Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Shoot Out the Lights

Video - A Solitary Life, part 4

http://youtube.com/watch?v=0WwYlqLe0HA


Richard and Linda Thompson: Shoot Out the Lights [April 1982]

Regardless of questions and opinions regarding aesthetic value in Richard Thompson’s previous or subsequent work, there is no question that this is the central album in his career, the record that put him on whatever map he does exist on, and for so many reasons that elude numeration. For whatever remarkable achievements he had already accomplished, would continue to achieve, and will subsequently attain, there is no question that Shoot Out the Lights will forever be perceived as his defining work, his one unquestioned essential album, and his key contribution to the canonical works of rock music.

For there are certain albums, along with certain songs, which simply transcend any objective assessment - they resonate so strongly that their power simply creates a new kind of archetype, a living touchstone in the artistic stream. In short, they become mythical, and in so doing, tie their creators (for better or worse) to these epochal statements.

Contributing in no small manner to its mythic status, the album, recorded in 1981, and released in spring 1982, is intimately connected to the perceived real lives of its creators, which, whether accurate are not, hit such a sharp universal nerve among contemporary critics, that its power forced Richard and Linda Thompson upon what public was there to receive it. The album (and its subsequent U.S. tour) not only introduced the pair to what public attention they would (so briefly) enjoy, but its resounding power laid the foundation for Richard Thompson’s continuing solo career.

I cannot personally recall so much verbal hyperbole for a record at the time of its release for an artist with whom I was previously unfamiliar, appearing on virtually every music publication’s Top Ten list for the year. Likewise, there are few albums indeed, that upon first hearing was I so smitten - indeed, astonished - with the contents that such hyperbole seemed sorely insufficient to do it justice.

Critical appraisal has held up. At the end of the decade, Rolling Stone magazine voted it #9 of their 100 Greatest Albums of the 1980s. And in the new millennium, it retains its status, ranking in at #333 on the magazine’s 100 Greatest Albums of All Time. (The relatively low ranking - one feels it should have been at least in the top 100 - does not reflect a diminished view of the disc. Rather, the summation of so many "classic" albums, primarily from the 1960s and 1970s simply swamps it in a flood of too-familiar titles. Its steadfast maintenance as a landmark release from two still-virtually-unknown artists reflects its defiant status as a verified classic.)

While the sheer visceral power of the record, so apparently raw, naked and stark in the portrayal of the couple’s break-up - (more on this in a moment) - most definitely helped to inspire critical awe, fresh listening reveals the more than ample justification of this assessment some 25 years after the fact. Truth be told, all personal issues aside, Shoot Out the Lights remains simply one of the most beautiful, intense and powerful albums ever produced in the rock era. Its inspiration may have come from premonitions of marital disaster, but its greatness lies in the simply breathtaking breadth and depth of its songwriting, along with the fully matured and passionately peaked fever of its execution.

This is in no way to suggest that the material on the album can ever be truly divorced from its emotional wellsprings. But let us do well to remember that the Thompsons had not only were not going through the traumas of marital breakdown while recording the album. Remember that Richard had written, and the duo had recorded, six of the album’s eight songs the year before, and the argument for the record as a document of the duo’s demise becomes even more specious. That Shoot Out the Lights was conceived and produced simply as a new album for Joe Boyd’s Hannibal Records label, and was meant in every sense to further and sustain the careers of Richard and Linda Thompson is documented beyond question.

On the other hand, whatever lurking feelings of pain, dread, and paranoia were unrolling themselves in the back of Richard Thompson’s brain as he composed these dark, harried and desperate compositions certainly did come to fruition in their aftermath. Something was undeniably wrong, and whether conscious or not, the fact remains that Richard did leave his wife for another woman, abruptly and permanently, soon after the record had been finished.

In the final analysis, to listen to Shoot Out the Lights and not think of it as an unconscious
document of a relationship’s death is simply impossible. Not only are the themes of emotional dissolution too explicit, they are simply too powerful - too real - to be discarded as "mere art." As the drama of their lives unfolded precisely in the terms the album describes, and life begins imitating art, we cannot be convinced that art - at least subconsciously - did not begin by imitating life.

Pour Down Like Silver’s ecstatic revelations notwithstanding, one need flip through Thompson’s back catalog, even in Fairport Convention days, to see a young, sensitive, distrustful man, constantly "watching the dark." Someone so sensitive to the ironies and failures of life, an artist continually placing himself in communion with his darkest of muses, he had always opened up his pores to filter through the all the false representations, the fluid fluxes and changes, to reach a critical core of an unflinching vision of life as an essentially horrific joke is not a man easily fooled. At least he is not fooled in his art.

Richard Thompson, the husband and father, wanting to be and do the right things, might not have allowed the consciousness of the insufferable state of his marriage when he wrote the songs. But Richard Thompson, the intuitive artist, could not ignore the rumblings within - and compassionate balladeer that he is, he could neither filter out the potential effects of his emotional estrangements would have on his suffering companion. For the songs on Shoot Out the Lights are not merely those of paranoia and disaster, but guilt, self-loathing and, most importantly, incredible compassion.

I must confess that I do hate analyzing music (or any art) on such a personal level - but that some works (John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, Astral Weeks, Blood on the Tracks, for example) absolutely demand it. To ignore their human subtexts is to artificially separate them from their essential emotional context.

The final proof of the, not validity but absolute necessity of this approach, for Shoot Out the Lights comes, ultimately, on the performances of the then-separated duo on the phenomenally bizarre and brave tour to promote the album, when the no-longer-speaking non-husbad/non-wife team nightly poured out this emotional content live onstage before forever going their separate ways. By all accounts, these amazing, discomforting shows were so powerfully real in their emotional content that the power of the songs themselves are absolutely justified. Simply put, music does not get much more powerful than this.

One more word before delving into this masterpiece more intently, and that must be about Linda Thompson. From the duo’s first album, she had more than held her own as a wonderful singer, and the most sensitive interpreter of her husband’s songs. Here, she not only meets him with an equal footing, but often times she surpasses him. Shoot Out the Lights is designed, unlike any other Richard & Linda Thompson album, as a series of dialogues between male and female. Whenever Linda takes up her cue, she takes up the material given her, and simply dominates it. As if the song were being composed to steal away her identity, she simply rises up, re-appropriates the melody and words and transforms them ultimately in her own defiant image, and in so doing, becomes simply one of the greatest singers (and artists) of her time, giving her full equality with Richard, even if just for a moment, and rendering herself as mythically large as he. She does not go out of the picture as a victim, but as a conqueror - and there is no question that she fulfills the demand to stand eye to eye with him in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, whether placed on earth, or in the grander, transcendent pantheon of true artists and pop-cultural gods.

"Don’t Renege on Our Love" - The album opens with a full-speed, minor-key gallop of electric guitars, bass and drum in a kind of chase reminiscent of "Borrowed Time," from Sunnyvista. But there is no conceit at work here. From beginning to end, this introductory song seethes with true desperation, the running of a man terrified, half out of his wits. When Richard’s voice first enters, we finally have reached the voice of his maturity - strangely rich and consonant, but also dreadfully disturbed. It is the sound of a man, frightened and astonished, a man fighting for his life:

Remember when we were hand in hand?
Remember, we sealed it with a golden band?
Now your eyes don’t meet mine,
You’ve got a pulse like fever,
Do I take you for a lover
Or just a deceiver?
Simple is simple and plain is plain,
If you leave me now you won’t come back again
When the game is up -
Ah, don’t renege on our love . . .

It is obvious that he has already lost the race. This is someone who has already lost his love, and he’s realized it too late to do anything about it.

As he continues, he becomes more angry, frustrated, and he begins to answer his declamations with savage strokes on his guitar. His arguments come faster, his objections more indignant:

Well, give me just an ounce of sympathy.
Give me my chains of liberty.
There’s a rope that binds us,
And I don’t want to break it.
If love is a healer,
Why should we forsake it?

Well hunger is hunger and need is need,
Am I just another mouth to feed
When the game is up?
Well, don’t renege on our love . . .

Anyone who knows anything about the history of the Thompsons will find it odd that it is Richard here who is begging the woman to remain steadfast in the marriage. It is after all, he that will soon be walking out on her to join a new lover. But that really is irrelevant. As we’ve noted, the songs on the album are not documentaries of the Thompson’s personal lives. But with this album, the personal context cannot be swept away from the mind of the knowledgeable listener. And more to the point, the realism, the directness of the performance ultimately gives the singer away. This is someone singing from his very gut.

Analyzed psychologically, it could be suggested that Richard Thompson wrote this song as an emphatic warning to himself, sympathetically anticipating the pain he could cause his wife through his leaving. Or it could be a reflection of deep-seated sense that something is indefinably wrong with his relationship and is fighting against the urge to run away from it, to keep faith. These questions are merely suggestive, and of course are ultimately unknowable (even to the composer). We can all play as analysts here, and whatever we may say or imagine does nothing but extend the meaning of the song for ourselves as we listen and project.

The fact does remain however, that "Don’t Renege" is a very powerful, urgent song that announces the main theme of fealty at the beginning of an album whose very core hovers around the difficulties of maintaining allegiances. It is a warning song in more way than one - it announces to the listener that we are entering treacherous territory, and that we’d better strap ourselves in.

The word "renege" is an odd, formal, almost archaic sort of word, and not something you would generally find in a pop song, however sophisticated. It implies a formal violation, the willful repudiation of something that has become to seem out of date - yet still it carries an enormous claim of responsibility. The references in the lyrics to the wedding ring, the "ropes that bind us," etc., display a respect for a moral obligation that goes beyond just feelings.

Anyone who has listened to Pour Down Like Silver knows how important, indeed how sacred the concept of commitment is to Richard Thompson. This is not just a human conviction, but a religious and spiritual one, and one that I remain certain that Thompson maintained then and maintains to this day.

It is the incredible tension of the tempted violation of this sacred bond that creates such urgency in the song. It is reminiscent of that special power contained in certain country & western songs dealing with divorce or adultery, wherein the context is eternal damnation (June Carter’s "Ring of Fire," for example). While most fear-of-love-loss songs center entirely on the internal emotions of the individual, Thompson’s move through those, and point beyond, to something eternal. The potential violation of that eternal bond is a haunting, damning demon, and it threatens not only the lover, but in some sense, the moral and spiritual essence of the universe.
In short, everything is at stake here - and it sounds like it.

Richard’s brief guitar solo treads up and down the fretboard questioningly, hovering uncertainly at jagged points that seem out of place, but he does not linger there long, returning, almost fearfully to the proper notes of the chord. In a mini foreshadowing of the pyrotechnical outspinnings of the title track, Richard’s lines delicately "test the edge" of their harmonic boundaries before retreating.

He continues singing in one last desperate attempt at salvaging the situation:

When my heart breaks, it breaks like the weather,
If you leave me now it’ll thunder forever.
Oh, don’t give it up.

He keeps repeating the refrain, pleadingly, "Don’t renege on our love," answered by a fatalistic chorus of bass-throated male voices chanting like doomed monks. He continues singing through an of unexpected modulations, suggesting that the song itself is careening out of his control.
Finally, there is a pause in the momentum of the chase - the driver has dropped his reigns. Richard plays a brief, static, chordal figure and comes to rest on an unresolved chord as the drum shifts to a slower, martial measure, and the song fades out slowly, waiting in hushed awe for its answer, all the while afraid that it will come.

