British folk-rock pioneer and guitar legend Richard Thompson gets things warmed up for the 2013 Seven Days festival with a concert on Wednesday.
A few years ago, writer, businessman and bon vivant Michael Sheridan went to an Irish Festival in town to hear the group Henri’s Notions. When the band played Richard Thompson’s “From Galway to Graceland,” about a woman who abandons her home in Ireland to spend her days by Elvis Presley’s grave in Memphis, Sheridan’s ears perked up.
“What a song, what a story,” Sheridan said. “I like a good story in a song.”
Sheridan went home and wrote a one-act play based on the song and submitted it to the New Horizons: Original Works theater festival at Florida State. It was quickly accepted and set to stage in April 2012. At the last minute, Sheridan suddenly realized he did not have permission to use Thompson’s song in his play.
“I figured I would get an email back from some underling or some manager or a lawyer, but I got an email from Richard Thompson himself,” Sheridan said. “We struck up a correspondence.”
Thompson gave the OK to use the song and requested a DVD copy of the live play. As the email conversation continued, Sheridan finally invited Thompson to come play at the Seven Days of Opening Nights arts festival.
Again, Thompson, who is one of the best guitar players on the planet as well as one of the wittiest songwriters alive, said, yes.
“Mike wrote a play based on a song of mine, which was then staged, and now, due to the enormous groundswell of goodwill generated, or for other reasons, I’m coming to Tallahassee, about 47 years after I bought the record (“Tallahassee Lassie”) by Freddy Cannon,” Thompson, 63, said in an email.
Thompson will play a solo show on Wednesday as a warm-up concert to the Seven Days of Opening Nights festival, which officially kicks off on Feb. 7 with violinist Hilary Hahn. Michael and Judy Wilson Sheridan are sponsoring the Thompson stopover.
“We tried to get Richard Thompson for a long time but the routing never worked,” former Seven Days executive director Steve MacQueen said this week from his new job at the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts in Burlington, Vt. “One year he came through Florida in too-early February and I couldn't get the room. Another time he decided not to tour Florida after all. Other times he just wasn't touring at the time. I made an offer on him every year I worked at Seven Days, but the fifth year was the charm.”
When Thompson finally arrives next week, he will carry with him a body of work that is rich, dark and deep. He started his musical career as a founding member of the influential folk-rock group Fairport Convention, which included the singer Sandy Denny, in the late ‘60s. Thompson left the band in the early ‘70s when he kicked off his solo career with “Henry The Human Fly” album in 1972.
From the start, Thompson proved himself to be a virtuosic, sophisticated and idiosyncratic guitar player.
“I’m a guitar player and he does things I can’t figure out how he does,” Sheridan said.
While many British guitarists of his generation are preening show-offs, Thompson prefers to serve the song first and save the pyrotechnics for special occasions. Though he did humorously object when his playing style was described as “understated.”
“I do flashy and unnecessary things all the time,” Thompson said. “If you’re understated most of the time, people tend to forgive you the odd weakness.”
Along the way, Thompson sharpened and honed his songcraft, particularly during the years he collaborated with his then-wife, Linda Thompson, for a series of searing albums released from 1973 to 1982. Their album “Shoot Out the Lights” (1982) was ranked No. 24 when Rolling Stone released its “100 Best Albums of the Last Twenty Years” in 1987.
After putting out more critically acclaimed solo albums in the late ‘80s, Thompson broke through to a mass audience in 1991 with his Grammy Award-nominated “Rumor and Sigh.” The album was filled with brilliant tunes such as “Read About Love” (about a fumbling Romeo who turned to Hustler magazine for romantic advice), “I Feel So Good” (featuring a freshly sprung jailbird who is looking for trouble on his first night out) and “1952 Vincent Black Lightning" (a love story starring a doomed robber, a red-headed woman and a vintage motorcycle).
“The song (‘1952 Vincent Black Lightning’) started with a desire to build a story around a romantic and iconic British object, the point being that most of the romance and myth in popular song, since the advent of the gramophone, has come from North America,” Thompson said. “I grew up listening to traditional ballads, so I love that longer form of story-song. I’d be happy to play it in Tallahassee.”
While Thompson loves to write sardonic songs, he has a passion for pop songs as well. On his album called “One Thousand Years of Popular Music” (2003), Thompson featured songs by Henry Purcell, who died in 1695, Hoagy Carmichael, Cole Porter and Britney Spears’ “Oops! ... I Did It Again.” Spears has never commented on Thompson’s very straight (and superior) reading of “Oops! ... I Did It Again.”
“I wasn’t really expecting to hear from Britney, but a call would have been nice,” Thompson said. “I’m sure she knows where I live. I like good pop, and ‘Oops’ is a classy pop song, but there is a lot of rubbish out there. Edith Piaf was classy pop. So was Carlos Gardel.”
As if his songwriting and guitar-playing ability were not enough, Thompson likes to pepper his live, solo shows with jokes and anecdotes between the songs. He could moonlight as a stand-up comic and his timing is spot-on. Thompson blames all the witty banter and stories on his nerves.
“I think they start from nervousness, and the feeling that somebody needs to say something or it’s going to be embarrassing,” Thompson said. “Someone remarked that the English can’t go three sentences without making a joke, so that’s probably why it can get droll.”
No comments:
Post a Comment