Richard Thompson
When I decided to do this series I immediately started a list of people I wanted to include, and I got up to about thirty or so entries about as fast as I could type. Richard Thompson's name was among them. But I've actually been sort of dreading the post on him–not because I don't like him a great deal, but because I knew it was going to be difficult to pick two or three things to post, and for that matter just to focus on his guitar work, and not discourse at length on his songwriting.
At this point in his career I think it's very justifiable to put him in the rank of popular musicians that includes Dylan and Cohen and Waits, those who have created a body of work that has remained of high quality over a span of decades (ok, Dylan has some lengthy lapses, but he still makes the grade). I don't think I've heard more than half of Thompson's work, perhaps less. But on the basis of that, I think the songs he wrote when he was half of Richard and Linda Thompson represent his absolute best, which means they're among the absolute best, period, with later work perhaps not quite as consistently good, but still better than most everything else out there.
Back to Thompson the guitarist: his playing is usually at the service of a song, so you can't find a lot of stretched-out jams or purely instrumental pieces among his work. And how do you pick, out of…how many?…a couple of hundred?…songs that he's recorded, two or three that really show off his guitar work? And you want to do justice to his writing while you're at it.
As it turned out I got lucky when I started looking on YouTube, and found these three videos almost immediately. I didn't want to concentrate exclusively on the Richard and Linda Thompson period. But it would be a shame to leave it out, too. And here is a live version of a song which is one of the best-known of that period. It happens to be one on which Linda plays a lesser part, and partly for that reason is a perfect instance of RT's own sensibility, or at least of his harder-rocking side (not to mention the grim theme). I don't know how you'd describe his vocabulary but it doesn't sound like anyone else's.
"Shoot Out the Lights"
To head off any impression that his guitar skills aren't what they used to be, here's a recent performance of a song from Hand of Kindness, his first post-Linda album.
"Tear-Stained Letter"
Had he chosen to, he could have made a career as a folk-acoustic guitarist like Bert Jansch and John Renbourn. Here he is live at the Cambridge Folk Festival, 2011, acoustic.
"Uninhabited Man" and "Johnny's Far Away"
I figure he wears that beret all the time because he's bald.
I do have one reservation about him, and it's probably caused me to listen to him less than his songs deserve: I don't care much for his voice. A lot of people love it, and I've tried, but I just don't care a great deal for it. He's perennially described as "under-rated" and "under-appreciated," and I've wondered if perhaps part of the reason for that is that a lot of people have my reaction. Well, in any case, I think by now most serious music fans recognize his achievement, and there are enough people who appreciate his work to keep him doing it.
There's a reason, by the way, for his appearing immediately after Blind Willie Johnson. When he was with Fairport Convention (you know them, right?–the greatest of the folk-rock bands), they did a thing based on "Dark Was the Night" which they called ""The Lord Is In This Place…How Dreadful Is This Place":
Light On Dark Water 
Leave a reply to Rob G Cancel reply