Hokey Pokey (Part 3)

"The Sun Never Shines on the Poor" - This breezy, waltz-tempo ballad is reminiscent of a Brecht/Weil song, or perhaps better, Jaques Brel. Richard sings the verses, all dedicated to pictures of poverty, with Linda joining in on the choruses. It’s perhaps the least convincing song on the album, but it still offers an enjoyable pastiche. Marxian sing-a-longs are always a welcome, and the dizzying, carnival-esque acoustic guitars give this one a buoyant, exotic flavor of indeterminable ethnicity.

Doubtless, the sentiments are correct, and the lyrics are twistingly vivid in a Dickensian way ("The urchins are writhing around in the mud/Like eels playing tag in a barrel"). "Ting-a-ling," goes the chorus, giving this dance of poverty the sense of eternality that its subject deserves.

"A Heart Needs a Home" - This is Richard Thompson’s greatest song to date, and by all rights should be regarded as a classic. Had Linda Rondstadt (or some other contemporary diva) issued this tune as a single, it would have broken records (and hearts) and would be a standard in the classic-rock, folk-rock, country-rock or any-rock category - not to mention "beyond-rock," a la The Beatles’ "Yesterday." But certainly no version could be more effectively sung than by Linda Thompson.

The haunting, simple melody is so incredibly unaffected, shifting from major to minor quietly, with broad pools of modal phrasings reminiscent of some of the best Joni Mitchell of the period. The instrumentation is simple, led by a harp and supporting guitars. Linda sings this in her open, unemotional, straightforward style with incredible restraint.

The lyrics represent Richard at his best, as the song is capable of being taken straightforwardly or ironically. This is the statement of a basic human truth, and if it is rooted in self delusion or psychological dependency, well that is simply the nature of the human animal.

The singer speaks succinctly and eloquently of her lover:

I know the way
That I feel about you.
I’m never going to run away,
I’m never going to run away.

She contrasts her current state with her loneliness before:

I came to you
When no one could hear me.
I’m sick and weary
Of being alone . . .
The world’s no place
When you’re on your own.
A heart needs a home.

These five words sum up so perfectly, so poetically, the core of why people all over the earth suffer such ravaging relationships and suffer such pain from one another. We are born with an inward yearning to share, and the loneliness of isolation makes any love match preferable to loneliness. Even the singer concedes:

Some people say
That I should forget you.
I’m never going to be a fool,
I’m never going to be a fool.
A better life they say,
If I’d never met you.
I’m never going to be a fool . . .

Clearly, there must be some obvious problems here. Her friends are urging her to get out of what clearly appears to them some self-destructive relationship. The singer is not going to listen. To leave would to "be a fool."

Being a "fool" here is ambiguous. Would it be foolish for her to leave because she knows in her heart that this is the right relationship for her? Or is it because of fear of being alone - that anything is better than that?

Obviously, she has experienced the alternatives and knows better than to be looking out among the crowd. She clearly does not trust the world:

Tongues talk fire and
Eyes cry rivers,
Indian givers,
Hearts of stone."

No matter what else can be said about her love, she is safe from fear and loneliness. He has constancy, and whatever else, his devotion gives her strength.

What makes the song so powerful, of course, is what it does not say, but only implies. We can imagine the best to worst about her lover and their relationship - it could be anything from simply dull to emotionally and physically dangerous. We simply do not know. And this is what makes the song all the more poignant - no matter what the situation, the basic human condition remains unchanged.

"A Heart Needs a Home" can be seen and sung as a simple love song. It could simply reflect a matter of heart, a conquest of substance over style. Her lover could really be the ideal. What does it matter what her friends say? Surely they could be wrong, could they not? This could be interpreted as humility in the face of true love, validating constancy as a supreme value.

Or it could be another nightmare, another delusional hell. We cannot know from the text of the song itself. What does remain constant, however, is the universality of the condition of dependency, no matter how happy or sad the ultimate outcome.

This is an absolutely beautiful song - a masterpiece that should be as widely known as any love song from the pop era.

Video - Richard & Linda Thompson - "A Heart Needs a Home"

http://youtube.com/watch?v=5upiUrUw0Jk

"A Mole in a Hole" - Hokey Pokey closes with a breezy version of this Sam Waterson song, leader of the 1960s British folk group, the Watersons. Its title and sentiment seems to hearken back to an old song by the legendary "Minstrel of the Appelations," Bascom Lamar Lunsford, whose "I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground" (compiled in Harry Smith’s classic anthology, Anthology of American Folk Music. I point out the Lunsford song because of Greil Marcus’ analysis of it as a confounding, nihilistic classic.

