When I was 13, I dragged my father to a Crosby, Stills and Nash concert. This was 1986, I was 13 and he was 44, so you’d think it would be the other way around. But even though he was born the same year as Paul McCartney, he did not have Boomer taste. In college, he was a traditional folkie, and played 5-string banjo with Ian and Sylvia. He thought Dylan was a confused Jewish kid from Minnesota with a lousy voice. He didn’t like anything that veered from tradition. By the time I was 13 and he had just taught to read for my bar mitzvah, he was listening to mostly Mozart, not just the composer, but the ethos. The CSN concert was not Cosi fan tutte. It was horrible enough to sit through songs that were played at Woodstock or a new Crosby song about doing time, kicking drugs, and wasting years of his life (boo-hoo, I imagined him thinking), but it got worse when the set went electric and it seemed very, very loud—like Guantanamo levels. I thought it was way cool, but I also felt bad that for him, and I thought as I aged, I might understand a little more.
Even though I was a corrupted rock and roll kid, the more I learned about music, I started to understand the purist impulse a little more. If you love rock and roll, you love things to be impure, and yet beauty walks a razor’s edge. At 15, while listening to my local public radio station, I struck gold when I came across an acoustic Richard Thompson concert, then a recent one in 1988. This was a miracle, because he was playing songs from his recent albums, but without all the production. I was already besotted with I Want to See The Bright Lights Tonight and Shoot Out the Lights. I also loved his voice with its Northern English brogue, close enough to Scotland in geography and Ireland in spirit. He once called an album Celtschmerz. The next year, I bought an album with Van Morrison and the Chieftans, where the world’s greatest Irish soul singer did everything he could not to sound Irish, even though the album was called Irish Heartbeat.
When I kept diving into Thompson’s solo work, on used records, I loved the songs, the voice, the virtuoso guitar, but felt like it was under a harsh fluorescent light. Those records were produced by Mtchell Froom, who would also produce Elvis Costello, Paul McCartney, and Suzanne Vega, whom he married for a while. They were all excellent records, but, I thought, I guess I just wasn’t made for these tines. And maybe artifice is artifice, but when it’s yours, it loses aura. At least it did for me. I did not feel this way about earlier periods of production. I really thought it all went downhill after Steely Dan’s Gaucho, which was 1980. I loved the soft drums of all the 70s albums. Even 70s punk, with all its confrontation, still had raw drums. When one is first building taste, one does not ask why.
After that, the drums had an isolated, echo chamber sound, like you weren’t hearing them in a room with oxygen. Most of my favorite artists went for this sound in one way or another, and I tolerated it to get to the songs, but it felt like I was being distanced from the musicians, who were being transported to some distant, expensive, antiseptic place. Tom Waits was the only 80s artist who wanted his records to sound like you were at a cabaret, a little Marc Ribot wild reverb here, a little Berlin in the 20s there, a little raspy, drunken poetics everywhere. XTC, one of my favorite bands in the world, got the drum sound from Steve Lillywhite in 1982, and soon enough, you could hear it in the drum fills on Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight,” the equivalent of Wagner’s Tristan chord announcing the siren call of simulacra. When they did an acoustic tour of radio stations to accommodate lead singer Andy Partridge’s stage fright, they played acoustic, and I thought it sounded like the supreme being intended.
As I have aged, now a bit past the age of my dad horrified by the CSN concert, I have come to see the virtues of tradition and its discontents. When Pete Seeger was similarly scandalized by Dylan going electric at Newport, Theodore Bikel said, “This is what the young people want!” I can understand Dylan, Seeger and Bikel at that moment, and I can understand my dad’s reaction to CSN. Ten years of being Joni Mitchell’s biographer helped me through every period of her innovation, to the point where her least loved albums are figures of fascination for me. (Joni and my father just missed each other in the Toronto folk scene.) When she worked with Mingus on his final compositions, she loved him, but was disappointed that he was an “acoustic man.” He didn’t want to hear electric keyboard or fretless bass, but then it was her album and by then he had bigger things to worry about.
The 90s undid much of 80s production. 70s nostalgia was quite the salve. PJ Harvey said she hired Steve Albini to produce Rid of Me because he knew how to make a drum sound like it was in the room. Now I say, bring on the acoustic and electric. Bring on Mozart and XTC and let the drums echo. I now have acoustic and electric moments.
Right now, Richard Thompson’s Acoustic II is playing. I would have loved this album at 15. I would soon read Whitman and learn about containing multitudes.
I am the thirteen-year-old boy at the rock concert. I am my appalled father. I am Dylan acoustic and electric. I am Richard Thompson singing Celtzchmerz for Allah. I am the string and the drum. I am the wires and I am the breath. I am just beginning to figure it out. I just got here and I hope I can keep knowing all that I will never know. I am the machine that kills Fascists. I am the heart that needs a home. I hope there is a tomorrow to turn it up all over again and play fucking loud.
Thompson has been and still is my favorite. I was playing his songs (with and without Fairport Convention) at Arts back in the 70's, 80's, 90's, and into the 21st Century. Both of my daughters as young children went to Thompson concerts as their first concerts. Seen him at least fifty times, electric and acoustic (two very different experiences), and I'm still a believer. His soundtrack for GRIZZLY MAN is stellar, too!
I was getting into him shortly before I heard you playing Richard and Linda and feeling vindicated. I could date it back to 1987, when Rolling Stone had the best records of the past 20 years (celebrating their 20th anniversary) the first of many such lists, and getting I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight, Shoot Out the Lights, and some of the 80s solo stuff I could find at Half Price Books--Hand of Kindness, Amnesia, and so on. Do you remember which songs you might have played to my Freshman honors class, 87-88? I remember the song "Garbage." Pete Seeger!