave,
The other hand is being paid.
They choke the air and bleed us,
These noble men who lead us . . .
Indeed, nature seems to be dying. "The fish and foul are ailing/The farmer’s life is failing." Once again, the leaders are ineffectual. "The backroom boys can’t save us now."
Indeed, this call for a rising up does not seem to be a traditional strike for wages or better working conditions. "Leave the factory, leave the forge," sound all too final here. The radical alternative seems to be a complete transformation of society into a universal brotherhood of a completely transformed society. To "Dance to the new St. George," is exactly that - to participate in a new order of a sanctified unity.
Of course, this was the ultimate goal of classical socialism. But placed in this context, the utopian promise seems hollow and imaginary. As a practical political solution, it means nothing. The song can be seen as a spiritual call to arms, or rather, perhaps it could be interpreted as a satire of such sentiments.
In the nihilistic context of the album as a whole, the latter interpretation seems most likely - although this does not exclude what may be Thompson’s genuine concern for the proletariat, the common working man who’s voice he appropriates - not only on this song, but throughout the album. Rendered in this light, "The New St. George" could be ultimately interpreted as pathos - the ringing anthem for a problem which cannot be fixed, only romanticized - which leaves nobody better off than before.
The song itself is powerful, in a tattered way, trundling down the street, so to speak, to the accompaniment of saxophone and trumpet reminiscent of a Salvation Army band. And what other army would our singer call on here than one that would bring salvation itself? It’s what the song ultimately demands, and what we know will always be ultimately denied.
Ultimately as depressing as it is rousing, this song is about as political as Thompson gets. There are no promises to be kept and we are still under his initiating judgement, his real call to arms - to "live in fear."
"Painted Ladies" - The sound of this song is once again tremendously reminiscent of Harvest-era Neil Young, with which is exactly contemporaneous (e.g., compare "Heart of Gold" and "Old Man"). There is simply no chance that this is a stylistic copy - even less likely the other way around. Once again, this self-produced album (along with a certain John Wood) simply miraculously appears as Young’s Anglican doppelganger.
The lyrics carry Young-like inscrutability here, as well. Just who are "the painted ladies I know," anyway. The first verse suggests that they may be prostitutes. Or then again, they could just be any attractive (perhaps "trendy") women, with whom a man will not have success without money:
When you don’t have credit, don’t hold no sway
With the painted ladies I know,
It’s thank you for nothing, we’ll see you someday,
The painted ladies I know.
At any rate, these women are inaccessible. "Those film stars and beauties" can only be experienced vicariously through the imagination, and do not satisfy.
Apparently, they like to tease, however: "When you’re starved for some loving they can make you feel special." However, it doesn’t last. "And God help the children playing their game,/The name of the game is ‘good-bye.’"
Looking a bit closer, though, one must ask is the song really an indictment of the "painted ladies" themselves, or is it of the male’s conception of them? The men’s attitude seems to justify their behavior: "’When you want to love everyone, how can you love?’/The painted ladies all say." Everyone, it seems is a victim here. In a culture where women are objectified as "painted ladies," the male’s desire is insatiable, and the women are not regarded with enough depth to be made a subject worthy (or even desirable) of commitment. As the song concludes,
It’s time to move on or go down with the ship,
The painted ladies all say.
The objectification of female beauty and the exploitation of male desire creates a fantasy world in which no one can win. Making a commitment is surrender, it is implied, and that destroys the seductive desires that gave the female the allure that aroused the male to begin with.
It is another perfect portrait of hell by Richard Thompson - who is here emerging as its most perceptive and expressive chronicler.
"Cold Feet" - This funny, self-effacing song has a country kick in the chorus and is reminiscent of classic-era Kinks. The protagonist is obviously tied down with servile devotion to his girlfriend through her charms and manipulations, but something deep inside him tells him that he shouldn’t cross that line into commitment. Still he can’t seem to back off ("I’d cross my fingers but they don’t seem to meet"). A much lighter song than the rest of the album, but it still displays a classic conundrum that maintains the main theme of entrapment, and it’s a pleasant sing-along.
"Mary and Joseph" - The Salvation Army band returns with a vengeance, marching down the street, Thompson singing the hymnal like an old drunk lagging behind. This could easily be a cut off of a late-eighties Tom Waits album.