Thus begins Shoot Out the Lights . . .

"Walking on a Wire" - If there were nothing else, this song alone would secure Richard and Linda Thompson’s immortality.

Richard’s most beautiful composition ever is stately, simple and slow, almost a lullaby of pain. Wrapped in a cushion of strummed acoustic guitar, it rocks plaintively to its sharp, insistent drum beat that barely seems to keep it afloat.

Linda’s most stunning vocal begins in what can only be described as an open-throated whisper. She sounds not so much plaintive as absolutely stunned by what she is singing, staring cat eyed into the glaring spotlight where she begins to reveal the uncertainty and pain in her soul - an uncertainty and pain that she didn’t even quite realize was there until she started singing about it. The song takes its time to develop and has a sense of self-discovery that eventually overawes the singer as much as the listener.

Her vocal functions much the same way as a Shakespearean soliloquy: she begins at an observation, a wondering, and as she listens to her own words, gradually she comes to realize the depth of the yawning void that surrounds her:

I hand you my ball and chain,
You just hand me the same old refrain.
I’m walking on a wire,
I’m walking on a wire,
And I’m falling.

Richard’s electric guitar kicks in along with the drums, where it will continue to hover about her, answering in sympathetic, yet helpless counterpoint to her yearning questions of self:

I wish that I could please you tonight,
But my medicine just won’t come right.
I’m walking on a wire . . .

The imagery returns us to the skills of "The Great Valerio," from I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight, but here there are no "acrobats of love." She is simply falling.
Linda herself has described "Walking on a Wire" as "a portrait of a disintegrating personality," and it is absolutely chilling to listen to it as it occurs.

In the bridge, the harmonic structure is seemingly taken out of her control, new chords building up, one on top of the other, and she must follow it with a melody that matches, pulling her more and more out of herself, until it feels as though she is going to split from her soul. The word come quicker and more desperately:

Too many steps to take,
Too many spells to break,
Too many nights awake
And no one else.

Richard’s guitar seems to carve these climbing phrases in the air, while Linda has no choice but to follow them upward to see where they lead:

This grindstone’s wearing me,
Your claws are tearing me . . .

Finally, the guitar seems to take pity on her, leading her gently back down as she sings to a resting point, still sad, but bearable:

Don’t use me endlessly,
It’s too long,
Too long
To myself.

She recovers just long enough to continue her lament:

Where’s the justice and where’s the sense,
When all the pain is on my side of the fence?
I’m walking on a wire . . .

Richard’s guitar enters to relieve her with a solo that is stately and solemn, maintaining her mood, but still bearing her dignity. As he continues, he becomes more anxious and fidgety, moving up the scale in chords and squiggles until he himself reaches a peak and has to run back down with a jaw-dropping series of two-note runs that finally crash back into the beginning of the bridge.

Linda’s second trip back through the puzzling ladder of the bridge sounds more desperate, probably because she is more self aware, and the emotional strain of the journey shows her practically cracking at the seams. But the downturn comes again, dropping her to a point where she has enough strength to propose a final verse:

It scares you when you don’t know
Whichever way the wind might blow.
I’m walking on a wire,
I’m walking on a wire,
And I’m falling.

She repeats the refrain again, Richard singing harmony. The song pauses for just a deadly moment.

Suddenly, as if with a last, despairing gasp, she leaps up a full octave and shouts out the refrain again, this time not with stoic acceptance, but with a full-throated shout that seems to be simultaneously a scream of self-abandonment and a liberating cry of ultimate transcendence.
She is gone . . .

Richard quickly takes her place with one of the most frantic guitar solos ever recorded by man, a crying, quivering, screaming line with note-bending cries and hammer-offs that reverberate like sobs. He takes this wailing lamentation as far as it can go in the structure of the verse, pauses once for reverence, then stately ends on the bottom-most note, which he must twist the gear-head on his guitar neck to be able to come up to reach.

I have heard very few more powerfully, affecting compositions and performances anywhere in my life. The impact of this song left me absolutely stunned upon first hearing - and it does so to this day.

Amazingly, after Richard’s abrupt departure, Linda, still in shock and anguish, full of booze and pills to ward off her demons, insisted on singing this song night after night on their U.S. tour to promote the album. Through enacting in public the breakdown of her private persona, Linda faced her pain and made herself cope with the reality of her own "disintegration," ultimately paving the way for the long period of self healing that would follow. In so doing, she also gave some of the bravest and greatest performances in the history of song.

Video - Richard & Linda Thompson: "Walking on a Wire"

http://youtube.com/watch?v=OQQQGrk2AwQ

"A Man in Need" - This stomping, virulent declaration of both independence and dislocation has over the years become something akin to Richard Thompson’s theme song. It kicked off the 1993 3-disc retrospective, Watching the Dark, and Thompson plays it in his concerts to this day.
The opening lines seem prescient as to the events that would occur over the next year:

I packed my rags, went down the hill,
Left my dependents a-lying still.
Just as the dawn was rising up
I was making good speed.
I left a letter lying on the bed -
"From a man in need," it read,
You know it’s so hard to find,
It’s so hard to find,
Who’s going to cure the heart of a man in need?

In a sense this could be same character featured in "I’ll Regret It All in the Morning" from Hokey Pokey, but one who has finally decided to take some action.

The dual themes of restlessness coupled with yearning seem to define the Richard Thompson persona, and they will appear in various guises from songs all throughout his solo career. The sense of being alone in the world, adrift on a hopeless quest permeates so much of his work that they are practically the very substances out of which his songs are constructed.

Is this the way the real Richard Thompson feels? That is both irrelevant and unknowable. That this is the part of what any sensitive human being can feel is undeniable, and hence the universalism in this song, as well as in so many others. One can certainly make the supposition that these emotions were welling up in the young man of 30 or so, married to his musical partner - to his work - for nearly ten years by then, two children, with another on the way - who can say? Even Richard Thompson cannot say for certain. The point is that the song delivers all the emotional strains and contradictions of what is a very familiar human syndrome and delivers it clearly, forcefully and without obfuscation.

The protagonist, the "man in need" may have everything that objectively you could think he could want. But he is really living within the confines of a trap that he has laid for himself. His home, his family, you would think, would be a comfort for him. But they are only props in which he has taken refuge, and that now are seen to be the obstacles which prevent him from leading an authentic, fulfilled life. At the beginning of the song, the protagonist has made his decision, and is defiantly taking leave of them to search for his true self. But just what that is - that he still cannot say.

He is well aware that he looks ridiculous in the eyes of the world. Those outside of his experience cannot imagine what he’s going through:

All of my friends don’t comprehend me,
Their kind of style, it just offends me.
I want to take ‘em, I want to shake ‘em
‘Till they pay me some heed.

Thompson virtually spits these words out of his mouth in angry frustration. His delivery of the song is incredibly convincing, and the listener gets a palpable sense that he means everything he sings with every fibre of his being. His act of singing seems to be a kind of primal scream, a way to break through a wall that both encloses himself and separates everyone in the world from his ability to communicate with them on a real level. Right now their ears are cut off from his voice, drowned as they are by their own questions of "Just what is your problem?" "How do you answer such a dilemma?"

Thompson shouts the obvious answer right back to them:

You’ve got to ride in one direction
Until you find the right connection.
You know it’s so hard . . .

His only companion here is his guitar, which he doubles on the track, lending himself his own support in a solo of self-righteous defensiveness. He returns to asking the hard questions:

Who’s going to give you real happiness?
Who’s going to give you contentedness?
Who’s going to lead you? Who’s going to feed you?
And cut you free?

And here is the real dilemma. How can an individual live a life of freedom if they are indeed dependent upon another person? And that’s the problem - he cannot. But that doesn’t stop his yearning. This is a cyclical problem, and the singer clearly recognizes that there’s no way out of the situation. His questions get louder, more insistent, more demandingly unreasonable:
Well, who’s going to shoe your feet?

Who’s going to pay your rent?
And who’s going to stand by you?

Just who is going to "cure the heart of a man in need?" The answer is plainly clear and does not need stating. "Nobody." It is, in the end, a quest that once undertaken can neither be realized nor abandoned. But the moving action itself is the very thing that defines the individual in all his honesty. His situation in hopeless, but his private consolation is that he is finally, ultimately, asserting his actualized selfhood.

So hard, indeed.

Video - Richard & Linda Thompson: "A Man in Need"

http://youtube.com/watch?v=QhOSiaD8x2A

"Just the Motion" - The next song is Linda again, and by now it is clear that Shoot Out the Lights is developing into a kind of dialogue between opposites, between conflicting states of mind that must be put together to see the entire puzzle of meaning. That all of the songs on this album are arguably great, even masterpieces, it is the breadth of vision that allows both sides to be alternately heard and understood that gives the album its true greatness.

Just coming off the defiant declaration of "A Man in Need" is the female’s reaction to such impossible demands. In a very different way, her answer is the same as his: acceptance.
In a harmonic setting of almost-still, lilting chords, played by acoustic guitar and delicately embellished by Richard’s gentle electric lines, Linda sings passively, almost completely devoid of emotion. She almost sounds as if she isn’t there at all:

When you’re rocked on the ocean, rocked up and down, don’t worry.
When you’re spinning and turning around and around, don’t worry.
You’re just feeling sea-sick, you’re just feeling weak,
You’re mind is confused and you can’t seem to speak,
It’s just the motion, it’s just the motion.

The response given to life’s blows here are equated with the unalterable rhythms of nature. One cannot change them. There is no need to protest or argue, or even to object. Your only recourse is to surrender yourself to the inevitable with a kind of stoic withdrawal. The world is not coming to an end - it’s only the natural vibrations of life that necessarily must carry with them pain.
That the song was specifically intended for the female perspective is made more clear in the second verse:

When the landlord is knocking and your job is losing, don’t worry.
And the baby needs rocking, and your friends are confusing, don’t worry.

Here the lyrics seem to suggest the demands of motherhood, along with all the other strains of life in the modern world. One can’t help but jump to the next sentiment, which is not stated: "When your husband has left you for another woman, don’t worry."

Is Richard Thompson here unconsciously attempting to write a prescription for his wife’s suffering, after imagining himself leaving triumphantly in "A Man in Need?" Is this a gift given to her out of guilt? It is impossible to say, and such speculation is certainly stretching the point. But the notion seems to fit so well that it is impossible to dismiss the implications, whether intended, consciously or not.

Just what sort of advice is withdrawal, anyway? Whether it is him telling her, or her telling herself, the answer is clearly a lie. To deny life’s problems is no solution, merely a defense mechanism. And of course Richard Thompson clearly sees that. The song is a song of a self coping with the uncopable.

In the beautiful bridge, the melody and harmony open up to new emotional territory, and Linda’s sense of hurt and rage is allowed to be given scope. The effect is achingly painful to hear:

Rocked by a hundred winds, knocked down a hundred times,
Rescued and carried along. Beaten and half dead and gone,
And it’s only the pain that’s keeping you sane
And gives you a mind to travel on.

