S/D: Richard Thompson

Ha, just digging into the excellent Q&As on his website:

Greetings from Chicago. Your September 19 show here at the City Winery was excellent. I treated my girlfriend to her first RT show that night so she could hear what all my fuss was about. She really enjoyed it and afterward said: "I feel like I saw a rare treat, something special that one should see at least once in their life."

A few years ago at the Park West, in between songs, you told a really funny joke about a meeting in heaven between a bunch of musicians, among them Howling Wolf, Screaming Jaw Hawkins, Prince (I think), etc. All of them had nicknames like that and someone in the story is introducing them all to each other, like: "Screaming, meet Howling. Howling, Screaming." It went something like that, but there were other musicians. I can't recall it, could you retell it?

This joke originated, I believe, with guitarist Billy Bremner (not the Leeds and Scotland midfielder). The basic idea is that you have to do the introductions at the Blues-singers' party, hence "Howling, meet Screaming, Screaming, this is Howling, Blind, this is Crippled¦" etc. No real script to it, you just grab the names as they occur.

There is also the intros at the music 'royalty' party - "Duke, meet Prince, Prince, this is Earl, Earl, meet King" etc. etc.

dunno if the songs themselves are classics, but goddamn, the guitar playing on the new one ... ridiculously amazing. miller's production is solid too, good sound overall.

yep, not any classic songs, but a lot of really good ones and boy every single song gets to the solo and you just want to stand up and cheer. really like the band he's playing with too. good performances.

Some of my favorite solos by Richard Thompson are on the Golden Palominos album Drunk With Passion.

I discovered RT through the Palominos! His guitar just jumped out of the speakers at me.

Had stopped following them by that point. Will have to check that one out.

http://25.media.tumblr.com/ca552a371a4a47b37b5cc1745f461cb3/tumblr_mkjuhqXw7v1ro1gy0o1_500.jpg
richard's teenage band with hugh cornwall of the stranglers - emil and the detectives

From a couple of weeks ago, speaks for itself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBzs97W-FKc

The other guitarist was awesome, too.

touring this summer with an "electric trio"! - i looked it up & it's just richard, drums, and bass....bassist was with dwight yoakam for 14 yrs...drummer is from the toadies! and recently with john cale (last 4 albums)

yeahhhh, i think i'm gonna go see him. last time i saw him he had another dude doing extra guitar and a few other instruments, but he was superfluous.

I'm bummed I'll be out of town when they come through.

First time I saw the drummer was in The The, and he killed. This bassist is awesome, too. Trio format makes sense, since Thompson is so often playing rhythm and lead simultaneously.

man this band seems like it's pretty great

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShIKWJTfFos

also found this from a joni mitchell tribute show, damn

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKmsdP7cGoM

I saw that ooncert, a live tribute offered up to Queen Joni by so many of her star and superstar subjects, when it was originally broadcast---on TNT, Ah swear. RT and band zipped through "Raised On Robbery", way too slick, though no more so than the original. Still, Her Highness looked askance. But later, he came out an did a solo acoustic "Woodstock", and she was like "d-a-a-mn", though not in so many words, of course. Whole experience was, as she said at the end, "surreal."

hee hee that screengrab of joni's face is pretty much how i imagine she would look if i tried to play one of her songs in front of her. richard kills on woodstock, though...he's been doing some new 60s covers recently -- "hey joe," "white room," maybe some others?

In 2011, I got hooked on following his solo tour around the world: opera houses, picnic tables, whatever-- even on YouTube phoneshots, it was all good. I've almost come to prefer him solo, though all the trio tracks I've heard are so tight; gotta get Electric. (Also cool that he's got Nashville cats guesting here and there.)

Has he announced the dates for the trio tour yet? I'ma see that.

over yonder : http://richardthompson-music.com/

No NYC for Jon :(

oh he'll probably play that backwater sometime soon.

dammit!

Yeah. I usually crosscheck Pollstar and whichever artist's site http://www.pollstar.com/resultsArtist.aspx?ID=20282.

No idea which thread this should go on, but here's a terrific new article about the Thompson family, as they make their, er, reunion album, negotiated and navigated by Teddy:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/09/magazine/teddy-thompsons-folk-rock-family-reunion.html?_r=1
Also digging RT's 2014Acoustic Classicsvery much.

hm, will be interesting to check out the thompson family thing. i've never really listened to teddy, is he good?

That article is really interesting, not to mention the way each of them are so competitive and manage to get in weird digs at each other.

The key take away for me was Teddy (Whose music I don't know at all)'s only substantive communication with his father about his feelings about being abandoned as a child was asking his dad to play guitar on a song about how much he felt abandoned by his father as child.

haha, i know! how awkward!
it is funny, i have a pretty well-adjusted family, I think, and I can only imagine how weird things would get if we were all trying to work together on something like this.

Teddy is more NPR MOR, but he's actually a pretty good song writer

haha, i know! how awkward!
it is funny, i have a pretty well-adjusted family, I think, and I can only imagine how weird things would get if we were all trying to work together on something like this.

― tylerw, Monday, November 10, 2014 2:58 PM (21 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Dude, I went on a road trip with my wife and my parent's to a wedding a few yrs back and yeah, I totally get along with my folks, but if I had to make a record with my parents...

"Goddammit Dad we are not doing another fucking John Prine cover"

"Are you sure you don't want to do another vocal take? Your voice sounds so nice when you double-track it."

