Richard and Linda Thompson's Shoot Out the Lights (33 1/3) by Hayden Childs (1-Aug-2008) Paperback

33⅓ Main Series #58

by Hayden Childs

In the fall of 1980 Richard and Linda Thompson (of Fairport Convention fame) had recently been dumped from their record label and were on the verge of divorce. Somehow they overcame these miserable circumstances and managed to make an album considered by many to be a masterpiece.Shoot Out The Lights puts the album-from the personal history driving the songs, to the recording difficulties they encountered and the subsequent fall-out-in context. This is a brilliant, emotional book about a brilliant, emotional album.

Genres: Music, Fiction

Paperback

First published May 31, 2008

About the author

Co-editor & co-founder, The High Hat online journal of pop culture: http://www.thehighhat.com

Blog for Shoot Out The Lights at http://shootoutthelights.blogspot.com

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nice to see someone - anyone - taking notice of Richard Thompson, who's one of those best kept secrets of modern music that critics love and no one else has heard of blah blah blah Lord how many times has that been written in the last 35 years? Richard began life as a 17 year old folk rocker in Fairport Convention (he's the long haired git on the right)

http://tinyurl.com/6ko745

then he married Linda Thompson and they became Sufis

http://tinyurl.com/6h8apw

then he divorced her hand his hair fell out and he wore a beret to cover up his slaphead

http://www.thepointcardiffbay.com/img...

which was not a wise career move, but it also was unwise not to be handsome in the first place. No matter how many great songs you write, how heartrendingly you pluck upon the acoustical guitar or how bunnyboilingly you play upon your electric guitar, the public will turn away in droves if you're not handsome AND you dare to be bald. Just ask Van Morrison. Hmmm - well, he must be the exception that proves the rule. Anyway, see for yourself, Richard's utterly great - here's A Heart Needs a Home by Richard and Linda when they were in their British Muslim phase

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5upiUr...

"I came to you when no one could hear me
I'm sick and weary of being alone
Empty streets and hungry faces
The world's no place when you're on your own
A heart needs a home"

and now Beeswing by Richard solo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-K18xQ...

'Brown hair zig-zag around her face and a look of half-surprise
Like a fox caught in the headlights, there was animal in her eyes
She said "Young man, oh can't you see I'm not the factory kind
If you don't take me out of here I'll surely lose my mind"'

and some electric guitar too (with 1980s ridiculous collar)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfVEHj...

So what's the conclusion? Richard Thompson bestrides the earth like a god, but this book... not so much. Still, I'm glad it's there. Although Shoot out the Lights isn't really that great an album - I'd start with Hand of Kindness or Pour Down Like Silver. All we are saying is give Richard a chance. He's been bald too long!

[Richard · Rating 2 out of 5]

I HATE these 33&1/3 books when they try to use the fiction gimmick. Even more annoying in the case of this book, there are several sophomoric appendices and not one citation to anything else anyone has written about the Thompsons. Even though I agree with most of Child's musical judgments--they are utterly subjective. _Shoot Out the Lights_ truly is a masterpiece and it deserves better a better guide to the underworld than Childs's community college Virgil.

[Emily Barrett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Disclaimer. I was one of the early readers for the author. I assume he chose me for a number of reasons. One of them is that I'm his wife, but one of them was also that I am not a music geeek and I am not a typical 33 & 1/3 reader. The fictional device and Virgil Schlage's story pulled me along, and the Dante allegory added interest and complexity, to an already interesting journey into the lives of Richard and Linda Thompson at the time of the recording and touring for this album. When I discovered this album more than a decade ago I found it to be beautiful and haunting, and that was enough for me. Now that I've read the book I feel as though I have a deeper undestanding of both the lyrics and the emotional place from which Richard Thompson's lyrics and Linda Thompson's vocalizations sprang.

[Craig Chojnicki · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading a book about a landmark album (in this case a tortured one), and having done so before an active listening provides an amazing framework for said listening. This is the case case here in the Childs text. He jumps directly into comparisons to Dante's Inferno as an anchor for listening. Childs also displays a mature knowledge of the mechanics of music, without dwelling in too much technical wording therein. Enjoy!

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked some of the insights into Richard and Linda's relationship, the recording of the LP, and the never-released Gerry Rafferty LP. However, the fictional pieces in this one just didn't work. I really liked the way John Darnielle worked fiction into his 33 1/3 about Black Sabbath's Master of Reality, but I just didn't buy the story here.