(There is possibly a relationship to another song by a 1950s-era British folk group, "I Am a Mole and I Live in a Hole," but I am not sure of this. It’s funny how this "mole" theme gets around, though.)

In true Thompson fashion, it contradicts the previous song, by demanding freedom, albeit of a strange kind. Sung by Linda, the self-proclaimed "refugee," with a kind of liberating (yet still ironic) glee, she happily annunciates her humble desires:

‘Wanna be a mole in a hole,
Diggin’ low and slow,
‘Wanna be a fly flying high in the sky.

The singer has lost her only friend to Jesus, and she has no interest in following. Another had such wisdom that he is now dead. Isolation, in a naturalistic setting, is the only thing that’s going to suit her, and she does not exhibit any despair.

In a sense, the song is no more than convincing in its sentiments than Thompson’s own declaration of independence, "When I Get to the Border," which kicked off I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight. Both songs are the [word] imaginings of would-be refugees, hopelessly seeking a way out of the whole mess we call life.

"A Mole in a Whole" is infectiously fun, however, despite (or perhaps because) of its ironies, and is delivered with gusto in a ‘round-the-campfire style that balances the opening song and is a fitting way to conclude the whole of Hokey Pokey itself.

BONUS TRACKS
"Wishing" - The first of five bonus cuts on the Island (British) re-release of Hokey Pokey is a BBC recording for the John Peel show in February 1975. I had always thought that these BBC recordings were done "live" in the studio, but this cut is obviously a studio recording, as evidenced by Linda’s double-tracked vocal.

"Wishing" is an absolutely gorgeous Buddy Holly song with which I was previously unfamiliar. Thank goodness it’s preserved here, in the Thompson’s rendition, which is both joyous and wistful. The band settles into the groove and lets Holly’s transcendence carry the day, with Linda’s open, heartfelt vocal. Richard takes a minimalist Holly-respectful solo with just a hint of his sliding acrobatics as a signature.

I can’t help but think again how much this sounds like some big contemporary acts - particularly here like Fleetwood Mac. I’ve got to stop asking why the Thompsons weren’t famous. God, this is gorgeous, though.

"I’m Turning Off a Memory" - Another BBC recording from the same date, here Linda Takes on the cruel honky-tonk blues of Merle Haggard, and she pulls it off effortlessly. Here, she feels much more comfortable with delivering country nuances (though there are a few Brit-folk mannerisms thrown in for charming effect) than she did with "Together Again," and the emotional commitment is pure and affecting.

What a voice! It’s wonderful to have these recordings, not only for themselves, but to hear some of the deep-felt sources of the Thompson’s emotionally charged material.

"A Heart Needs a Home" - The last of the three BBC recordings here, coming off the heels of the first two, demonstrate aptly Richard Thompson’s debt to American music, and country music in particular, for both its form and depth. What can we say about this song that we haven’t before? Sheer perfection.

"Hokey Pokey" - This roadhouse-raucous version of "Hokey Pokey" was recorded at the Roundhouse, London, September 7, 1975. Let’s just say that it kicks ass, with the band chomping in a hip-swaggering form that "nasties up" the original. Richard’s sly and raunchy solos interweave with Linda’s verses for some real fun. No question what this one’s about here.

"It’ll Be Me" - This has always been one of my favorite old rockers. Written by producer/engineer Jack Clement for Jerry Lee Lewis, it has an insanely obsessive style that the Thompsons take on at a less frantic pace than the Killer, but with just as much unbridled enthusiasm. (Oddly, the sound of this one is reminiscent of the way that John Doe and Exene Cervenka would recast oldies and project them into the contemporary punk of the early 1980s - a process that is no way a copy of Richard & Linda, but more an observation that like experiments can produce like results.) Richard sounds just as crazy singing these words as his own, and his guitar solos, while not reaching the heights they later would, wrap barbed-wire riffs around every turn.

The band is the perfect R&L band: John Fitzpatrick (accordian), Dave Pegg (bass), Dave Mattocks (drums). Oh, to have been so lucky to see this group in a club back in 1975! Who would have guessed that the material in their songbook would reach so deep and make so many connections with their original material? These are great add-ons that produce a more rounded picture.