After another verse, Richard joins in to give her emotional support (or at least sympathy) in a subtly stated guitar solo. The bridge is repeated to great emotional effect, then everything hangs in a brief suspension, as if reaching the crest of a wave, before continuing to the last verse. As Linda sings, the instrumentation dissipates to its most minimal level, then slowly returns, continuing the rocking motion implicit in the song:

Oh, the motion won’t leave you, won’t leave you alone, don’t worry.
It’s a restless wind and sleeping rain, don’t worry,
‘Cause under the ocean, at the bottom of the sea,
You can’t feel the waves, it’s as peaceful as can be.
It’s just the motion . . .

This final image of ultimate withdrawal to the core of emotional depths within, promising escape is as empty a promise as one can imagine. This is cold comfort indeed, and both the singer and the composer know that this solution is false. Yet oddly, at the same time, it seems the only sane way to keep a personality from completely succumbing to the insurmountable odds of some onslaught.

This sweet and terrible song, this lovely, ironic port in a storm is, in the final analysis, only a temporary solution. It gorgeously, sadly ends side one of this masterful, humane album. The beginning of side two will dramatically, decisively prove to shatter any illusions lingering about the individual’s apparent safety in a network of withdrawal.

In a sense, Shoot Out the Lights is a kind of emotional laboratory, where different situational, conceptual stances are tried out in response to the uncontrollable world upon which we subsist. Each attempted perspective is alternately tried on, only to be abandoned (or conquered) by a succeeding mood - each one ultimately inadequate for sustaining a mythical construction of self in which one can be either fully actualized or kept safe. The album will continue this back-and-forth struggle until its final resolution.

"Shoot Out the Lights" - We have heard Richard Thompson exploring the depths of nihilistic horror before, peering into a void that peers back, on "Calvary Cross." We have heard his guitar searching, penetrating into vast, unstudied rooms of possibility on "Night Comes In." Here, we abruptly encounter a fusion of these two approaches on this jaw-dropping masterpiece, and the resonances are unbearably shocking in both their force and their bottomless excursions into the endless realm of the dark subconscious itself.

To call "Shoot Out the Lights" a tour de force is to diminish it. Yes, it is ultimately here that one wants to turn just to demonstrate Thompson’s mastery of the electric guitar. Its fireworks display is truly of Hendrix-like proportion, which is to say it is almost inconceivably great. Most comparisons to Jimi Hendrix are woefully passing to surface-level similarities of the guitar’s greatest genius - here Thompson actually matches him in intensity, virtuosity and power, while actually superceding him in horrific self consciousness. Of course Thompson’s sound and approach to the guitar is is completely different from his forerunner, and radically his own, it must be said that this is truly one of the few works on electric guitar that fulfills the astonishing template that Hendrix uncannily established in his too-short career.

However great the guitar solos, however, this is not the focus of "Shoot Out the Lights." The masterful, mind-boggling guitar lines are merely the extensions of a song of such darkness and fear that it seems to rip itself, uncalled, from Thompson’s own deepest subconsciousness. Quite simply put, there is nothing anywhere like it recorded.

To say that "Shoot out the Lights" "punctures" the false tranquility of the dreamy escape of "Just the Motion" is somewhat like saying that a nuclear attack can spoil a nice picnic. This, the emotional center and core of the album, blasts such a withering whole into any facade of artistry that every other song here cannot help but be seen in its all-conquering light.

"Shoot Out the Lights" is the outward manifestation of an inward demon that is too powerful either to destroy or ignore - for it is the eruption of the irrational, death-loving, self-hating nature that takes the form of a stalking killer. The blasting, ugly perambulations of electric guitar chords, bass and drum are the unstoppable footsteps of this living death wish as it moves across the dark cityscape. The lyrics are less of a narrative than a device in which this unquenchable, destructive emotional force embodies itself:

In the dark, who can see his face?
In the dark, who can reach him?
He hides like a child.
He hides like a child.
Keeps his finger on the trigger,
You know he can’t stand the day.
Shoot out the lights.
Shoot out the lights.

Thompson talks/sings these words in a deep, haunted voice, as if in a trance. It is not an observation - it is a voice that seems to be speaking through him. His vocal creeps through the relentless onslaught of the huge, lumbering chords, caught in a kind of sleepwalk. He is more chanting than singing.

That his narrative is told in third person is completely irrelevant here. The singer here is not so much singing about himself as simply manifesting the emergence of the force as it envelops anything. "He" could be translated into "me," "we," "they," or most precisely "it."
As the chords crash down on the refrain ("Shoot out the lights/Shoot out the lights"), it is less a description than it is a sense of will. And it seems, ultimately, less a directive to an individual or situation as it is a benediction, a fatalistic blessing of a deed already accomplished.
He continues:

Keep the blinds down on the window.
Keep the pain on the inside.
Just watching the dark,
Just watching the dark.
Ah, he might laugh, but you won’t see him
As he thunders through the night.
Shoot out the lights . . .

It is the action of burying the unbearable within oneself that creates the monster. Within, all fear and pain festers and grows until it escapes and runs rampage, like a Frankenstein monster. It’s inside of everyone, and it’s just waiting for a triggering release. "Just watching the dark" - in this one impossible phrase Thompson captures the very essence of the soul in inner turmoil, constantly held at bay, but due to release at any given moment.

Thompson’s first guitar solo lets the monster loose. Playing with the tuning of his lowest string, he immediately creates a sense of unstableness. His fiery runs lead him back and forth from this point, and finally to a high, hanging, shrieking series of unresolved notes that dangle perilously, waiting breathlessly for the massive chord change to finally come along and save them. When it does come, he runs breathlessly across the fretboard, seemingly trying to get away,
Just what kind of music is this? "Shoot Out the Lights" holds a sustained tension between controlled, virtuosic display and pure exploding rock blast. Not exactly jazz, not exactly heavy metal - the song carries more the brooding nihilistic flair of the early-eighties punk rock that was currently in vogue in places like Los Angeles. But astute critics noted that Richard Thompson adroitly "out-punked" punk in this savage display of raw power and emotion. Schooled as it is in masterly improvisational techniques, the song remains a raw, bleeding sledgehammer of true power and despair. (Tellingly, the greatest of the L.A. punk bands - X - would eventually record a cover version of the song for a Richard Thompson tribute album.)
The guitar returns to big, sustaining block chords as the lyrics resume:

In the darkness the shadows move.
In the darkness the game is real.
Real as a gun,
Real as a gun.
As he watches the lights of the city,
And he moves through the night -
Shoot out the lights . . .

"Real as a gun" is pretty damn real, indeed. Thompson keeps repeating the refrain like a chant, until his guitar returns and completely takes over. Here, he begins on a repeated line built of substitute chords that feel completely alien to the song as they enter, a shocking, dissonant display of an individual split in half, locked in his own compulsive spasms. He starts wandering all over the fretboard, bouncing, seemingly heedlessly from one inappropriate note to the next, all the time sustaining tension against the still, slowly repeating chords of the song. He freezes up into the highest register, impatiently screaming a note, breathlessly waiting for the chords to resolve. He finally succumbs, playing a series of sharp, descending slides that sound like inverted fireworks crashing to the earth.

But it is not over - the beast won’t die so easily. He rattles low on the strings, like a ghost creeping about the base of a house, then jumps in with some chord runs that sound like Chuck Berry’s paranoid voodoo nightmare. Finally, it all comes down crashing in staccato stabs that stab like little knives down to the conclusion.

Even as the song ends, the demon remains, appearing in ghostly harmonics swirling up and around the final chords, all unresolved.

"Shoot Out the Lights" abruptly interrupts the dialogue of the album, seemingly hijacking the proceedings with a final denunciation that lays waste to everything in its path. If this album can be seen to document a decaying relationship, it’s dead right here. "Shoot out the lights," it’s all over, it seems to say. There is no turning back at this point. What was once is gone and dead, and this guitar-slinger is both its weapon and its killer.

I can think of no song I have ever heard as simultaneously sophisticated and savage as "Shoot Out the Lights." Richard Thompson would near these heights (depths?) again, but never equal them, which is probably a good thing if you think about it. But what could possibly follow in the wake of it on this album?

Video - Richard Thompson performs "Shoot Out the Lights"

http://youtube.com/watch?v=RfVEHjhnsEc

"Backstreet Slide" - The problem here is solved by a kind of dodge. This is a savage, mean little song that diverts the direction of the album from the previous back-and-forth, male-female dialectic of the rest of the record. Instead of attempting to immediately answer "Shoot Out the Lights," "Backstreet Slide" deals more with its aftermath in the general community. It is nothing short than a blaring "fuck you" to any potential critics of the existential meltdown that just preceded it.

In what is becoming another uncanny series of premonitions, "Backstreet Slide" seems to anticipate and hold off the would-be critics of the Thompsons’ divorce, slapping it back in their faces defiantly as nobody’s business. It is a nasty rebuke of nasty, gossipy people who most definitely should mind their own business. The vocal, sung by Richard (with Linda on harmony on verses) is probably his angriest sounding yet. God knows to what (if anything) he was reacting when he wrote and performed it, but it sounds like he means every god-damned word of it.

Reverting momentarily to the British folk-rock form that seems to have all but vanished from the Thompson’s palate, the song begins in a harsh, electric jabbing that moves like a series of punches in place of footsteps at a reel.

The objects of derision are (female) gossips that so casually destroy a person’s reputation:

Those backstreet women, watch what you say,
You turn your back, and they slide away.
They run next door, they give it all away,
Doing the slide.

The chorus turns the gossips’ activities into a kind of dance:

The backstreet slide, the backstreet slide,
They’re gonna get you, dead or alive,
Stab you in the back with a kitchen knife,
Doing the slide,
Do it all day, the backstreet slide.

The subject matter may seem insubstantial after the volcanic eruptions of "Shoot Out the Lights," but the quick beat is a contrast, and coupled with the snarl of the song, moves it along quite effectively.

Thompson adds a mocking guitar solo in seeming mimic of the gossips’ tongues, playing on the cliche’ of rapid minor-second hammer-offs to suggest the vacuity of their babble.

As verses keep coming, and the chorus keeps returning, Thompson’s vocals simply drip venom:

Slide over here, slide over there,
Spreading that scandal everywhere,
Stab you in the back, and they just don’t care,
Doing the slide . . .

The derision is contagious, and the rocking, minor key taunting of the song makes it quickly perhaps the most catchy and deliriously driving of any song on the album.

The end features an extended coda, with a descending set of chords that repeat like slaps, until finally - boom! - it’s answered by a major-key British dancing jig, complete with fluttering accordion. The surprise and utter sarcasm of this musical device is pure, snotty joy, as the beat sustains the same drive while the two themes jump back and forth between each other in savage mocking.

"Let’s slide!" shouts Thompson, as the song is carried out to its nasty, curt conclusion. Never mind the bollocks, indeed!

Video: Richard Thompson Performs "Back Street Slide"

http://youtube.com/watch?v=gAm6Zj99IZY

"Did She Jump Or Was She Pushed" - One could conceivably say that there is no "answer" song possible to "Shoot Out the Lights," with its violent, nihilistic sense of finality. Miraculously, there is one right here. The last Richard & Linda Thompson song to be performed by Linda is a call from the grave, a ghostly question from the aftermath of a holocaust, and it takes the album even deeper into dangerous emotional territory than probably any pop/rock record has ever delved before or since.