"Shut up Mom"

my older brother would just drink pacificos and mutter about how "we've lost the spirit"

that article was great. Has there been a full length bio of RT or RT+Linda?

there was one in the mid to late 90s, which had RT's (grudging) participation -- it's ok, maybe a little bit boring in parts.

I like Teddy's more recent albums alright, but always did seems that he might be better off in a band, or at least an occasion to rise to (Nora Guthrie to thread). And maybe he agrees (actual quotes like "He owes me" aside). Results now streaming here! http://www.npr.org/2014/11/09/361384683/first-listen-thompson-family
(Oh yeah, the article mentioned The McGarrigle Hour, which really is a good, unlikely family album; Martha's teen bust of D.A.D. is the only dinner table upsetter [it's enough].)

haha, the mcgarrigle/wainwrights seem like the kind of family that enjoys needling one another through song

As far as Teddy goes, his debut and Rufus Wainwright's debut came out right around the same time, and for all their similarity, I thought Teddy's was much better.

Haven't really listened to Teddy enough to say much, though obviously he doesn't sound too much like either of his parents (been compared to Roy Orbison, and while that's pushing it, not totally inappropriate---more like a not-necessarily-retro descendant of Del Shannon or the Everlys). Rufus is literally long-winded: can hold notes a really long time, and so he does, very often. Think he and Loudon and RT all tend to distance, more than balance, emotional turmoil, in a highly stylized way--which can be thrilling, cathartic in its own right (somewhere, something is exploding, lights are flashing, perfectly timed) but like, on RT's Electric, even when I'm getting goose bumps, I might (or might) not be thinking, "This is just Thompson-y as Hell," even more than, "Well played, sir." Like I don't doubt he really does or did have weird takes on experiences with women, but he's drawn on them so much, for really high-class pulp fiction (hey, that's in a lot of folk music, music of the people yall)
But cut to the chase, also think Martha's the one who is more up front about being in the midst of struggle, like if she suspects her marriage is failing, she'll just say it like that, and her stylized qualities are about emotional churn and daring to find/test balancing act, rather than anguished held-note bravura or four-chord vignettes. Not to take away from the best work of these older guys, but also glad that Kari (and Teddy and Linda and others) get their own shots at Thompsoness, next door to Dad, for the moment (their own albums have more breathing room of course, but let's see what they all do under pressure). Although at the moment I'm still working my way through another npr stream, the amazing two-disc Richard Wyatt anth.

Feel kinda guilty re comments on Rufus, Loudon, RT--they can all be great, esp. the geezers, but tney're so prolific, can't help noticing the patterns and tropes and other tech elements per se, like w yr fave director, Big Hollywood or indie.

meant to say, "I might (or might not) be thinking"

RT can be relentlessly bleak when it comes to the human condition (guess that's to be expected form the dude whose first song has the lines "let me learn to despise"). all well and good, but it can be kind of exhausting -- might be why the grizzly man sdtk is probably the solo record i've listened to the most in the past decade or so.

A lot of beautiful, wintery musical sound effects though, incl on Electric, esp. but not only the Deluxe Edition, and dig the snowplowed highways of Acoustic Classics.

But yeah, it can be strenuous.

Feel kinda guilty re comments on Rufus, Loudon, RT--they can all be great, esp. the geezers, but tney're so prolific, can't help noticing the patterns and tropes and other tech elements per se, like w yr fave director, Big Hollywood or indie.

― dow, Tuesday, November 11, 2014 12:31 PM (18 minutes ago)

Think it's the fatalistic element in old-school Romanticism tho': he's still after that dream, at least musically. Also into the lower-case, "lower-class" kind, at least as a turn-on, but it's the "Beeswing" girl who is sleeping rough, not him, while he still loves her wild child spirit (out there somewhere, not in his face all the time).

RT from basically the split with Linda onward is a distanced storyteller for me, like you said dow, a crafter of tales. I can't deny this has been somewhat a detriment for me.

RT from basically the split with Linda onward is a distanced storyteller for me

He's not the most confessional or poetic sort. He's pretty firmly in the mode of, say, '50s rock and roll, if not the mold. Really the sum of his parts, I think. Pop, rock, folk, but little of the mystery of Dylan, for one. It can definitely be read as a distancing effect, but I listen to RT as I would , yeah, a short story writer, albeit one who recognizes his short story is 4 minutes long, and can sometimes be told with guitar. We're definitely spoiled. Not a lot of duff in his catalog, so consistency seems like a detriment. At least all the rest of the clan have youth on their side, or in the case of Linda, a few decades off, but RT has pretty much been killing it since he was barely out of his teens.

for all his 80s, 90s and 00s stuff I find myself relishing his live releases much more than the studio albums. Semi-detached Mock Tudor, for ex., knocks Mock Tudor into the fucking ditch. All that Froominess was just not really right for him. I did really like the way Old Kit Bag sounded, though.

I think I'm at least two albums behind by now, though. Maybe three.

(I realize only some of those records were produced by Froom, but you get the idea)

richard thompson is a god-tier (ugh, hate that phrase, but it came to mind) songwriter and guitarist but i feel like his "bleak" outlook as expressed in his songs has always seemed a little wilfull, and with each passing album it seems cornier and cornier.

btw if you ever have a chance to see him live, with or without a band, DO IT.