Altogether, the duo’s follow-up to I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight does not match the fearsome intensity of that debut - and that’s a good thing. The Thompsons stretch out more here, cover more musical and emotional territory, and more importantly, begin to sound like a genuine, singular unit of expression. While Light had the great songs, along with the primal shock of revelation, it still felt a bit cobbled together - You’re my wife, you’re a singer, I’m a writer, let’s work together. Here, Richard and Linda Thompson seem to merge together, two voices with one vision - or better, one voice with two tonal ranges. It’s a good name for a marvelous album by two people in the prime of their lives. Richard and Linda play Hokey Pokey together all through the record - and will continue to do so down to the bitter end.

Hokey Pokey (Part 2)

"The Egypt Room" - This charming little grotesquerie is the kind of seedy portraiture that Thompson would come to excel at. The scene is a quasi-exotic nightclub full of romantic dreamers and a "princess" who dances with a majestically alluring style. Of course, it’s actually a seedy little strip club, probably with some Egyptian motif in its shabby decor.

The song is mockingly mysterious and brooding, led by faux-Egyptian modalities played on electric guitar and accordion. You can just imagine the "princess" undergoing her undulations in in a pathetic parody of Oriental ritual.

Richard sings with an air of both desire and sarcasm. As pitiful as this portrait is, it’s impossible not to be empathetic to the denizens of this bizarre little bazaar, as it seems that this is the only enchantment that life has left to them.

There are wonderful, brief descriptions of characters here (Hobnail Kelly and the Beefcake Kid, the "man in the cane with Italian shoes"), but it’s clearly the dancer who is the center of activity and attraction. How does she view herself? Do her erotic writhings that cause such excitement in the customers give her a sense of self, of identity? And if all this this tawdry make believe is unseemly, Thompson leaves his judgement totally ambivalent in the gorgeous repeated refrain of "Don’t be late." If this is the promise of a kind of paradise for some, well what of it?

I hope he’s not just being a bald-faced mocker here. If Thompson’s point is, as so often, the difficulty of authentic human feelings and relationships, we can find that for sure down at the Egypt Room. I hope he’s not pretending that these low-end delusionalists are any more sad than anything you would find in a more refined setting. And judging from the rest of his output, he’s not.

The song sounds fabulous, though - the music mocks the cheesy pretensions of exoticism, while adding a genuine sense of wondrous allure. Priceless.

"Never Again" - This is an absolutely beautiful, simple acoustic ballad, in the traditional British style, sung with great sadness, focus and control by Linda. The lyrics seem to suggest a kind of wistful questioning for the abiding of love and joy. The answer is connected to the final verse, which looks at the conditions of old age:

Old man how you tarry, old man how you weep,
The trinkets you carry and the garlands you keep.
For the salt tears of lovers and the whispers of friends
Come never, O never, O never again.

This bittersweet peon to ephemerality is short and sounds heartbreakingly real. It closes the first side of the album with a sombre, restless note.

"Georgie on a Spree" - Side two opens in high spirits again, as Linda sings this exuberant little confection with girlish glee. In a kind of cross between a music hall number and country & western song, the narrator tells of her seemingly perfect relationship with the well-to-do, well-heeled "Georgie." The kind of extravagant time that Georgie provides is certainly enough to turn any young lady’s addled head:

When Georgie’s on a spree
All the girls are jealous of me.
‘Cause I’m the one he spends his money on,
We spend it, one, two three.
Driving in his Chevrolet,
I’m perfect company.
He’s the king and I’m his queen
When Georgie’s on a spree.

This is a nice counter-balance to "The Egypt Room," where we have lovely imagery of the rich and facile. With the warning of "Never Again" still echoing in our heads, we watch this girl carelessly entranced by being used by this rich boy. Of course, it’s good - and it’s good enough for her. We simply know that such things have no stability or permanence, and cannot last. Georgie leaves her, but promises to return. Of course he won’t - why would he? We experience the song as the prelude to a long adulthood of loneliness and disappointment.
Yet at the same time, who would deny her this fun? And which one of us wouldn’t welcome it for ourselves, in one form or another?

"Old Man Inside a Young Man" - It’s Richard’s turn again, and here we get the flip side of "Georgie on a Spree." This ponderous lament by one Billy could very well come from "Georgie" after a couple of spree-filled years. It speaks of the cultural imperative for youth to grab everything all at once. Now, with all pleasure spent, the young man is bored and tired to death of life:

I’m an old man inside a young man,
You’ve got to take it while you can.
I’m just an old man inside a young man,
Take a heart and break it while you can.