It is also the only Richard & Linda song to be credited to both participants, every other song in their catalogue being a composition completely of Richard’s. What Linda brought to the composition of this haunting masterpiece is unknown, but the overall effect is one of a female’s unique and privileged perspective, albeit delivered after the fact.

From the very beginning of their partnership, Linda has demonstrated the extraordinary ability to sing emotion-laden material without any audible expression of emotion (i.e., "The Great Valerio"), but this extraordinary restraint finds its ultimate execution here. She sings the song as a cipher, as if she were not even there. The narrative of the song is in the third person ("she"), and in the past tense, so the subject only exists in the past tense. However, the closeness with which she delivers the lyrics, the way she floats on the beautiful melody, inevitably fuses her performance with her subject matter. There is no question in the listener’s mind that Linda Thompson is here singing about herself.

That the song was written and recorded before their breakup is a fact. It is startling, therefore, to realize that this final vocal from Linda is not a literal commentary of herself as victim, just as it is impossible not to hear it that way after the fact. There is no way of knowing the couple’s exact emotional state during the time of the recording, and one can only sensibly attribute the associated biographical meanings to an incredibly intuitive artistic sensibility on the singer’s part, a profound ability to "get inside" of a song and inhabit it. That Linda Thompson has always had that capacity is obviously clear right from the beginning of I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight.

The other strangely beautiful aspect of the song is the composition itself. How can something so perfect, so right, emerge unknowingly from a composer’s mind in regards to a situation that had not actualized itself as of yet? The only answer, again, is the powerful sensitivity of the author(s) to such an imagined situation, and it displays, in Richard Thompson’s case, a clearly understood depth of empathy and guilt that informs all of his greatest work.

The song begins as two unresolved guitar chords brush back and forth between one another to create the musical form of a question, of a mystery. Linda’s voice emerges with the practically single-note melody and begins the narrative, cool, undisturbed and straightforward:

She was there one minute and then she was gone the next.
Lying in a pool of herself with a broken neck.

The words have tremendous economy and power, delivering the violence of the imagery with a matter-of-factness that is palpably frightening. As the verse continues, the chords begin a strange series of modulations that reinforce the nature of puzzlement, as Linda takes us through all the details:

She fell from the roof to the ground.
There was glass lying all around.
She was broken in a hundred pieces
When her body was found.

The verses are divided into two parts. There is a brief pause, then Linda returns to the first part of the melody to complete the entire section. Here, she focuses on the victim’s life, in double-tracked harmony with herself:

She used to live life, she used to live life with a vengeance.
And the chosen would dance, the chosen would dance in attendance.

The double tracking creates an eerie feeling of her singing along with herself - either as observer and subject, or perhaps as subject, before and after. The use of the phrase "life with a vengeance" hammers home the stunning reality of death ever closer. The second line, above, displays a sense of power in life, a kind of aristocratic station and direction of will that makes death even more alien a notion.

As the verse begins its conclusion, the guitars strike power chords, the drums pound militantly, as if the vocals suggest the mustering of arms to lead someone to a firing squad. Linda observes:

She crossed a lot of people,
Some she called friends.
She thought she’d live forever,
But forever always ends.

Did the dead woman abuse her power or station? Is she being called complicit in her own death? The chorus comes quickly to supply us with the answer, or rather a non-answer, as a question only remains. Any "answer" is merely the correct way to form the question:

Did she jump or was she pushed?
Did she jump or was she pushed?
Did she jump or was she pushed?

This simple question is asked, over and over, to the accompaniment of a slow march tempo, beautiful guitar arpeggios, and Richard’s dark voice joining back in the mix. There finally comes no answer, and the voices finally fall silent as the martial instruments of the chorus solemnly end.

The two gently clashing guitar chords return, as if to begin the next verse. Instead, Richard enters on electric guitar with a quietly probing solo that seems intent on getting to the bottom of the question itself. It twists and turns with the odd maze of the harmonic structure, but finally exits the tangle still unresolved.

Linda begins the next verse, still double tracked:

She used to have style, she used to have style, and she used it.
And they say it turned bad when the truth came ‘round and she refused it.

What does this last line mean? What was the "truth" that the subject would nor or could not acknowledge? Was it the disruption of the illusion of her life? Was it a betrayal by a friend or lover? We are not told - we are only given more facts that leave an enigma as to her end:

They found some fingerprints
Right around her throat.
The didn’t find no killer,
And they didn’t find no note.

"Fingerprints" certainly suggest an attacker, though they may not mean that the attack was part of a murder, or was, rather, the prelude to a suicide. There is no doubt some violence has been done to her, however. Clearly, she is a victim - but just how much did she contribute to her own destruction?

The refrain asks the same question, over and over again, with no resolution in sight.
"Did she jump or was she pushed?" Just exactly what are we asking here? If we are examining a human casualty of some sort of lifestyle, we might question to what degree did she bring on her own demise? In the context of a relationship dissolving, we may ask what part did the person play in bringing about her own rejection or betrayal?

In the end, perhaps it really does not matter. The calamity is the central fact, and there is no question but that the subject of the song is a victim. There is, in the unanswerable question of the refrain, contained the eternal enigma of question of inevitability. Could this disaster have been avoided? What can be learned?

Ultimately, as I read the song, there is no way to engage in life - especially in love and relationships - without risking everything. If we re-contextualize this text with the (once and again, unavoidably!) Thompson’s own personal history as it would soon enact itself, the fact that Richard would (or could) leave Linda is an inevitable and universal condition of the fact of her marriage and commitment to him.

When one does not risk all, one is not completely engaged, and in the great dance of life, not to be engaged is to relinquish life itself. If there is no risk, there is no gain. And if there is gain, there is always the chance of loss - even utter and complete loss.

Which still does not answer the question of the ultimate responsibility here? "Did She Jump Or Was She Pushed" does not answer its own question. It certainly does not condemn the singer, nor does it in any way let the author of the song off the hook. It simply hangs in the air, ever mysteriously taunting, asking for an accountability that cannot ever be truly given.

Here, so close to the end, Shoot Out the Lights leaves the singer dangling, without any certain answer to hold onto. Nor does it do any more for the listener. We are left out on a ledge, dangling, as the softly crushing chords continue and the searching guitar goes on puzzling aimlessly until the song’s fade.

In truth, the album could end here, justifiably asserting the lack of any possible resolution to life’s problems. We would still be in possession of a masterpiece - one of the wisest and most sublime albums ever made by any artists.

That it does not end here is testament to something no less than a miracle . . .

Video - Richard Thompson performs "Did She Jump or Was She Pushed"

http://youtube.com/watch?v=4MvZ39Ddlfc

"Wall of Death" - The fact that Richard Thompson wrote this, arguably his greatest song is astounding enough. That it found its place here, as the grand finale to possibly the most profoundly tortured album ever recorded by pop/rock artists, is something that elicits nothing short of sheer awe.

How can such a troubled odyssey as Shoot Out the Lights end in anything like an affirmation, let alone a life-ennobling affirmation that does not dodge any of the hard-won, prickly truths of love and life? The fact that it does so, and does so in such a majestically, sweeping and powerful manner is nothing less than the proof of genius, as well as the profound inspiration of desperation and pain.

The structure, both musically and lyrically, of "Wall of Death" is very simple. It is simply a sustained metaphor of life as an amusement park ride, set to simple, open folk chords. Richard and Linda sing together, their voices entwined forever in a shared chant that locks them (and us) indissolubly together on a venture of the ride that we all must share.

What gives the song its power is the indescribable strength of the name of the thrill ride - "The Wall of Death" - combined with the singers’ not only acceptance, but insistence upon riding it:

Let me ride on the Wall of Death one more time.
Let me ride on the Wall of Death one more time.
You can waste your time on the other rides,
This is the nearest to being alive.
Oh, let me take my chances on the Wall of Death.

Wherever it came from, Thompson has happened upon an irreducibly powerful name here - a metaphor for life, with all its attendant risks. The shock of the name does not diminish as they sing it, even after 25 years of hearing it. To desire this, the most dangerous - indeed fatal - ride in the amusement park is to invoke and affirm everything that life has in store. It is to have the courage to venture forth in the world as fully human, completely vulnerable, both to all the joys, richness and happiness that living as a human has to offer, as well as to the disappointments, pains, and even complete destruction of personality as well. To take one’s chance on the Wall of Death is, in essence, to give an unqualified "yes" to life, regardless of the consequences. Indeed, not to place oneself in such a vulnerable position is rejected as a "waste (of) time."

This, then, is the ultimate retort and summation of all the tangled, twisted, nightmarish voids that have been visited on the album. It is also the ultimate justification for engaging oneself in a commitment to another, which may or may not work out in the end. For the Thompson’s, as we know, the ride did not turn out happily - but that does not mean it was not worth the trip. If either of them are still alive after the ride is over (and they will be), they will pick themselves up and go back to ride it alone, or with another.

The bridge expostulates on the experience:

On the Wall of Death all the world is far from me.
On the Wall of Death, it’s the nearest to being free.

If the Wall of Death is "the nearest to being alive," how can the world be said to seem far apart? The answer, I believe, is that it is the mundane world, the unreal world of day-to-day, busy, pointless acts of life that deflect us and distract us from our real meanings, our true selves, that are pushed into the background. Here, in the face of Death itself, is the one true place where anything worth having in life can be truly appreciated. By subjecting ourselves to the infinite possibilities (and potential cruelty) of fate, we ironically free ourselves from fear, and thus approximate the closest thing available to true human freedom.

The rest of the verses of the song detail the other rides you can "waste time" on. Each is a form of distortion or escape - "You can fly away on the Rocket or spin on the Mouse." All are merely ways of avoiding confrontation or commitment. All are safe activities, and all are merely useless.
In the context of a marriage, of a relationship, the "Wall of Death" is emblematic of the commitment of two souls to endure whatever may behap - even if the relationship is destined to end in failure or tragedy. For if one does not completely commit, there is no chance of the attendant ecstasies of communion. And with this transcendent joy in love, necessarily comes the risk of pain and loss. The alternative is a kind of wasteland, a wishy-washy world of non-committal half-being, wherein no one can be said to truly live.

The willful entry of two souls, wide eyed, into this dangerous realm of commitment is finally justified by the exquisite and horrific highs and lows of love. The song is sung with exuberance by the couple - passionately, openly embracing all the possibilities of life, which we, with hindsight, realize that they are bound to lose in the end. Yet in the playing, and the replaying of the song, one senses that all the pain and loss were truly worth it in the end.

This, of course, is the unescapable subtext that concludes the forced biographical reading of Shoot Out the Lights. What makes the song (as well as the album) so profoundly permanent is its extension beyond this reference to a more universal meaning of square-faced, open-hearted commitment to see life through to the end.

When all is said and done, Shoot Out the Lights remains one of the most powerful universal statements about life, love, pain and loss to be put to record. Within the context of its real-life protagonists, it is profoundly moving. Taken beyond them, and pointing to life as a whole, it is merely profound.

