RICHARD THOMPSON SHOOTS OUT THE LIGHTS

NO BRIGHT ONES TONIGHT: RICHARD THOMPSON

SHOOTS OUT THE LIGHTS

by

Michael Goldberg

There is a story circulating about Richard Thompson. The way I heard it, the Eagles approached him, prior to hiring Joe Walsh: they wanted Thompson in the band as lead guitarist. Living in obscurity in England, Thompson allegedly replied: "What? And spend the rest of my life working with a bunch of Southern Californians?"

The world's greatest living rock 'n' roll guitarist was sitting in a rundown hotel room in San Francisco, looking more like a rumpled character out of a song by the Band, or from a John Steinbeck novel, than a rocker.

Richard Thompson is 33 years old and speaks with an English accent as thick as the head on a mug of English ale. He might have been a farmer from the turn of the century with his receding hairline, trimmed beard and moustache, green army pants, and pale blue cotton shirt. He screwed up his gaunt face into an exaggerated grin and stared down at the fake wood table between us. I had just mentioned that in many reviews, Thompson is favorably compared to Robbie Robertson.

"Really?" he said, his voice almost a mumble. "Very flattering." He looked over at me. "I love Robbie Robertson's guitar playing. I wouldn't mention myself in the same breath as him. I think he's great."

The word "modest" might be appropriate at this point. Didn't he think he was a good guitarist?

"Sometimes. I think it varies from night to night, actually. After the last two gigs, which were in Santa Cruz, I don't think I'm a good guitar player." He laughed nervously. "'Cause I didn't play very well."

I thought the Sex Pistols were the outstanding band of the 70's, actually.

What Richard Thompson didn't say, but which I will, is that on a bad night, Richard Thompson can walk all over everyone from Eric Clapton to Eddie Van Halen. He is a purely intuitive player who sounds like he's letting a drop of his soul out with every note he fires from his Fender Strat. As often as not it's a mess of notes. He'll somehow stretch a string with one finger while other fingers are picking out a fluid solo—he sometimes sounds like two guitarists playing together, (cf. the solo at the end of the title track of Richard and Linda Thompson's recent LP, Shoot Out The Lights, for evidence.)

Unlike so many of the younger guitar slingers, Thompson is a man who takes note of tradition. His is a tradition of rock guitar defined by people like James Burton (Elvis Presley's hired gun), the late Clarence White (who helped Gram Parsons and the Byrds invent country rock), Muddy Waters and, of course, Robbie Robertson.

It's a tradition of guitarists who play with emotion and technique. But it's a tradition that never sacrifices emotion for technique. In other words, sometimes a wrong note has more emotional TRUTH than a perfectly played noted. Dig?

"I think if you play an instrument, you're expressing something. I think instruments are a substitute for the voice," explained Thompson, as he rubbed a bare foot against the worn beige carpet. "You are trying to speak, you're trying to be eloquent in a way. It's a kind of a language. You are trying to communicate something. But it comes, really, without thinking. You don't sit down and go, 'Well, right now I'm going to play a solo, it's going to be very eloquent and it's going to convey the pathos of an Armenian peasant toiling in the fields for hours. I want to convey that in a solo.' " He chuckled.

Did he think of that right before he played, I kidded?

He grins. "Uh, no. Not usually. I think it's really just unconscious. Thinking as little as possible. The less you think the more it plays itself. And the more it plays itself, the better it gets. The less you. interfere with it. The more it's music ,and the more you get those real notes, the good ones. And there's not many of those. So you're playing for those real notes."

If Richard Thompson was merely an amazing guitarist, that would be enough. But he's not. He's one of these multi-talented characters; a band leader, currently leading the Richard and Linda Thompson Band, one of the greatest songwriters of his generation, and the man can sing with the kind of voice the Levon Helm might have had if he had grown up in England rather than the South.