This motto has brought about his early rot. Using up life, using women, using sensations - never establishing meaningful relations or endeavors, he has, in essence, used himself up:

There’s not one thing on earth
That I’m not through with.
What can I do with
The rest of my life?

And he fears the rest of his life may be short. His wealth has brought to him a sense of paranoia that he’s being followed by would-be killers who are after his "fancy clothes." So he deigns this empty life to a close, but is always on the run, always on the escape from himself.

Oddly, the "old man" of Billy’s vision brings nothing with him of the wisdom of age. For wisdom requires waiting, persistence and sacrifice. His view of age is, therefore distorted. He is a casualty of easy success and the cultural imperative to grab. He is a walking ghost, and he fades away down the street as the song fades out.

Musically, and in its movement, this song is once again reminiscent of Harvest-era Neil Young, but with Thompson’s unique British tonalities. The song moves in slow, ominous steps, and Richard delivers a short but blistering electric guitar solo to underscore the sense of epic tragedy that this song both suggests and parodies.

Unquestionably, this is one of the best songs on an album that is rapidly filling with colorful, memorable and deeply felt moments.

Hokey Pokey (Part 1)

Richard and Linda Thompson: Hokey Pokey [April 1975]

While not an about face, the pair’s follow-up to Bright Lights is a quite different album, both in sound and tone. While keeping to the basics of British folk-rock, for the most part, the Thompsons bring in a larger palette of textures and attitudes. Hokey Pokey is not so grim and awe-imposing as I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight, and it is obvious from the start that this is quite intentional. Though not lacking in depth, the album largely takes a lighter approach, and the sound is generally more pop oriented - in a good way - than anything Thompson has done before.

This is not to suggest in the slightest that Hokey Pokey is in any way a commercial retreat or a sell-out - all the ironies remain intact. But this is a more welcoming, come-hither approach that invites the listener in to explore the multi-faceted perspectives and textures of Richard Thompson’s twisted world.

Released in the mid-seventies atmosphere of such zillion-selling artists as the new Fleetwood Mac, one cannot help noticing certain similarities of sound and approach, and wonder why the hell Warner Brothers (their American distributor, as well as Mac’s) did not push the Thompsons harder. Many of these songs would not be out of place at all on car radios of the mid-1970s, their oddities notwithstanding. But oddities were still tolerated (as Joni Mitchell and Randy Newman attest), and sometimes even prized. Sometimes I wish that the Thompsons had made it truly big on the charts during these years - if for no other reason than that I would not have to attempt to explain to everyone I meet just who Richard Thompson is before going on to describe or discuss aspects of his work.

Of course, if the duo had enjoyed massive commercial success, any subsequent history (and therefore output) would inevitably have been quite different. Not that it would have been necessarily inferior, but the experience of discovery - for both artist and audience - would have been one of a radically different dynamic. For cultic artists, their message always seems to their initiates to be of more valuable and honest coin than the big stars of the airwaves, with whom they serve as an ongoing contrast and dialectic. One feels more personally bound to one’s private heroes in many ways.

Nevertheless, part of the fascination, for me at least, of listening to Hokey Pokey is in imagining what it might have been like if such singular, beautiful art had merged with the commercial machine at such a propitious moment in history. How would the world be different? Or would it?

"Hokey Pokey (The Ice Cream Song)" - The song begins teasingly with a repeating little fiddle figure that tricks us into thinking we’re about to get some Fairport-esqe excursion, which is blown away quickly by the churning back and forth of the electric guitars, bass and drums. "Hokey Pokey" is a child-like rocker that Linda sings with a true visceral glee. After each couple of verses, Richard enters with his hard electric guitar solo, adding increasingly ironic commentary (and wizardry). Now this should have been a hit.

It’s nice to hear some humor reappearing in Thompson’s songs, and the inclusion of this song at the beginning of the album (not to mention as the title of the record itself) sets a strong, upbeat mood that will be held, more or less, throughout the disc. That is not to say that the song is bereft of the trademark Thompson "doom and gloom," as the sarcastic nature of the lyrics walk a neat knife’s edge between celebration and condemnation.