The lyrics are an insane portrait of the Holy Couple, with "Mary . . . tied down on the bed/While Joseph plays the ukelele/standing on his head." In this strange scenario, Jesus will not come to be born, as the couple is divided.
The imagery of the song is somewhat difficult, and the point being made somewhat obscure. It seems, in a way, to be simply a song of madness, a hymn for an alternate reality, a dream that failed to materialize.
Why are Mary and Joseph so estranged? Are they too different ("Like the worm that loves the rose")? If Mary is tied down to the bed, is she supposed to bear the saviour against her will? At any rate they are "divided," inexplicably "parted in the name of good."
Is this a suggestion that perhaps the Biblical pair, chosen against their will and desire, cannot bring forth the arrival of the Son of Light, whose name and essence is Truth? Perhaps our mad, drunken bard, observing that there is no peace on earth, assumes that no Incarnation has ever taken place, since mankind is not redeemed. Mary and Joseph could not bring forth the birth of the saviour naturally, so that any other kind of birth - a supernatural incarnation would not only be impossible, but absolutely meaningless.
But this places us in another Catch-22. If "He’ll only come when hearts are joined," how can he ever arrive to deliver mankind. Can Christ only appear to a mankind which is already in love, peace and harmony? Then what would be the purpose?
I am not sure at all of Thompson’s intentions here, but this "alternate reading" of the absence of the divine is a marvelous addition and extension to the wandering ranter’s rebel cry. Thompson’s voice is even more deliberately "unrefined" here, a warbling amateur baritone just following along the notes of the staff of his imaginary hymnal.
Why wasn’t this a hit record?
"The Old Changing Way" - We return now to that Neil Young Harvest sound, but we’re still distinctly in the British folk-tale idiom. The story tells of two brothers (tinkers), who set out on the road to make whatever modest fortune they can, pledging to always stay together. When hard times arrive, however, the brothers split up, each one having to make his lonely way by himself. It is a cautionary tale not to break with your blood or to face a harsh, wandering road, lost and without comfort.
The self-contradictory name of their pathway - the name of the song - remains the same whether they are together or apart. Does this oxymoron take on an additional meaning after they split? If the "Old Way" was to travel together, encountering new experiences on the road - thus "Changing" - is there a new "Old Changing Way" after they part? Here "Changing" would modify "Way," instead of "Old." So is song a requiem for the changing of time when blood kin are not bound together in life?
The singer states "We never agreed to divide our tin." So was it money, perceived as necessity that broke up the two? Does a capitalist, market economy drive a wedge between the old, sacred order of bonding that comes natural to brothers - or just plain human beings?
This seems to be the gist of the song, but with Thompson, I’m not ruling out another layer of irony that I just may not be picking up at this point.
"Twisted" - What a fabulous way to end the album! Here, in one of Thompson’s strongest melodies so far, he tells a simple first-person, present tense tale of being hopelessly drunk and not being able to interpret things properly. ("Sitting at the bar with my face in the jar,/"And something tells me I’m twisted.")
His girlfriend (?) has already left, the band has stopped playing. People are becoming hazy, and he can’t quite remember the way he came in. So he stays and drinks.
This eloquent, simple tale of a lost soul, couched in the language of drink, seems a fine summation for the narrator of "The Human Fly." It is his destiny and doom to be alone, left behind. If drink is a metaphor for escape, it is not helpful here, as the perpetual outsider just gets constantly sucked back into himself. The final reality seems to be the reflection of his own face. Why is he alone?
Blame it on the drink if you like. But when he reflects that "Something tells me I’m twisted," I believe he’s saying more about his inner condition than simple inebriation. Drinking is only a symptom here of an existential state. It is the fate of the "twisted" man to see things aright - or at least in a way that nobody else does. "Twisted" is not just drunk - it’s a different kind of alignment to reality from everybody else. At its extreme, as the singer seems to fear, it really may be actual madness. No wonder nobody else wanted to stay or take him home. They’d have to listen to him.
As a prophet, Richard Thompson was entirely accurate concerning his first solo album. As he wryly recalls, "I think I personally knew everyone who bought a copy." This album needs to be heard.
