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
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