Video - Richard Thompson performs "Wall of Death"

http://youtube.com/watch?v=A_FJImYHkZk

BONUS TRACK

"Living in Luxury" - When Shoot Out the Lights was first released on compact disc, it came with a bonus studio track from the sessions for the album. While there is nothing wrong with that in itself, the way that the disc ended up being programmed gave the appearance that "Living in Luxury" was the final, culminating track of the album, following "Wall of Death." While "Luxury" is a nice enough song, it certainly pales in the fiery glory of its predecessor. Shoot Out the Lights ends definitively, powerfully and passionately, in "Wall of Death," and there is absolutely nothing left to be said about the matter. The bonus track, thus, inevitably threw off the balance as a whole, and in the present form of the compact disc, it has been removed.

I don’t think it necessarily should have had to been completely excised - by boldly printing "Bonus Track" on the disc sleeve, and separating it respectfully from "Wall of Death" by a good ten seconds or more of silence, it could serve as a pleasant little addendum to the album. But I will agree that it’s better to have it completely removed than to (falsely) end the album as it originally did on earlier CDs.

"Living in Luxury" is the B-side of a single - (I didn’t know Richard & Linda Thompson had singles). A wonderful little song on its own, it’s just subpar from Shoot Out the Lights standards. A sort of British or Scots march, complete with horn fanfares, it is a nice slice of sarcasm sung in harmony by both of the team. The lyrics extoll the virtues of love over riches:

You don’t need a thing
To live just like a king,
Because loving is living in luxury.

Does love make one’s life luxurious, or is it simply a "luxury," in the sense of superfluity? Perhaps it’s just an excuse . . .

Rocks in my bed and two crusts of bread,
Two crusts of bread ain’t the feast it used to be.
Rocks in my head, but I’ve got love instead,
Because loving is living in luxury.

It’s a lovely slice of lowlife/highlife with a terrific bass line, and it’s nice to have if you’ve got it. But it has nowhere near the urgency of any of the material that makes the album so intense.
It is very difficult to sum up such an extraordinary album as Shoot Out the Lights. Quite obviously the artistic high point for Richard and Linda Thompson, it also signalled the end - nor could it have done any other. But out of the ripping fabrics of their relationship there was weaved this singular masterpiece - their definitive album, both as a couple and as individual artists.

This is the album that would bring Richard Thompson to an international critical recognition from which he has not yet diminished one iota. This, the ending of his partnership with Linda, would also stand as the starting point for his own solo career, which has been going on steadily in its wake for 25 years now.

Through blood and tears, but more importantly, sheer musical inspiration and mastery, Shoot Out the Lights proves itself today, just as essentially as it did upon its release, its vital and necessary place within the core of the canon of rock and roll. It goes even further - it is the fulcrum upon which the entire works of Richard Thompson balance, that essential validation of his entire career, with his odd and unique approach to songwriting. It is, quite simply, the album that makes Richard Thompson matter so vitally to the music of the late 20th and early 21st century.

From here, Thompson would go on to write many, many more great songs, and record over a dozen magnificent albums of new material. And yes, he would subsequently quite often rise to these heights, and in some brief moments, transcend them. But it is from Shoot Out the Lights, this magnificent triumph in marital and existential despair, ultimately, from which Thompson derives his his commanding power and authority, no matter how few records he sells, or how many poor souls don’t know who the hell he is.

In a sense, the long continuation of his career seems almost like an attempt to prove that Shoot Out the Lights was no fluke - he really is that profound of an artist. Ultimately, he strives to live up to unmatchable standards - in both his art and his life - standards that he has created for himself, and in whose message here, in his greatest work, is that to do so is to attempt the impossible.

Therein lies his glory and his most everlasting value.

Video - A Solitary Life, part 5

http://youtube.com/watch?v=kUFeX6wPsng

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Back From the Retreat

After nearly three years of religious sabbatical, Richard and Linda Thompson returned to the recording studio, having signed a deal with the Chrysalis label (of Jethro Tull fame), and completed two albums: First Light (1978) and Sunnyvista (1979). Unlike the first three albums from the duet, these releases got decidedly more mixed reviews. Unfortunately, neither of them are available for appraisal today. Hopefully, sometime in the near future, someone will make the decision to re-release these albums. Not only will we then be able to fill in some essential knowledge about the duo’s late-’70s, pre-Shoot Out the Lights work, but we may also find ample space for re-appraisal of this material.

Richard & Linda Thompson: First Light [October 1978]
According to the article in Wikipedia, First Light “is dominated by spiritual songs, some of them direct translations of Sufi and Koranic texts.”

The only song I possess from the album is called “Strange Affair,” and it appears on the 1993 Richard Thompson box set collection, Watching the Dark. Naturally, I can’t reconstruct an album from one song, but at least we have something here.

“Strange Affair” - This is a slow, brooding ballad sung by Linda. It is a portrait of an old person, looking about to find her family and friends gone, her youthful dreams dissipated, now cast adrift, alone. The unstated religious implication is lack of focus on the divine has left all transient things slip by, with nothing constant to cling to. It is a portrait of a life lived in the absence of God.

The singer asks:

And what do sleepers do make them listen,
Why do they need more proof?

Well, why indeed? Without a center, life can indeed seem to be a long series of fleeting good times, all succeeded by loss, and eventually capped by death. The absence of the assertion of what is missing makes the song more potent and universal than if it preached of any specific answer.

This is a lovely song, nicely textured, and Linda sings it with great sensitivity. The impression is given that most of the album is given over to soft, spiritual ponderings.

Richard & Linda Thompson: Sunnyvista [October 1979]

States Wikipedia:

Sunnyvista is a curate’s egg of an album in terms of its mood. Stylistically it covers wide ground and includes some of Thompson’s most overtly rocking songs - possibly reflecting pressure from the record company to deliver a big-selling album.”

As with First Light, the Watching the Dark collection contains only one song from Sunnyvista:

“Borrowed Time” - This one is a paranoid rocker in a minor key that uses outlaw imagery to express a sense of persecution for freedom:

They hunt you down ‘cos you dare to tell the truth,
A man ain’t safe today under his own roof.
But you can’t live your life under no man’s thumb,
They’ll all pay double for what they’ve done,
Our day’s coming but their day’s come.
Living on borrowed time.

It’s not a great song, perhaps, but it does have some interest and excitement, and Richard plays lots of stinging electric guitar.

The overall impression is that this is one stylistic example of a very eclectically fashioned record.

Both of these albums need to be heard, and it is a pity that no one is currently printing or distributing them. It does a great disservice to the Thompson’s fans and anyone interested in RT’s development. Hopefully, this is a situation that will be rectified soon.

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Inerregnum

After 1975, Richard and Linda Thompson more or less withdrew from the music world, moving into a Sufi commune in East Anglia, England. If that had been the end of the pair’s musical career, they had already left a most impressive legacy. Richard’s first album, Henry the Human Fly had introduced an important new songwriting voice and method of composition. Then, joining together with his new wife, Linda, they proceeded to make three of the most striking, distinctive albums of the 1970s. I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight, Hokey Pokey, and Pour Down Like Silver may not have seen much in the way of sales (and were practically invisible in the U.S.), but this trio of albums left an extraordinary legacy that would be hard to be matched by any of their contemporaries in such a short frame of time. Had neither recorded ever again, it is fascinating to muse upon what the effect (if any) of later rediscovery of this body of work would have affected upon the music world.

Of course, there might never have been any impact at all. Aside from the likelihood of the albums simply being deleted into obscurity, any picking up from adventurous musicians to affect later musical directions is impossible to say. As things stand, it is remarkably difficult to assess the duo’s impact as it stands, as well as Richard Thompson’s in general, chiefly due to the still-relative obscurity of Thompson in general. Presumably, he has had impact on such post-punk/Brit-folk rockers as the Pogues, as well as direct effects on other, more traditionalist folk artists in Britain.

It is in the realm of folk/pop composition in general that it is especially difficult to gauge influence. Writer/performers of great renown, such as Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Van Morrison have been known admirers, if not directly influenced. Musicians in the wide and varied folk environments have no doubt been influenced the most, as have countless so-called "alternative rock" groups. But no one has come along to follow identifiably in the complex paradigm that Thompson has sketched out over his long career.

Of course, we will be looking at Richard Thompson’s subsequent career in great detail, but it behoves us here to take a closer look at the influence and impact of Linda Thompson, both as an individual, as well as contributor to the duo.

It is obviously too easy to dismiss Linda as merely a mouthpiece for Richard’s songwriting. Although she wrote no material of her own - as to this point - there is no question that Linda’s vocalizations were not only absolutely beautiful on their own, but altered and augmented Richard’s songs to such a degree that the effect upon them is incalculable. And to the degree that she inspired, suggested, or gave uncredited assistance or suggestions, this will never be known.

Songs as diverse and beautiful as "Withered and Died," "I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight," "The Great Valerio," "Never Again," "A Heart Needs a Home," "For Shame of Doing Wrong," and "Dimming of the Day" are simply unimaginable without the depth of interpretation that Linda’s magnificent interpretation lends to them. They remain great songs, of course, without her, and Richard has continued to sing many of them. But they in no way carry the deep emotional resonance that is carried, not only by her stunningly beautiful voice, but by her superbly insightful penetration into the meanings of the songs.

Linda Thompson has proven, and remains, one of the great female interpreters of song of her age. And as for her mastery of the Richard Thompson song, she simply has no peer. Her tonality and delivery, her precise and intricate balance of emotional tenor and conceptual, psychological perception, gives these songs layers of resonances of meaning that no one else could have mined, and when she sings them, she imbues them with a life that is all her own.

Of course, being married to Richard Thompson put her in a remarkably unique perspective into his songs, and there is no question but a spouse can see multiple meanings in their partner’s statements, whether musical or not, that none, not even he, might suspect were there. In just that sense alone, Linda’s presence on these records are remarkably inseparable from their greatness.

Considered as a duo, however, Richard and Linda Thompson prove a bit more problematic to interpret. Yes, we have the obvious contrast, not only between the female and male voice, but between the sublimely shaped, traditionally "beautiful," and the rough, course, direct-to-the-bone delivery of someone who is not naturally a singer. This is not to say that Richard is not a good singer - he is, indeed a truly great singer, but in an entirely different mode - closer to the rough-hewn voices of backwoods folk howling (whether of Celtic or Zydeco origin) that had been pioneered in pop by Bob Dylan.

It is in the blend and alternation of these two voices that gives the duo’s albums so much of their variety and depth. But can one identify a specific character that comes from the mixing of these two personalities into a distinct unit that transcends the admixture of two individuals? In other words, is there a group identity to Richard and Linda Thompson that fully distinguishes them from Thompson alone (as the group identity of The Beatles transcends the individuals in the group?)

I find this a very difficult question to answer, particularly to this group of albums. There seems to me a very limited sense in which Richard and Linda are greater than the sum of the two, creating a new, larger identity. They contrast and complement each other beautifully, but in essence, despite the power that her voice and character brings to the songs, she seems to me to be more an element of expression for Richard than in providing any sort of dialectic that creates a greater synthesis.