Because he was a founding member of Fairport Convention, Britain's answer, to the Byrds, back in 1967, and because he continues to work in a corner of the musical universe where rock and folk, country and blues, acoustic and electric all fit together in a magical, mystical way, he has been dubbed a "British folkie." But in fact, Richard Thompson's music has about as direct a relationship to folk as Fleetwood Mac's. "The music we play, it tries to be contemporary," said Richard flatty. "It's not trying to be old worldy. Sometimes people think that if you have anything to do with traditional music, then you're being old worldly or something. A lot of the reviews of Fairport used to take that stance. That we were reviving this rich English history of music. Which wasn't true. English traditional music is still sung and goes on. It's not this old thing. It's this contemporary thing. So what we try to do is contemporary. I think if you listen to a lot of traditional music and it influences you, then inevitably, what you do will have a timelessness, because you absorb something that was written over a long period. In the case of British music, 700 or 800 years. And you could say that that's the only way to be contemporary in England, to understand traditional music. Because then you understand what's possible. And what's been done. And you can be truly contemporary.

"In another sense it's just rock 'n' roll. I hate definitions. I really do. I shouldn't have gotten into this. I just cut my own throat."

As you are probably beginning to gather, Richard Thompson is not your typical sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll type guy. He's very ...serious. Consider that he doesn't drink or smoke, and that he became a Moslem six years ago.

"If you're a Moslem, then you believe there's more to the world than what is apparent. And after you die, that isn't the end of things. You carry on. And if you believe that, then obviously you live life differently than somebody who thinks that's nonsense. It gives you a totally different attitude to living."

Richard Thompson was 16 years old when, together with a bass player named Ashley Hutchings and guitarist Simon Nicol, Fairport Convention was formed. It seems natural enough that this kid who was born in London and grew up there, listening to his father's Fats Waller and Duke Ellington and Django Reinhardt and Les Paul records, not to mention the Scottish country dance records, would end up in a band that mixed jazz and folk with rock 'n' roll.

As Thompson tells it, the arrival of American rock 'n' roll records in England had a major effect on him. "Oh, it was wonderful. It was kind of naughty music," he laughed. "You had to hear it wherever you could. I was fairly young at the time. I had a big sister who started to collect rock 'n' roll records. She had a good collection of Buddy Holly, Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis. That was the first stuff I heard, yeah. That was the only stuff that came to England. Stuff like rockabilly never appeared in England until 1975." He laughed again. "Earlier than that, but there wasn't a lot of that around. A bit of Carl Perkins." *

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When Fairport formed in 1967, Dylan had already shifted from folk to rock, had toured England with the Band (then known as the Hawks), and had demonstrated that rock 'n' roll and brains were compatible. Thompson and his friends were bowled over by Dylan and the Byrds. "We were very impressed by the lyrical content, more than anything else," he recalled. "The fact that you could have rock 'n' roll with very strong lyrics was very appealing. We always wanted to do the equivalent. And our interest in it started by imitation. We used to do Byrds numbers, Dylan numbers, and Joni Mitchell numbers until we had a style of our own."

Fairport Convention were never particularly popular, in England or the U.S. Yet they managed to record a batch of wonderful records with titles like What We Did On Our Holiday, Unhalfbricking, Liege and Lief, and Full House. Richard left the band in 1971 and released his first solo album, Henry The Human Fly, a year later. By that time he had become romantically involved with Linda Peters, a friend of the late Sandy Denny, Fairport's striking lead singer. Peters was also a singer, and after Richard married her in 1972, they began working together as Richard and Linda Thompson, recording a series of albums, most of which the critics loved and the public ignored: I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight, Hokey Pokey, Pour Down Like Silver, First Light, Sunnyvista and most recently, Shoot Out The Lights.

Over the course of those six albums, the duo have taken the tentative folk and rock fusion of Fairport Convention and developed it into a rich music that is quite unique. Linda's voice has that proper English quality about it that reminds one of afternoon teatime; it is a gorgeous instrument, far more emotive and beautiful than more popular singers like Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris. Contrasted to the rough grain of her husband's vocals, the two come off like a hip, very English George Jones/Tammy Wynette.