Video - Solitary Life, part 3
http://youtube.com/watch?v=sxzDmu8krz4
Richard and Linda Thompson: I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight [April 1974]
The debut of the newly married Thompsons was released on Island Records in the U.K. in 1974. I can find no record of its sales history. I had no idea before I started this how popular Fairport Convention were in their "heyday," but I don’t know that Richard and Linda enjoyed any kind of the commercial success that the group had, thus I cannot judge their impact on the British consciousness. In the U.S., I think the impact was probably about zero. The album was released by Warner Brothers, but I’m not sure it was even in the same year. I don’t recall seeing or hearing Richard and Linda Thompson albums until Shoot Out the Lights was lionized by the national media in 1982.
But however long the gestation took, I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight certainly exists not only in the American consciousness (albeit marginally, obliquely, to a sequestered crowd), but is also a member in good standing in the "official" canon of rock ‘n’ roll, having placed in the Top 100 Albums (1967-1987) in the initial Rolling Stone classification of 1987, as well as weighing in at #4?? on their 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. It’s interesting, in fact, that no Richard Thompson album other than Shoot Out the Lights is included in this list, though there is no question that many deserve to be.
My basic supposition is that the second Lights illuminated critics enough to revisit their back catalog, where they were astounded by the first Lights, and it has enjoyed its privileged position ever since. Of course, speculation like this is always a bit hazy, but the passing of two decades has not dislodged the album’s place of power, so there it remains, reinforcing Richard Thompson’s severely underrated presence in the canon.
But to be fair, despite all that he had accomplished before, and even with what was to come, it is finally here, that Richard Thompson lays down some of the greatest songs of his career - masterpieces that will become touchstones throughout his long musical sojourn - both with, and without Linda.
There is also a sense of something greater coming together, moving into focus on this album. As freakishly wonderful as Henry the Human Fly was, this is not just an extension, but a move into something entirely different - much larger, more spatially and emotionally inclusive.
Of course the change is accented by the appearance of Linda Peters (now Thompson) as an apparent "equal" collaborator, though how much of that really is a cause, and how much just part of the presentation will continue to be obscure. Richard continues to write all the songs, and he sings about half of them. There is no denying, however, the added power and strength that Linda brings to some of the very best songs an entirely new dimension. It’s not so much that it’s a beautiful voice intoning these beautiful song visions. Like Dylan, Richard Thompson has one of the most effecting, transformative voices in popular music history, even if (like Dylan) it is not conventionally "pretty." What’s more important is that the songs seem to open up in new dimensions, with new possibilities. The real key is that Linda knows how to sing Richard Thompson songs - she knows how to get to their emotional root - without sounding at all like Richard Thompson. Behind Linda’s beautiful contralto is a sense of emotional distance that compiles the ironies and bring all the stark pain of the songs she sings to the surface, without any apparent commentary. I do not believe that it is an insult to say that Linda Thompson allows Richard Thompson’s songs to speak for themselves. Indeed, that is the very quintessence of her art.
With Thompson’s singing, which is improving dramatically here, you have nothing but emotional investment. When there is irony, the bite of his delivery spits it back with a vengeance. In stark contrast, Linda’s vocals are entirely transparent. Her interpretations of the songs sometimes seem like they emanate directly from the shell-shocked victim of the tragedy they portray, creating an eeriness that can be absolutely devastating.
So why, might one ask, does not Linda sing all the songs on the album? Well, for one reason, thankfully, we do get to hear Richard Thompson’s voice. But unlike Shoot Out the Lights, we do not get any real sense of dialogue here. This album is more of a united team front. The contrast between the pair simply opens up all the songs, making for a more universal statement than would be possible with only one singer.
Here, at the beginning at least, the Thompsons appear as comrades in arms. But it’s not just that Richard is using Linda as another instrument. We cannot know just how and why - only they could tell us that (actually perhaps only Richard could tell us that) - but Linda’s presence and henceforth, necessity for performance, alters the way Richard writes songs. She opens up an entirely new universe for him - and to make the claim that this is the universe of the eternal feminine is, I believe, not too trite nor an overstatement.
If anything, such an assertion still probably falls short of the reality. Just how the relationship of his new wife affected his writing, how much she became established as his muse (and mouthpiece) altered his perspective is incalculable. What cannot be denied here is that these are some of the greatest songs that Richard Thompson had (or would) ever write.