This will decidedly change on their last album together, although even there, as we shall see, the problem of perception tends to muddle and confuse their relationship between one two the other. Here, we find in the duo more of a complementary collaboration of unequal parts - similar, say to Simon & Garfunkel, but with its own unique dynamic.


COLLECTIONS

Richard Thompson: (guitar, vocal) [May 1976]

To fill in the gap left by the Thompson’s semi-retirement, Island released this compilation of live recordings and alternate takes, from the Fairport Convention days up to live recordings from 1975. A number of these tracks have shown up as bonus tracks, including several live cuts, on the Island re-issues of the original albums. There are also two new recordings (live, presumably Richard on acoustic guitar) from 1976. Since many of the most interesting tracks are readily available, the deletion of this collection from Thompson’s back catalogue is not catastrophic, but it would be pleasant for completists like myself to listen to this as a kind of back-door summation of odds and ends.

Richard Thompson: Live! (more or less) [1976]

This U.S.A.-only release is a double album, the first record of which consists of the entirety of I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight. The second record is a selection of cuts from the U.K. compilation, (guitar, vocal) above. I wonder how many people bought this or heard it as their first RT experience? Probably not many. It is thoughtfully deleted today.

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Pour Down Like Silver

Richard & Linda Thompson: Pour Down Like Silver [November 1975]

Whatever the experimentations of Hokey Pokey would have prepared one for in the next Richard and Linda Thompson album, it certainly would not have been this. Pour Down Like Silver at first strikes the listener as much more subdued than anything Thompson has done before. Gone are the wild rants, the instrumental flourishes, the taunting sarcasm. On first listening, Silver presents itself as a relatively straightforward collection of love songs with very simple, even repetitive settings. The melodies, and the singing (especially Linda’s) are quite lovely, but the songs seem to sit there in a kind of passive, unironic, reflective mode that seems quite unlike the Richard Thompson we have come to know.

That is not all that is different about Silver. There is a complete mood and shift of attitude here that seems strikingly sharp. The songs here are almost all seemingly love songs - songs of yearning, songs of hope, songs of devotion. And devotion is indeed the key word here, for Richard and Linda Thompson had, behind the scenes, so to speak, had made a religious conversion to Islamic Sufiism.

That is in itself somewhat of a surprise enough. Up until now, Richard Thompson’s vision, at least expressed in his lyrics, had been pronouncedly un-romantic, cynical - perhaps even nihilistic. Any sense of spirituality previously expressed had been presented eliptically, even ironically, if they had been there at all. In fact, all of Thompson’s love songs themselves had been portraitures of loss, alienation and self deception. That such a profoundly sarcastic bastard as Thompson should suddenly turn and embrace any sort of transcendent vision would have seemed terribly unlikely, to say the least.

But considered in retrospect, this shift in perspective is not as great a turn-around as one might think. Any human being who represents life as bleakly and cynically as Thompson has, must often, on the other hand, be deeply disillusioned by the unmet promises and hypocrisy of existence. In other words, his guise as mocker is essentially a mask for the yearner, the unending seeker after not only truth and validation, but ultimately, for a satisfying ground of being itself.

Whatever Thompson found in the Sufi faith - the great mystical tradition of Islam - it touched a chord deep within him that nothing before had managed to satisfy. And here, on this album, we can hear its results in the artist, and to most striking effect. It is not so much that his conversion has changed him, but rather that it seems to have effectively brought out his other side - his deep, loving, spiritual side - that before had only been able to be observed as in a kind of negative reflection. Whatever wall had broken down for him, there is a newly discovered energy at work here that will provide and sustain a much broader, balanced perspective to his writing and performing, throughout the rest of his career.

Seen in this light, previous songs, especially "A Heart Needs a Home," seem to take on multiple levels of new meaning. Where before, in context of Hokey Pokey, this song could only be interpreted as ironic. Now it can be heard quite differently, as a heartbreakingly aching desire for a restless soul’s wandering. Other very "bleak" portraitures, such as "Has He Got a Friend for Me," and even "Twisted," take on a much larger, existentially poignant resonance as contrasted with an ultimate, transcendent faith, displaying the human condition as more tragic than pathetic, as the individual is seen as basically alienated from his core. The songs that mock ethereal pleasures "Hokey Pokey," "I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight," etc., glimmer with a new radiance in the rising light of an infinite, spiritual beneficence.

For it must not be assumed that this religious conversion marks for Thompson a new "either/or" perspective of faithful blindness. Even here, and throughout his subsequent output, Thompson remains the open-eyed realist, and irony is never far from his mind. What has happened, however, is that the irony has deepened and been transformed by a vision of infinite love and acceptance. It is this odd fusion - or perhaps it is not so odd, after all - of idealist and ironist that will feed and sustain the seemingly boundless humanism of Thompson’s art.
But to return to the album at hand, after repeated listenings, Pour Down Like Silver gradually opens itself to deep, heartfelt visions that belie the simplicity of their settings. For these are extraordinarily deep, moving and life-enhancing songs. Whether conceived as songs of human love and devotion, or interpreted as paeans to the infinite God, they ultimately reveal the depth of the individual heart.

There are really no albums I can think of that serve as equivalents to the experience of listening to Pour Down Like Silver. The closest I can come to are Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks or John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. But whereas the former is the portrait of an anguished search, punctuated with a busy jazz bass and spacious strings, and the latter is an impassioned celebration expressed through the boundless power of music to leap past all human boundaries, the Thompsons’ spiritual masterpiece is lean and spare. What connects all three works, however, is a boundless openness that the listener may enter and attach himself to another’s pure vision of the divine.

Briefly spoken, Pour Down Like Silver is quite simply one of the greatest albums of the 1970s. Its singularity and its uncompromising vision may put off some listeners who resist falling under its spell. More is their loss. This is a vital and essential document of the human condition at its most poetically stark and vulnerable. This is a masterpiece.

"Streets of Paradise" - The album kicks off with this hard-hitting, slow electric march with a vocal by Richard that is more chanted than sung. The ambiguity of the point of view holds the listener in a kind of holy spell. For the song is arguably ambiguous in its sincerity, as regards the lyrics, but totally convincing in its sentiment it regards to the music and the vocal performance.
In a sense, "Streets of Paradise" can be compared and contrasted to "When I Get to the Border," the great opening song of I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight. Whereas in the latter case, the singer looks hopefully to a fanciful realm of escape in a prelude to an album of songs detailing total entrapment, this song yearns more for the concrete realization of heavenly transcendence. What makes the song ambiguous is its juxtaposition of its apparent literality with the jarring nature of its imagery. The opening stanza:

The tears fall down like whisky,
The tears fall down like wine
On an island made of cocaine
In a sea of turpentine.
We all need some assistance,
But won’t that day be fine
When we’re walking down the streets of Paradise?

Without an awareness of Thompson’s religious conversion, one would be apt to think the lyrics to be purely ironic, but in a rare way, he seems to be using his rhetorical devices to point to something broader, more meaningful and lasting.

For what is Paradise? From a mystic’s point of view a literal heavenly city is an absurdity. Paradise is the perfect union of the human soul with God, which in essence, is beyond rational comprehension. What are the words that could conjure up that vision, essentially, by nature, ineffable? "Walking down the streets of Paradise" is clearly understood by Thompson as a metaphor for an indescribably transcendent event or state of being. The implication of its use here is indeed a recognition of the inadequacy of language to communicate this experience, just as the mind of man is limited to metaphors of the banality of everyday life.

The lyrics explicitly acknowledge the human being’s limitations in the temporal world, and affirm - though clearly not as absolutes - the efforts of people to attempt to attain a semblance of this purely transcendent vision.

Hence, the opening reference to drugs. Thompson acknowledges what the majority of even drug users fail to realize, which is that the use of such substances are sub-consciously an attempt to re-create or induce this divine, "intoxicated" state. He does not condemn this activity, however, recognizing the limitations of the separated individual, and makes a clear distinction between this and the reality of the experience of self absorbed in the ultimate transcendence of God. That this ultimate transcendence cannot be expressed otherwise than in another (utterly human) limitation of language and imagery that may confound the mind by a literal interpretation of the words, is Thompson’s ultimate concession.

For more than anything else, "The Streets of Paradise," is a passionate song of yearning, a prayer to be lifted up and away from the mundane, as well as a statement of assurance that - somehow, in some way - God will allow this to happen to those who are open to His grace.
The next verse continues, similarly with a portrait of a drunkard:

Tar brush on the corner,
I’ve never seen him before.
He drank ten fingers of what they had,
Now his feet don’t touch the floor.
He can’t see me or this dirty old town,
He’s got nothing to look for.
He’s walking on the streets of Paradise.

This verse explicitly connects with such previous songs as "Twisted," and most specifically, "Down Where the Drunkards Roll." Whereas, in the latter song, the visions of the drunken masses were seen as purely delusional, here they are re-interpreted as transformed into a kind of "halfway house" of spiritual ecstasy and are not to be condemned. (Thompson would later return most definitively to this theme in his great and moving ballad, "God Loves a Drunk" on Rumour & Sigh in 1991.)

The third verse denounces worldly goods and achievements in favor of holy issue. But a doubt begins to creep into the listener’s mind when the singer announces that "I’d trade my little sister" for Paradise. We protest that a human life is sacred and is not a thing to be bargained with. This is a strong hint that the song is sung, not by Thompson, but by a delusional character who is perhaps barking up the wrong mystical tree.

In a sense, this is true, yet it may be not. As Thompson recognizes that the metaphorical "streets" are a way of thinking about the unthinkable, the limitation that the image places on the mind of the singer can just as easily distort his perspective and indeed cause him to miss the point of his entire quest.

The final verse solidifies the singer’s demand for pure coin instead of spiritual substitutes:

I asked you for a racehorse,
Now don’t hand me no mule.
I asked you for a fast car,
Don’t you take me for a fool.

In the end, language always points back to the clear and concrete world of things, and therein lies an inevitable distortion. What exactly is the "authenticity" that the singer seeks so strongly in the song?

Oddly, it is man’s condition, as reflected by the inadequacy of his language, to be forever separated from the perfectly divine, which is what he ultimately seeks. This is, in my interpretation at least, why the song can be seen simultaneously as by Richard Thompson and "not by" Richard Thompson. It is here that he is expressing his own deepest yearnings, while acknowledging his own limitations. Perhaps the secret key that the singer has yet to grasp is that it is in the search for the divine that it is discovered - where it is only partially, if at all, realized.

"Streets of Paradise" is a masterful, powerful introduction to an often painful world of searching. Unlike many other statements of religious conversion, Pour Down Like Silver eschews dogmatism and the usual facile convictions that its spokesman is the possessor of unassailable truth. In contrast, Thompson’s religious vision is thoroughly human, filled with a sense of respectful awe and humility. His compassionate humanism will not allow him to be truly disdainful, as he acknowledges his own (along with everyone else’s) limitations.

It is this attitude and sentiment that make Silver such compelling listening even to doubters. For Thompson seems to insist that doubt is at the absolute essence and core of faith - which it most certainly is to any thoughtfully honest person.

"Streets of Paradise" is an incomparably beautiful song. Simple, straightforward in its construction, yet bold in its presentation, it hovers somewhere between the traditional folk rock that is Thompson’s chief metier (gorgeously adorned throughout by John Kirkpatrick’s delectable concertina) and a desert chant towards Mecca. On the simple, yet gut-wrenching refrain, Richard is joined by Linda, making this work a tandem statement.

