To Be The Very Best

A LITTLE MORE than ten years ago, the two most beautiful and touching albums of the seventies were released almost back to back. Poth were by veterans of the folk movement in the sixties, but both transcended their roots in range of emotion as well as in diversity of influences, One, Bob Dylan's Blood On The Track, immediately shot to number one on the charts. The other, Richard and Linda Thompson's I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight, sold less than 50,000 copies and disappeared until last year when Rolling Stone, "rediscovered" the rerelease on the miniscule Carthage label.

Well, musical anonymity may drain one's bank acount but it certainly does not siphon off one's creative juices. While Dylan has managed to put together only two records of any quality in the past decade, Thompson, now divorced from Linda, has delivered a string of ten killer albums culminating in his most complexly beautiful since Bright Lights: Across A Crowded Room.

Like Dylan, Thompson has the rarely found depth that allows him to appeal to your sympathy one minute and kick you in the balls the next. No song on this new disk exemplifies this better than the first one, "When The Spell Is Broken." The minor chords issuing from Thompson's twangy, vibrettoed guitar rumble and lament like a Scottish funural dirge, and his solo swoops gracefully and reverently around them. The words, though, are pure vitriol, worthy of an especially pissed-off Dylan or a younger Graham Parker. The extremity of its despair makes this song frightening, with appropriately violent references to love letters that are "pushed back down your throat and leave you choking."

This violence recurs in the album's one great misogyay song. "She Twists The Knife Again." The music here is almost upbeat, betraying Thompson's accusations as an act of defense rather than malice. Two years after his breakup with Linda, Thompson is still bitter: on this song, he lets his guitar gently weep in a way that is fat above anything George Harrison could envison in his wildest, rock-and-roli wet dreams.

His guitar can also run with breakneck speed, as be demonstrates on the two uptempo numbers. "Little Blue Number" and "Fire In The Engine Room." "Number" is a infinitely better played variation on Dylan's trash-blues classic, "Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat." "Engine Room," on the other hand, is built on a careening, dissonant riff that sounds like a madman's rage. The lyrics are similarly out of control, clearly delineated by Thompson's view of his ex-marriage in a single burst of acid: "And you know how uncertainty can linger, with a rattlesnake wrapped around your finger, one day it might wake up and sting you, here's a toast to the bride and the groom."

Thompson's doesn't just bitch on this album, though. In the two slow songs, "Love In A Faithless Country" and "Ghosts In The Wind," he almost entirely dispenses with words, preferring to convey emotion by constructing dissonant, haunting atmospheres full of tragic and pathetic echoes. Thompson is one of the few guitarists in popular music who dares to use leaps of dissonance in his soloes: often you'll here bits of the blues, Celtic folk, heavy metal, and even classical stylings woven into the same song. Sometimes, in the overextended jam. "Country", for example, this variety can lack focus, but the results are always interesting--if not always ultimately satisfying.

Across A Crowded Room is difficult to get into at first because Thompson literally tries every trick except shoving his twang bar up the listener's nose. Yet this album also has a sense of urgency and creativity that is missing from most pop music. Though Thompson may initially seem malicious (towards both his old flames and the the contemporary ear which Michael Jackson has so thoroughly dulled), this is an album you could listen to a hundred times. But the album before Thompson tosses you in one of his songs.

ROCK CONCERTS ARE NOT USUALLY very moving events. Ever the best performance rarely inspire you to more than shooting down six beers in six minutes and then... you know. At his recent show at the Berklee, though, Richard Thompson proved that this forum doesn't necessarily have to be limiting.

Much of the show was very sad, filled with songs telling of his troubles with his wife, Linda. Opening with a note-perfect rendition of "Where The Spell Is Broken," he followed with Glow I Wanted To" from Hand Of Kindness and later "Withered And Died" from Bright Lights, two morbidly depressing songs about the frustration of helplessly watching your relationships disintegrate. The ghost of Linda hovered in every note Thompson sang or played.

This missing voice, however, did not create a void in the music. The ample harmonies of Christine Collister and Clive Gregson backing his own low growl, Thompson easily negotiated his way around the tough arrangements of songs like "Wall Of Death," from the last album he did with Linda, Shool Out The Lights. His eyes closed, his face grieving, he showed that he did not need his "better half" to continue the show he has run for the past twenty years.

Surprisingly, although the songs may have the tone of King Lear, Thompson's non-musical rapport with the audience leans much more to "Monty Python." The night I saw him, he was wearing an outfit that would have made most blush: a turquoise suit with an orange leopard-skin tie slung about his bare neck in something that looked more like a noose than a knot. He even poked fun at his own pessimism by saying. "If we've brought a little doom and gloom into your life, we'll consider it a job well done."

Even more surprising was how well Thompson's quintet could rock out. Thompson's nimble fingers easily whipped off the amphetamine pace of "Fire In The Engine Room," "Little Blue Number" and "Tear-Stained Letter" without his usual barrage of accordians, horns, et al. "You Don't Say," the single weakest track on Crowded Room, became a furious dance song, fueled by harmonics and a vicious guitar jam. Throughout, Thompson and Gregson seemed determined to escalate the pace of their frequent duels, culminating in the third encore with a twelve-minute version of a Gregson original.

This brings us to the core of Thompson's show, his guitar. At the risk of offending everyone in our quarter of the galaxy, I have to say it: Richard Thompson is the greatest live guitarist in music. Period. At the Berklce show, he did Clapton's blues, Van Halen's hammering. Beck's lightning fusion, and Page's power dissonance, so that all the parts flowed into each other. On "Shoot Out The Lights," he captured some low-register feedback that would have made Hendriv's month fall and mutter "Shit, that boy can play." And he never once looked at the neck of the guitar.

So there you have it. I've sunk as low as a critic can go. I've used (sob!) a superlative, a commendation that will probably condemn me to the seventh ring of Rex Reed's private hell. Too bad: Thompson's Berklee show, and the man, deserve nothing less