It’s not just the songs, however. The presentation and the sound are exquisitely open, and Richard’s voice shifts just enough from the madman of Henry to become more universally human. The openness of the sound, the relaxed nature of such horrific visions lends Lights a gorgeous invitational quality that it rivals the contemporary Southern California style (which it seems to emulate) of Fleetwood Mac, the Eagles, Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt, etc., that these tunes could have easily been placed on the radio in 1974/75. (The fact that they were not, I have to ascribe to Warner Brothers Records, who made so many ridiculous errors around this period of time - witness only their refusal to release Frank Zappa’s Läther as a supreme example of executive stupidity.) But of course, once inside the lyric world of the album is a bleakness and nihilism that would not be encountered fully until the punk era (Randy Newman aside).
The cover of the album wonderfully exposits and reinforces the contrast of the extremes that the record contains. Spray-painted on a blank, nondescript wall is the title in dripping red. When one sees the image "I WANT TO SEE THE BRIGHT LIGHTS TONIGHT" as a piece of graffiti, its message seems to become much more desperate than any simple request or wish. The fact that it looks as though it is painted in blood sears into the brain, and finally the message appears as if it were a suicide note. The smaller "RICHARD AND LINDA THOMPSON" painted similarly just below it seems to suggest the collective author of the aforementioned statement, and shifts the meaning of the relationship of artist and title just enough to cue us in that what we are about to encounter is something less than a celebration, definitely not a product, but something more essentially and violently human.
Earlier in the year, Bob Dylan’s shocking self-autopsy, Blood on the Tracks made a similar suggestion - with the title, if not the cover. Two years before the explosion of punk rock, there was clearly something in the air - and that was nothing if not the realization of the absolute dissolution of 1960s ideals, and the correlative notion that the individual (or couple) was frighteningly adrift on his own.
This is, of course, Richard Thompson’s unique perspective that seemingly had been there all the time. Life is pain, loneliness and self-delusion, while cultural actions - especially human relationships - are designed to divert us from this central fact. Love, the great deliverer, is the great deceiver, as we are all so selfish at heart.
In the course of the Thompson’s career, Richard’s vision would become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as this relationship, simply mirroring millions of others, would sink into catastrophe. But the strange thing about this album - as in so much of Thompson - is the sense of humanity affirmed by this hellish situation, particularly embodied in a magnanimous, loving - if futile - kind of hope.
Strap in and get ready for a long ride. This is the real start of the journey of Richard Thompson, the great modern master of katharsis. Get ready to see what it feels like to be fully human. (Hint: it hurts.)
"When I Get to the Border" - Richard sings this kick-off song with seemingly high spirits. It’s a tale, a plan of escape. Whatever the imaginary "border" is, the singer is going to leave all his problems far behind once he gets there. The song encompasses an earnest belief in some sort of (at least personal) utopian ideal of freedom. Rocking infectiously in mid-tempo, it pulls the listener in with its open grace and glad tidings. It rocks like a rocking chair, and Linda’s harmony on the chorus makes everything about it just seem that much more alluring, charming and full of promise.
On first listening, the uninitiated may not catch any glimpse of irony, save perhaps a sense that the singer may be perhaps a little over-optimistic. It’s only after listening to the album as a whole that one recognizes all the high hopes and schemes presented here are a mad delusion. This peppy gem is a sheer masterstroke to lead off one of the most bleak visions ever committed to vinyl. It serves as not only a supreme contrast, but a very much-needed balance to the album as a whole, which is fascinating that Thompson recognized this as so by placing the song right at the beginning. Everything that follows will appear in a different light after this bucolic excursion.
Beautiful Celtic melodies ring in on fiddle and dulcimer, which are answered by Thompson’s full-throated electric Strat lines. The contrast and sympathy between the two musical forms and approaches has an uncanny poignancy and a strange sense of fatalism as the tune fades away into its uncertain future.
In short, this masterpiece begins with a master stroke. It so wonderfully invites you in - now it’s about to turn and grab you by the throat.
"The Calvary Cross" - This is, quite simply, one of the most beautifully brutal, most nightmarish songs ever written. The "mad ranter" of Henry the Human Fly has transformed now from a caricature to a human being of palpable suffering, and he takes the entire audience with him.
A modular electric guitar enters and searches restlessly for half a minute or so, but finds nowhere to go. Then suddenly, the doom-laden three chords come crashing down, repeating incessantly, locking the singer who emerges from this enclosure to ruminate on his own private hell.