For hokey-pokey, the "ice cream" of childhood metamorphoses as its verses unfold into the joys of sex. The contrasting parallelism between the childhood love of a treat and the adult’s equivalent pleasure can be taken in manifold ways. Does the treatment of sex as purely a pleasure device devalue it or the individual? The song is ruthlessly non committal on this question. As the images unfold, however, the oddity of the sexual context increases: a prisoner’s sexual fantasies help to keep him alive, a gangster is threatened with death, which is equated with the end of sex. And finally, we are presented with the image of what must be the contemporaneous "glam rockers" of Britain, all tarted up in an alleyway, completely engulfed by their obsessions.

The fun feeling never leaves the song, however, which is brilliant in its simple construction and genuine sense of enthusiasm. Is "Hokey Pokey" a song of "guilty pleasure" only? Does it justify man (and woman’s) sexual nature? Or is it taking a "poke" at such activity as banal, childish and trivializing?

But as the song admits:

Everybody runs for hokey pokey,
It’s the natural thing to do.

Sex, however you wish to look at it, is a part of human nature and an inescapable fact of life. The true feeling of the song seems to me to be a humorous acknowledgement of that fact, as well as the inevitability that it will take many forms. I don’t really see the song as disapproving of sexuality - except insofar as taken by itself that it manifests itself into fetishes and patterns of life that may be seen as inauthentic. But ultimately, this is not a harsh song. "Hokey Pokey" seems more generous than many of Thompson’s songs in this regard - it’s partly celebration, partly satire. And it’s object is you, me, him, and her - all of us. We can’t resist the allure of sex any more than a kid can resist ice cream.

And once again, Linda’s delivery is absolutely delicious.

"I’ll Regret It All in the Morning" - If there’s any question at all about Thompson’s misanthropic, fatalistic point of view, however, it’s quickly dissolved by this weary acoustic ballad, in which he sings of the need for quite a bit of whisky to get him through the night with his lover. Bitterness and self loathing flow everywhere in what is genuinely a lovely, though doom-laden song.

If this is a sub-species of "hokey pokey," it is a particularly pathetic one. The narrator does not explain why he remains entangled with this woman, but there is a tangible sense of entrapment. Perhaps he has married her, perhaps they even have children - and he’s stuck in his unhappy situation. But there are no outside references to the narrator’s prison, and they seem to be voluntarily imposed. In a way, the song seems more a sequel to "Cavalry Cross" than the opening number. Something within her keeps something within him self crucified - and that condition is somehow part of human nature as well as desire.

I’ll regret it in the morning
When I see your smiling face -
I’d rather be any place but here.

Thompson cleverly, devilishly, inverts cliches and plays joyously with language, but once again his protagonist is in a self-constructed hell.

Usually thought of, the phrase "I’ll regret it in the morning" implies that one might do something under the influence of drink - sexual or otherwise - that one would ordinarily not have done, usually with a stranger or an acquaintance that one wishes to keep at a certain distance. Here, drinking is just the medicine required to keep an already established - and unwanted - relationship intact. That the situation seems beyond the singer’s control is much more pathetic than any single, impudent act of self indulgence could ever be.

"Smiffy’s Glass Eye" - This oddball tale is reminiscent of one of the more vaudevillian songs of the Kinks or perhaps even the Who - in fact it’s more reminiscent of a John Entwistle song than any I’ve perhaps ever heard. The story is of a boy whose eye is knocked out by a schoolmate’s slingshot, and his subsequent replacement eye causes him to be the constant object of derision.

The song is sung blankly by Linda in a lower register, with double tracking. There is a conspicuous lack of emotion, which of course she does well, and the folksy setting of what is basically an English music hall type of construction, makes the whole affair totally lacking in sentiment. The playful nature of the melody and accompaniment implies a joke, but it’s hard to be unmoved at Smiffy’s plight - his life is actually ruined, and he will never know a normal life or experience love.

The song ends in absolute disaster:
Nobody cried when his world fell apart
And poor Smiffy died of a broken heart.
You have to turn a blind eye to that sort of thing,
Smiffy with his glass eye glittering.

The pun cruelly distances the singer from the subject, and this jaunty little ditty has become a true nightmare. Of course the tragic aspect of the song is its shoddy treatment of a poor little boy, whose deformity caused a like reaction from his peers. On the other hand, in his most slyly, skilfully ironic way, Thompson confirms the point that we really have to keep emotional distance from all kinds of suffering just to maintain emotional balance. That we are equipped to do this - from childhood - with playful mockery, is not something we should feel particularly good about.
Once again, we see that the act of being human requires skills at inhumanity, which is yet another variation on the great large theme of the great universe of compromises required to keep us alive and functioning.