On the front cover of the album, Richard appears in a simple close-up shot wearing a turban. Linda, on the back cover, smiles simply with the devotional headpiece and scarf of the traditional Islamic world. This is a metamorphosis that they have entered into together, and this will be unquestionably a "Richard and Linda Thompson" album in more ways than one.

But despite these clear-cut images, any path involving Richard Thompson is not going to be straight and simple, as the majestic "Streets of Paradise" pointedly make clear at the outset.

"For Shame of Doing Wrong" - The second song is given over to Linda, and it is quickly another classic of infinite simplicity and beauty. Backed with only electric guitar, concertina, bass and drums, Linda chants a litany of regret for leaving her lover. Is it her husband? Is it her God? There is, within the Sufi song tradition, a practice of composing love odes which have as their ultimate reference, the divine, rather than the human. Is this the case here? Though the song can certainly be read that way, its power does not lie on its subject, but with the emotional realm of the singer.

The regret and shame of faithlessness come back to haunt the ex-lover who sings of her emptiness and desire to be re-united with her love. For in rejecting that in whom she had been bonded, she has done the most violence to her own soul, and is now cast adrift.

The remarkably poignant refrain is purely Thompsonian in its seeming contradictions: "I wish I was a fool for you again." Here, a "fool" can be interpreted in just as many ways that the word "fool" suggests. And if one is a "fool," in a negative sense, the desire for that condition is an explicit recognition that there is a compensatory reward that far outweighs "foolishness." Here, it is, ironically, in the loss of self that the individual finds her true meaning and ultimate completion.

There is a definite sense of responsibility in this context of the definition of love. Could love be love without it? If love is ultimately conditional, is it really love at all, in the truest sense? Were love a mere choice or preference, one would not "hang my head in shame for doing wrong." The singer accuses herself of being a "restless thief," one that placed her passion and commitment somewhere other than its rightful place, be it in a man or in God. Love comes with a moral imperative that is, to some degree, self-negating.

There is a hope of reconciliation, however. As the singer prays to her beloved:

Please don’t make me pay for my deceiving heart,
Just turn up your lamp and let me in.

This certainly sounds like a repentant sinner returning to a faithful, loving God. But it also reminds one of a contrite wanderer in a country & western ballad. The phrase "deceiving heart" can’t help but conjure up thoughts of Hank Williams’ "Cheating Heart," and reminds us that in that tradition, as well as in the more exotic world of the Sufi, the sentiment is precisely the same thing.

Linda sings the line, "I wish I was a fool for you again," over and over, as if it was mystical Koranic chant, while Richard repeats her words antiphonally, until the song fades into the distance. Is the reconciliation actually accomplished? We do not know. We only know that it is prayed for with a contrite and sincere heart, and we hope that somehow the plea will be answered.

Now, if there is intended irony in this song, I fail to see it. That there is a biographical irony is certain, as in so many other songs by this pair of real and earthly lovers. We will inevitably encounter that as the story of Richard and Linda Thompson reaches its powerful climax. Let us only note here that these are the words here of a human being - a fallible human being who confesses in his own language that he cannot achieve the ideal. Let us rest with that thought for now and not let it trouble us further in examining the remainder of the album.

Video - Richard & Linda Thompson: "For Shame of Doing Wrong"

http://youtube.com/watch?v=2cM6gez2-Uc

The Poor Boy Is Taken Away" - Here is another acoustic song in very slowly, stately tempo, this one a dirge-like waltz. This aching, empty song of loss is sung very simply, deeply and beautifully by Linda, to the accompaniment of Richard on guitar and mandolin.

The narrative is one of loss, ostensibly for a dead lover. I presume he has died, given that he has been "taken away." Of course, he could have been stolen by another woman, but the fact that he is referred to as "the poor boy" makes this unlikely.

At any rate, the song is one of utter desolation and loss ("The world has no comfort to bring.") Memories are insufficient, and there is no offer of possible consolation with another love. This is one of Thompson’s best efforts purely in the style of an old English ballad.

Keeping in mind of the theme of the album, however, where a sense of loss is appropriate as the counterpoint to mystical union, "The Poor Boy," simply interpreted, is thematically relevant and adds poignancy to the record as a whole.

One might argue, however, that the song could be interpreted as being seen from the perspective of God, who is saddened and disconsolate at the losing of an earthly soul from His love. That such a person, turning away from the divine, could be utterly "lost" without his primal connection is a very interesting and deeply felt perspective - and certainly not one that is heard very often, even in liturgical music.

Considered in this sense, there is certainly a new depth added to the spirituality of the album. In Sufi tradition, God is seen as analogous to a lover. That God should feel the loss as powerfully, if not more, than the lover is presumed in a good deal of Sufi poetry. Interpreted this way, "The Poor Boy" makes a beautiful counterpart to the preceding perspective of the repentant lover in "For Shame of Doing Wrong."

However one prefers to interpret it, "The Poor Boy Is Taken Away" is a sweetly melancholy addition to the lineup of songs on Pour Down Like Silver, deepening and sustaining the mood in a very subtle, yet powerful way.

"Night Comes In" - This, the centerpiece of the album, is a fearless, slow-droning chant of love. What could be a tiresome, repetitive excursion is transformed, in a powerfully hypnotic performance by Richard into a wholly convincing, moving, and finally, fully transcendent hymn of divine love.

There is an oddly ominous quality to the song - just as in "Calvary Cross," the chords, set in a minor mode, repeat endlessly, but to quite different effect. Whereas on the previous song, we found a musical depiction of hell, here we have quite the reverse. If this is not heaven, it is the sound of the soul’s yearning for it.

Richard starts with unadorned electric guitar, running patient, simple lines that simultaneously seduce and strike a kind of hushed awe in the listener. He is soon joined by bass guitar, and when his vocal finally enters, it is a stark and naked thing - humbled and humbling and downright chilling in their authentic call for grace:

Night comes in
Like some cool river,
How can there be another day?
Take my hand,
Oh, real companion,
And we’ll dance,
Dance ‘til we fade away.

Sufi dancing is a mystical tradition in which the spirit of God enters the petitioner’s body, and they unite and become one in an ecstasy of joy. The dance is not done for God, but with God, as the two dissolve and become one. The music itself becomes divine - the "songs pour down like silver." In the middle of the second verse, a slow, simple drumbeat is added which, given its long delay, pushes the song forward, effortlessly into an entirely new realm of movement and revelation.

Finally, and quite unexpectedly, the chords change into the chorus, where Richard, joined now by Linda, passionately intones:

Dancing ‘til my feet don’t touch the ground,
I lose my mind and dance forever,
Lose my mind and dance forever,
Turn my world around,
Turn my world around.

Rarely has this kind of simplicity been so artfully employed to build to this kind of ecstatic release. As the pair sings, the electrified music vibrates along with them, and the listener is carried into another realm. No matter what one’s perspective on religion, one cannot help but feel the intensity of Thompson’s passion, and the listener is taken up, away with him into an almost purely transcendent realm.

I say this, knowing full well that some listeners may remain unmoved by what I find one of the most extraordinarily passionate moments in rock music. But many fail to be swept away by such intense declarations as The Who’s "Bargain," or the self-destroying, all-absorbing power of the repeated choruses that end "Hey Jude." What can I say? When all is said and done, transcendence is a very personal affair. All a loving listener can do is to point out that it is there for those who can perceive it.

Is it not then, everywhere? In a sense, yes. But it takes a special kind of sensitivity to life to be able to transform all of the mundane world into a spiritual experience, a sensitivity that can only come to the most gifted, or to those who have been most inwardly transformed by some sort of inner revelation. For the rest of us, many of us can find it here, specifically in musical/emotional moments like these, where our minds and hearts are led by great artistry, taken to a point far away from the ordinary, and lead us to a point in the wilderness where the rest of the world hushes as we can listen to the eternal within our lives, and within ourselves.

That Richard Thompson can achieve such a moment here is testimony not only to his greatness as an artist, but to the possibility of shared insights between human beings. It is often said that a mystical experience cannot be communicated. Music consistently proves this adage patently untrue. For in the words of Frank Zappa, "Music is the only religion that really delivers the goods."

Finally, in the end, it is not what is being communicated, in terms of its content. It really matters not if a listener shares Richard Thompson’s convictions about God. What ultimately matters is that whatever unique connection is made between artist and listener is made at all. In the end, the content is finally inexpressible. It can only be felt and understood in the content of itself.
Fascinatingly, this is exactly what "Night Comes In" is about. It is a song about the entry of this spirit into the willing participant, and in so describing the effect, the song almost magically produces the result in transmission of its concept. This is the very definition of the "holy song" - the hymn, the chant, the resolute, impassioned thrall of the pounding of the village drums. It’s all here.

Finally, the words give out, and Thompson rides out the rest of the way on his beautiful electric guitar lines. But, virtuoso though he is, he does not show off, but holds his restraint, in keeping with the holy conjuring of the piece, holds his ego in abatement, producing beauty without showing off.

We reach a climactic moment, where the beat goes into double time, Thompson adds a second electric guitar, almost imperceptibly, and the two identical instruments take up a kind of dance with one another, emulating the dance of the lover and his beloved, the faithful petitioner and his God.

This instrumental extension - I would not call it a coda, for it is a natural part and parcel of the song itself - goes on for several minutes, until it becomes gradually more soft, quiet and subdued, like two lovers in the afterglow. And then, very simply, it ends, as does the first side of the album, in a reflected light of silent peace.

When all’s said and done, "Night Comes In" is, regardless of religious perspective, one of the most passionate songs of love ever put down on vinyl. And in those wonderful days of long-playing records, it quite definitively ends side one.

"Jet Plane in a Rocking Chair" - Side two begins with this rollicking little number harmonized entirely by both Richard and Linda. Returning to a more basic British folk-rock feel, Jet Plane capers nimbly with fiddle accompaniment. It is yet another love song that is basically directed to God. As the title suggests, and the rest of the lyrics illustrate, the singers are turning their backs on false claimants for the "real" object of devotional love.

Interestingly, while the lyrics speak of the denial of false promises, one can quite easily re-interpret the images as metaphors for achievement of transcendence through the mundane. If one’s heart is truly changed, as proclaimed in the song, one could, indeed, ride a jet plane in a rocking chair. But that does not seem to be the song’s intent, as Verse 4 proclaims, "I’m a fool with a size one head."

The notion is reinforced with the chorus, so beautifully and simply sung:

Here comes the real thing
I’ve been waiting for so long,
For so long
I’ve been waiting for a love like you.

Ultimately, the song proves un-complex, which is a bit of a pity, as Richard Thompson’s spirituality would later prove so broad and inclusive of human experience. But here there is the suggestion of the orthodox valuation of a true choice set against a false one.

I suppose that he could perform this song today, however, with overtones of a broader palate of comprehension - for in recognition of the source of transcendent love, God, and informed with this knowledge, all types of mundane human adventures could be validated through their investiture of their source.