The lyrics are at first just a strange jumble of images until you begin to finally connect them. Each phrase seems to stand alone as an aphorism or an enigma until you fit them carefully together as a narrative. This is easier to do with reading the lyrics than with listening to the song being sung - as each line is separated by the pounding of the same three chords and the mournful background wailings.
I was under the Calvary Cross,
The pale-face lady she said to me.
I’ve watched you with my one green eye,
And I’ll hurt you till you need me."
"I’ll hurt you till you need me." With that one phrase, Thompson encapsulates everything that can possibly be wrong with a relationship. It is predicated with pain, desire, loneliness, the need for control and manipulation. Love appears here as a twisted pact between sick, helpless individuals. Each will gain something from this balanced shared psychosis, but in the process, each will lose themselves - which is, frighteningly, perhaps the very point of it all to begin with.
If love is, indeed, the haven of the existentially vulnerable individual, is there only one side we can blame? "The pale-face lady" in this case is the predator, the creature of cunning and dominance. But no one would accept her call who would not want to ultimately escape from himself. No matter what you might think of this woman, you cannot ultimately blame her any more than him. Was this "the border" the singer was so happily fleeing to in the opening song?
The singer speaks like a creature out of Dante. There is no real choice once you have made your decision - you are stuck irretrievably in that portion of Inferno which has been designed for you - and more significantly, with complicity by you. And finally, once you receive the full force of this vision, there is no getting away from asking yourself - what role am I playing in this drama? His or hers?
Let us retreat for a moment and ask the question, is this dark, grim, pathological analysis of love truly universal? Or is it an aberration of the ideal? For if we accept Thompson’s vision uncritically, we are indeed damning the entire human race to an eternity of sick dependency. In short, is this song a portrait about a sick, perversion of love, or is it rather a portrait of love as an unalterably sick perversity?
I don’t know if this question can be fully answered. No relationship is perfect, and all carry some degree of dysfunction rooted in fear. What he’s singing about here is a very extreme case indeed. But for those of us who have been in one or more of those extreme cases, the situation is all too familiar. Is even a "good" relationship "good" only in terms of degree?
Well, at any rate, the song is not going to tell us. The song is the prophecy of the damned, and is certainly a "worst-case scenario" that may hold a kernel of truth in it that exists down deep somewhere even in the best of relationships.
Love is always a compromise of individuals. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It can be quite joyous and transcendent, as most people (and love songs) will witness. The power and the utter audacity of the song resides in its utter insistence at pointing out this universal principle as an ego-death compromise - whether it is willing or non-willing. We are not prepared for songs to tell us things like that. And certainly not like this. This is where "Calvary Cross" gets its unfathomably dense and potent power. In a sense, if you can’t take it, you’re really not truly prepared to be honestly alive.
The chorus:
Everything you do,
Everything you do
You do for me.
inverts the ordinary perspective of the lover who proclaims his joy at pleasing his love. Here, the object of his affection is instructing (or simply stating the fact) that all his actions now belong to her. As the song concludes, "This is your first day of sorrow."
But what about the title? What about the image of the Calvary Cross. Is the fact that the "pale-faced lady" was under the dead body of Christ (at least in the imagery) implicate her in his crucifixion? Is this now to be another one? Or is there something deeper, more sinister at work here?
Did the lady learn her lesson at the Calvary Cross? Is that what Jesus’ sacrifice means for us - in essence, a life of guilty devotion? Does this portrait of a dysfunctional relationship point more deeply into the very nature of devotion itself? Do we serve God himself through fear and sickness?
The metaphor lies there, undeniably, sickeningly implicit. The lyrics of the second verse sharpen their steely implications:
"Scrub me till I shine in the dark
"And I’ll be your light till doomsday."
Even if this is the intended metaphor, we are left with the question of whether this is the nature of faith, or a sick perversion of it.
In the end, Richard Thompson leaves us no easy answers - in fact no answers at all. As the mournful chords fade away, it is finally him suffering up there on the cross, and we can and will join him to whatever degree our sense of identification and dropping of defense mechanisms will allow.
