INCHOATE THOUGHTS
August
29, 2010
Hi,
Recently, we went to Portsmouth, New
Hampshire for the last gig of the Prescott Park Arts Festival season.
Performers play on an outdoor stage beside the Piscataqua River in downtown
Portsmouth. The tide was ebbing at amazing speed when we arrived. The Memorial
Bridge, a vertical-lift bridge, rose to allow passage downriver of the Isles of
Shoals Steamship Company ferry. Like others in the audience, we ate our picnic
supper as the declining evening sun tinged the industrial buildings over the
water in Kittery, Maine. Portsmouth is attractive: part no-nonsense port
dominated by the Portsmouth Navy Yard, part narrow street colonial clapboard
domesticity. It looks its picturesque best on a warm summer evening.
The opener was Scots-Canadian
singer-songwriter David Francey, his own show having been rained out two nights
earlier. Clearly talented, he seemed a little ill at ease to be preceding the
main act, which was scarcely surprising, given who that was to be. After
apologizing for having delayed the main performance for as much as twenty
minutes with his genial patter and his renditions of such agreeable songs as
“Paper Boy,” and “Broken Glass,” Francey and his local sideman departed. The
stage, dominated by the “olde London towne” set of Peter Pan, playing on other evenings, was readied for the principal
event. This meant no more than the careful placement of a mic stand, a stool
for a water bottle and a tin of talc, and two monitor speakers. Then, with no
fanfare at all, a tall, slender figure in black — jeans, shirt, and beret —
slipped almost self-deprecatingly onstage. Suddenly realizing that the man with
the Lowden guitar was actually standing in right front of them, the audience
rose to applaud and cheer. He plugged in and sang.
Richard Thompson is simply the best
at what he does. He doesn’t bother to ingratiate himself with his audience from
the outset. His comments on the beauty of the evening and the congeniality of
the city (he has played in so, so many) were almost mockingly peremptory. He
gets on with what everyone has come to hear and see him do. He knows. He ought
to, after over forty years performing.
His early work remains as robust as
his newest. “Genesis Hall” from the 1969 Fairport Convention album Unhalfbricking came across as fresh as
“Stumble On” from his new album, Dream
Attic. By the time he got to “Genesis Hall” he was overcoming the dead hand
of bound-to-be-disappointed expectation by establishing a genuine rapport with
the audience. He referred to vinyl records as being as big as he could stretch
out his arms. “Genesis Hall was a squat cleared violently,” he told us. “We
used to compose songs to protest such things. We still do.” He does, but his
critique of financial irresponsibility on Wall Street on his latest album, “The
Money Shuffle,” is not among his finest.
Thompson is best at gloom. The high
point of his set was “Dimming of the Day,” inevitably evoking his former wife
and musical partner, Linda Thompson, with whom he did some of his very best
work. She sang it on their 1975 album, Pour
Down Like Silver. He also gave a particularly raucous and jangly
performance of the title song of their first album, I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight, released the previous
year. “That’s five gloomy songs in a row,” he quipped, before giving a
wonderful rendition of the hilarious Frank Loesser song “Hamlet,” his only
number by another writer.
As a solo performer, Thompson relies
solely on his own abilities, with just an occasional burst of subtle echo on
the voice, and his guitar equalizer highly scooped (the highs and lows loud,
the middle range diminished). On his own he is more exciting than many a band
using a full range of instruments and electronic effects. No wonder. His
musicianship is both technically and emotively astonishing. He gave several
encores, imploring the patience of his sound engineer with a hand signal before
the last. Then he walked off. No fuss, none of the embellishments of a
superstar. He’s beyond all that. He’s simply the best.
Ever,
Ivan