The song could be heard ironically as well, as could many of these songs, as I’m realizing. If the singer(s) has become so enamoured of the source of life and love that he can miss the Blakean adventure of a "Sea cruise in a diving bell," or could not "Run a mile in a wishing well," perhaps he is missing the gifts that life truly has to offer.

However one wishes to take the song, it seems to work best, quite straight-forwardly, with its humble, glowing sense of simple joy - a joy that is all to often absent from Thompson’s world perspective, and serves so effectively here as a content respite from the extremes of even his devotional music.

It’s really a lovely, pretty song, and seemingly heartfelt. It’s short, to the point, and is probably best enjoyed for exactly what it seems to be - a happy little personal hymn. (After all, this isn’t "Wall of Death," even though the roller coaster "rolls nowhere.")

"Beat the Retreat" - This, the simplest of songs on the album, feels like its emotional climax. Basically three acoustic guitar chords, played quite slowly, to the accompaniment of what is basically an unadorned chant, there are no doubt listeners who will find "Beat the Retreat" tedious and pointless. Like much of the album, this song will cause divisions. But I find the simple repetition to be essential to the song’s power. This calm exclamation of surrender suggests the soul at absolute peace, and the martial movement of the beat, combined with Richard’s heartfelt commitment to his beautiful, sparse melody, makes this one of the most moving pieces in his entire repertoire.

It is, indeed, another love song, and once again the lover can be seen as God. Or not - one of the nice things about the songs on Silver is their lack of insistence upon their subject. One can take the content as far as one chooses, and apply it to whatever degree one can about a love object, be it human or divine - or as with with the other songs on the album, ultimately both.

Richard plays an open-tuned 12-string guitar, to the accompaniment of bass and flute. As in "Night Comes In," the drum enters here in the second verse, but driving the song with more allusory suggestiveness, as the weary, defeated soldier marches back home to his lover. His resignation, however, is not sad, but joyous:

I’ll follow the drum
Back home to you.
I’ll follow the drum
Back home to you.
There was no sense in my leaving.
There was no sense in my leaving.
There was no sense in my leaving.
I’m running back home to you.

I feel nothing but pity for those who cannot share in the deep, hopeful humble march of this joyous retreat. Its earnestness and simple acknowledgement of human limitation is one of the most sublimely real moments ever put to record - a moment that we can all share, whatever our conviction of religious or metaphysical truth. It is a great moment of the human heart, that personal acknowledgement that "a heart needs a home."

"Hard Luck Stories" - After all the faithful devotion and emotional regret, this harsh little scolding seems to have dropped out of the sky, accidently falling into this album from a completely different record.

A sly combination of Brit-folk and country & western, snidely sung by Linda, it is vicious little diatribe against an annoying person, essentially telling them to bugger off.
In Richard Thompson’s abrupt return to darkly comic wordplay, we get treated to a nasty diatribe:

They say running into you is like running into trouble,
You bend my ear and I see double,
You’re everybody’s idea of a waste of time.
You still come around ‘cos I used to listen,
But I run a steamship, I don’t run a mission,
Don’t be mistaken in thinking you’re a friend of mine.
Those hard luck stories,
It’s all I ever get from you . . .

Like so many other of Thompson’s songs of personal disdain, the humor and intensity of the vituperative undermines the effectiveness of the dressing down, and the words are thrown back on the singer, revealing him (or her, in this case) to being an insensitive asshole.
No doubt that we all have acquaintances whose "poor me" discourses make us want to drive them out of our sights, but this snarly lack of empathy is so particularly nasty that it cannot be taken seriously, can it?

Richard’s electric guitar solo uses slides effectively to make mock tears and taunt the poor subject of the song. The verbal attack is simply relentless - it just never lets up, and finally it becomes universalized:

Why don’t you grow up, why don’t you settle down,
Why don’t you get a job, why don’t you leave town?
Even a chicken has to do what it has to do.
You don’t like one thing, you don’t like another,
You don’t like anything that looks like bother,
Everybody don’t like something, and we all don’t like you.

The effect of this hilarious assault may indeed hit the mark for some, but something in us tells us that the song simply goes too far. If we identify with the singer, as we are likely to do, since we’d rather be on the giving than the receiving end of this one, even though the song is funny, and may hold some truth for us, we don’t like going quite this far - the fear of being a total jerk alienates us from the singer’s position. Now turn the perspectives around. The song is addressed to the listener, after all, and as such, we’ve got to immediately object. How does it feel to have one’s faults taken and amplified to such a pitch that one is the object of the entire world’s derision? Not very good, does it?

This is one of Thompson’s double-edged songs in which we can simply find no peaceful resting point. And for some reason, its apparently unwieldily inclusion in this suite of faith and love not only provides a relief-filled respite from the sonorous intonations of the rest of the album, but provides a much-charged register of suggestion from its realm of the opposite.

Somehow, "Hear Luck Stories" help makes the picture complete. In a world full of human disdain and highly contingent relationships, it throws the helplessness and "alone-ness" of the individual into strikingly high relief. Shown what the stakes truly are, the stirring ending of the album, which is just about to come, can be felt with much more poignancy and empathy.
"Hard Luck Stories" is exactly the right song to come along right in the nick of time before Pour Down Like Silver reaches for its shimmering, heartfelt conclusion.

"Dimming of the Day" / "Dargai" - Linda sings this plaintive, elegiac hymn of love with such an open, beautiful voice as to bring tears to the hardest of hearts. Such an honest confession of the need to be loved, the need to be known and accepted is a worthy tribute of a pure heart longing for either earthly lover or transcendent God.

With simple, open-tuned acoustic guitar and light banjo picking for accompaniment, Linda opens up her heart through Richard’s gorgeously simple melody and lyrics:

This old house is falling down around my ears,
I’m drowning in the river of my tears.
When all my will is gone you hold the sway,
I need you at the dimming of the day.

The Brit-folk feel of this simple ballad gives it a timeless quality - nothing about it seems forced or contrived. This has to be one of the starkest, most beautiful love songs ever put down on record.

The theme of past inconstancy returns, but is dismissed quickly. The singer’s need is urged in terms as elegantly equivalent to nature’s designs ("You pulled me like the moon pulls on the tide"). And it is in the finality of night and rest where need is most fully realized. At the end of a day, or at the end of a life, the seeker must find rest with her beloved. Together, alone in the dark, they are as one.

Video - Richard & Linda Thompson: "Dimming of the Day"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4j_RBpvDqw&NR=1

Immediately, after the song concludes, Richard picks up its continuation on his spare acoustic guitar, both in answer and in fulfillment of Linda’s pleas. "Dargai," an instrumental credited to J. Scott Skinner (and arranged by Thompson), effectively serves as a meditational finale to "Dimming." There is no break, and the two meld into one, as lovers entwined slip silently into one another’s spirits as in dreams.

Although I do not know the source and purpose of this tune, "Dargai" is the name of a mountain peak in Pakistan. On October 20, 1897, George Findlater, a 25-year-old piper in the British army, played as his regiment advanced an assault on the mountain. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, "at the front of the charge Piper Findlanter was shot twice, and his pipes were partially shot away also. But he continued playing until losing consciousness." He survived, and his company won the day.

What made Thompson select this particular ode to the musical/military tenacity of this young piper as a conclusion to this album is unclear. Perhaps it set in his mind as a metaphor of constancy, even in the face of death and disaster. Of course it is just as possible that the tune was chosen simply for its plaintive melody.

At any event, "Dargai" eloquently serves as a beautiful coda to an album of romantic and devotional surrender. Elegantly plucked in open tuning, the simple ballad features lovely flourishes from Richard which are never showy or detract from the simplicity of the song, but rather enhance its sense of serenity.

If "Dargai" is a recognizably English folk tune, it is also played with a slight sense of Eastern exoticism that suggests meditational devotion. In its pauses and silences, its slow forward motion, its gentle, unforced trills and ornaments, one can feel the peaceful majesty of the setting sun. "Dargai" is a fulfillment, a communion made with a self joined at peace forever with another spirit.

Even in the unheralded world of Richard Thompson, Pour Down Like Silver stands alone as a shimmering, beautiful, unknown masterpiece. Those canny enough to know and love I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight and Shoot Out the Lights need desperately to add this stark, mystical vision to their music collection today.

Bonus Tracks
Island’s 2004 CD re-release includes a bounty of extra tracks that feature live versions of several of Pour Down Like Silver’s songs, giving them an added dimension and power.

"Streets of Paradise" - This version goes back to the Roundhouse performance on September 7, 1975 that was featured on the Bright Lights and Hokey Pokey re-releases. Huge, stately and ominous, this is a magnificently fresh recording of this classic song, featuring the beautiful ornamentations of John Kirkpatrick, as well as one of Richard’s most impassioned vocals recorded to date.

Revisiting this song, it has resonances that vibrate far beyond my original interpretations, and the more I listen to it, the more ambiguous it becomes. If I had not known of the Thompson’s conversion to Sufiism and heard this song afresh in the context of Richard’s previous work, it would appear to me to be wholly delusional and cynical. This is the very crux of Richard Thompson - the idealistic misanthrope caught between two worlds, the cynical and the divine. It is a dichotomy that defines the man as an artist, and it will ever remain the great source of tension within his songs that will continually drive him to produce his greatest works.

"Night Comes In" - This live version of "Night Comes In" is most welcome, as it was originally released on the now-deleted (guitar, vocal) compilation album (1976). Clocking in at over 12 minutes, Richard pours his soul into two separate, searing, searching guitar solos that define his heart more than display his technique (though there is technique aplenty). Just an absolutely essential addition to what is already a magnificent disc. Recorded November 27, 1975 at Oxford Polytechnic.

"Dark End of the Street" - This song, also previously available only on (guitar, vocal), was recorded live at Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, on April 25, 1975. This song of hiding adultery was written by Dan Penn and Chips Moman, which became a soul hit in 1967 for vocalist James Carr. It has been recorded many times since, notably as a country duet by Archie Campbell and Lorene Mann (and later by Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner.)

The universality of the song is captured in this close, intimate acoustic performance, sung with great sensitive understatement by Linda, with Richard on guitar and backing vocals on the chorus, completing the picture of the love-doomed cheating duo. Magnificently haunting, the Thompsons display once again a thorough understanding of their musical sources, bringing incredible drama and pathos to this ballad. Richard’s guitar is very simple strumming, until a solo section allows him to deftly display his remarkably imaginative, versatile finger-picking style. This is a perfect place to mount this remarkable gem.

"Beat the Retreat" - Recorded the same night and place as the previous song, this version is previously unreleased. Starkly performed solo by Richard, with just his acoustic guitar, this simple hymn for deliverance relies entirely on the soulful conviction of the singer’s shaky voice and his absolute trust that the urgings of his soul will resonate with his audience. It does, and it is the perfect way to end this expanded edition of the album.

Unlike many other releases with bonus cuts, these do not seem tacked on after the fact, divorced from their main material. Manifestations of the same spirit that created this superb album, recorded at the same time, they are a welcome addendum that plays perfectly into the original record proper. All taken, Pour Down Like Silver in this format, is a timeless listening experience of a kind that is quite different to match anywhere, and finds Richard and Linda Thompson (temporarily, at least) in loving harmony and peace, perfectly united and reflecting the peaceful love of the rays of eternal bliss.