This is a bolt out of nowhere on a "pop" album, even in the extraordinarily sophisticated age of 1974. After this brutal, unexpected assertion, Richard Thompson has already gone just about as far as he can go. From this moment on, everything he writes can only be a variation on this theme. From this staggering masterpiece, everything else flows. We either turn away from him and think happier thoughts, or we follow with our eyes open, breathlessly waiting for whatever this now-accomplished "poet of darkness" is driven to reveal.
If you can get past "The Calvary Cross," you can get past anything. And that includes the rest of this album.
Video - Richard & Linda Thompson: "The Calvary Cross"
http://youtube.com/watch?v=DPsAcgdOns8
"Withered and Died" - This slow waltz ballad is the first solo vocal given to Linda Thompson, and it is extraordinary. I don’t know where to begin: I could talk about the majestic simplicity and beauty of the melody, the achingly sad, defeated lyrics, the pureness of tone in her voice, the absolute absence of emotion that makes the performance so starkly believable. I could roll them all up into a little ball of description that makes every side of this cut so amazingly perfect, but I still couldn’t get it across. One must hear this heartbreaker, so free of maudlin, but so completely desolate that it simply makes you want to cry. The closest experience to which I can compare it is listening to Hank Williams’ "I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry" to get a sense of the potential beauty of despair. Of course, Hank’s is the greater song - the shocking masterpiece of bleakness that miraculously heals. But "Withered and Died" is its worthy descendent.
Although seemingly an English ballad, "Withered and Died" is also at heart an American country & western song - a blend that Thompson feels instinctively and that will emerge continuously throughout the rest of his career. His sliding guitar solo reminds one of a pedal steel and its sense of "crying." This is no accident. Everything here is purposeful. The greatness of its art is in not appearing at all artful. This is one of the most natural-sounding recordings I have ever heard and appears completely organic. With Linda, Richard Thompson has found an extraordinary new instrument with which to express his melancholy and give it different levels of meaning, perspective, and universality.
Three songs into the album, and we’re already at a level of depth of expression for which I can find very few comparisons anywhere. This album is truly great, and it’s only going to get better as it goes along.
Video - Richard & Linda Thompson - "Withered and Died"
http://youtube.com/watch?v=kcKyZEnPWBQ
"I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight" - The first time I heard this song, I was somewhat baffled. Sung with exuberance by Linda, it comes off as good-timing party rocker. A girl wants to be taken out clubbing by some fellow, drink, dance and have fun. So what?
Context is everything. What is this song doing here? Why is it the title of the album? Why is it seemingly written in blood on the cover? A few close listenings, and deeper meanings begin to gleam through the text. The third verse is really the kicker that cued me in:
A couple of drunken nights rolling on the floor
Is just the kind of mess I’m looking for.
I’m gonna dream till Monday comes in sight.
I want to see the bright lights tonight.
The song is a desperate plea for escape - escape from work, escape from a lonely mundane existence, escape from oneself. The great subject of the song is the absolute void that is pushed aside so that it it seems to be absent from the song itself. That is all in the effort and desire of the singer who so wants so badly to throw herself into a whirlwind of pounding sensations just to get away from everything else that just hurts so bad.
Listen a few times. The singer’s exuberance is really desperation. She’s heading for a nervous breakdown - no, probably an existential breakdown. Linda’s precise control in holding the balance between the two emotions is absolutely astonishing.
The Salvation Army horns right out of "Mary and Joseph" seem to mock her every feeling, every syllable. The Thompsons have created a masterpiece of sustained irony here, and is on my list of recommendations for consideration of "greatest songs of all time." To take the celebratory party ethos of a rock ‘n’ roll "anthem" and subtly deconstruct it, showing the void behind it is an absolute triumph that few could pull off anywhere near this subtly.
The scariest part is that the song sounds so fun - and you wish you were going along too.
Video - Richard & Linda Thompson: "I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight"
2 comments:
Very impressive, Pete. Glad to see you name-checking the great Sandy Denny here. You might be interested in my Sandy blog at www.sandydenny.blogspot.com.
Thanks for your comment, Phil. Think your Sandy Dennis blog is absolutely marvelous, both in look and content. Particularly enjoyed all the insights on "Tam Lin," a song that befuddled me as well. Keep up the good work!
All this (blogging) is quite new for me, and I'm happy to learn by anyone's insight, hard work and example. Keep in touch!
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