The songs that Richard writes are not slight. In fact, some people wonder about them. About the, shall we say, morbid and depressing nature of many of the lyrics. On the new album, for instance, there is a song called "Did She Jump Or Was She Pushed?" Sings Linda in an almost hushed tone: "She was there one minute/And then she was gone the next/Lying in a pool of herself/With a twisted neck...She thought she'd live forever/But forever always ends."

Another of Richard's songs is called "The Wall Of Death." And when he writes about love, "Don't Renege On Our Love," it's in this manner: "Remember when we were hand in hand/Remember when we sealed it with a golden band/Now your eyes don't meet mine..."

When asked about the dark nature of his songs, Thompson was surprised. "Well if you switch on the television," he says, pointing over at the hotel room set, which is turned off, "at least half the channels are showing something comparable. Is that dark? If you go to the cinema, at least half the films are a lot heavier than that. I don't see that it's dark or heavy.

"I try not to locate them too precisely myself," he said. "I prefer the ambiguity of them. I hate to pin stuff down and say this means this. It's not the way it's intended. It's intended to be how you like it. It's one' of the great things about music. It's different to each person. And I think within the confines of a song.. .a song isn't any big deal. It leasts three minutes. It's not Shakespeare and it's not Mozart. It's neither of those. It takes elements of music and elements of words and puts them together. And you can do something with that. In three minutes you can put something across. But it's not a really big deal."

But it's important to you, you've spent your life doing it.

"Oh I love it. I really enjoy it. But I know its limitations."

At this point, it must be rather sadly noted that when I interviewed Richard, on the final afternoon of the Richard and Linda Thompson Band's first American tour, things were not looking too good for the future of the Richard and Linda Thompson Band—or, for that matter, the future of Richard and Linda Thompson's marriage. Richard was staying in his own hotel room—and there was no sign of Linda in the room. Rumors were flying fast and furious that this would be their last performance together, that their marriage was on the rocks, that kind of thing. Linda was not available for interviews. And all Richard would say about it was: "It's always been hard to balance domestic and career. It's an endless problem. That's all I can say. Really difficult."

Richard Thompson likes punk rock. "I thought the Sex Pistols were the outstanding band of the 70's, actually," he said with utter seriousness. "They just sounded great to me. Phenomenal energy. I think Johnny Rotten was a great singer. His new band, Public Image, is just excellent. Possibly by accident, one of the most interesting bands around."

The fact is that Richard Thompson is a fan. of good music, music that conveys emotion and life. "Heart" is his word for it. Which is why he can dig the Pistols, but has contempt for, say, Journey.

Asked for his take on the Styx/ Journey contigent currently dominating American FM rock radio, he said: "Oh, that stuff. In England you don't hear too much of that stuff. Before I left England, I was despairing because English radio is so awful. It's just the same old stuff all the time. The same old hits, real narrow programming policy. I thought, this is terrible here. I thought there must be something better in America. And I got to America and I couldn't believe it. It's so abysmal. It's really conservative. It's like frightened music. Frightened to make anything that someone might object to or might stick out too much. It's just elevator music as far as I'm concerned. I'd rather listen to elevator music, really. I think it serves a better environmental purpose than Journey, Styx, Foreigner, etc."

Those bands just seem to be in it to make money.

"And having made it, they're desperate to keep making it. And so they make more and more conservative records. Take less and less chances. They probably take a million hours recording every album making sure they get everything absolutely right. Get the tempo unspeakably steady. Get the notes excruciatingly correct. It's extremely distressing. And I hope there are enought people in America with decent taste that it would eventually overthrow this tyranny of blandness."

And with that, Richard Thompson, the man who wouldn't join the Eagles, got up to go watch a bootlegged videotape of Bob Dylan's 1967 documentary Eat This Document.