[Douglas Roberts · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. It's the motion.

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

What do you look for in rock criticism? Do you want Lester Bangs style autobiography? Do you want a minute explanation of the sounds you're hearing by a musical know-how? Or a scene know-how? Or an anthropological musical know-how? Do you want something that improbably ties the sound of an electric guitar to a Great Works of literature? Do you want gratuitous but wholly righteous swipes at Eric Clapton?

Whatever it is, Hayden Childs has thrown everything into this book, and it all completely WORKS. It helps that he has excellent source material: if all of us halfway-decent writers and musicians could play the way we wanted to, we'd play like Richard Thompson. The man wrote "Meet on the Ledge" when he was seventeen. (When I was seventeen I was hard at work on a ditty called "The Gillian Anderson Testosterone Brigade." Its chords were E5 to G5 and back to E5. The rhythm was similar to "Thunderkiss 65." I wish I was kidding about any of this.) He only got better, and Shoot Out the Lights (with his wife Linda) is his masterpiece. It was also an honest, unsparing, often CRUEL album about souring love, hellish carnivals, murderers in the dark, and the friendly reminder that if your storm-swept boat is rocking you could always find peace and stillness at the bottom of the ocean.

As if that wasn't enough: there was an aborted first pass at the album; the Thompsons would divorce immediately after the record was released; the record became an unexpected hit in the US, which resulted in a fraught tour by the divorcing couple (Linda, left for another woman, famously threw water bottles at Richard on stage, and kicked him in his ass once). You could say there's a book there. But it's also well-covered ground, and rehashing history is no satisfying book.

It is also plainly beneath the talents of Childs. The book is a mini-novel of sorts, as it details a cross country trip taken by an alcoholic literature professor named Virgil so that he may pick up the body of his estranged ex-wife. Virgil thinks Shoot Out the Lights mirrors Dante's inferno; so does his trip to New York match the poets vision of hell, complete with a god damn hurricane. Virgil is obsessed with Thompson's music because he feels his life is the inferior copy of the more famous guitarist. Along the way there are digressions into Sufi mysticism, the twin towers tightrope walker, a murder attempt, AA meetings, Dante's enemies sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with the true monsters of history among the inferno's damned, and an interesting-sounding book entitled Mediated.

This is a recipe for disaster. But Childs knows what he's talking about: whether it's how Thompson gets his guitar to "quack" just so or the devils gnawing at the souls in the Divine Comedy, he's informed, informative, and engaging. More to the point, he knows what he's doing: what seems like a throwaway point about the WTC tightrope walker and its inevitable turn to 9/11 turns into an excellent image, borrowed from Thompson, of Phillipe Petit still on his tightrope, "taut in the suddenly empty air, strung now from cloud to rising dust cloud."

The author lauds Thompson's musical vision, which draws on dozens of musical traditions and seamlessly blends them into a rock context that is still unique, powerful, and completely accessible. I think Childs has done something similar in his writing, here. He takes elements of high minded cultural criticism, dry musical theory, even dryer literary historicism, and finally some rip-roaring THISISMYFUCKINGLIFEMAAAAN prose and comes out with something readable and brilliant. And all of it in the service of the main idea: that this album is the best, and it's worth plopping the $15 down to reinforce it. Only Dennis Wilson and John Darnielle have done better in this series. Bravo.

[Bruce Jenkins · Rating 3 out of 5]

I confess that I have mixed feelings about 33 ⅓ titles that use a fictional device to explore the title album. It can feel false or worse, indulgent.

In this case, Hayden Childs has done a good job of structuring his fictional narrator as a kind of lesser doppleganger of Richard Thompson, the musician responsible (with then wife Linda Thompson) for "Shoot Out The Lights".

Childs uses a fictional narrative as connecting tissue for what is basically a standard song-by-song journey through the album. Some insightful observations and a willingness to acknowledge fandom without slipping into idolatry keep things interesting throughout.
One weakness for this reader was Childs' reliance on doppleganger album "Rafferty's Folly". This Gerry Rafferty produced (but never released) precursor to "Shoot Out" is drawn on heavily in the song analysis but as it (a) is not freely available, and (b) always comes out the loser in the comparisons, one has to wonder at the point of such emphasis.
Similarly, the Appendices are not really necessary, though a comparison between Richard Thompson and Neil Young, album by album, is entertaining (if unbalanced).
Overall, a worthwhile read for Thompson fans and a solid 33 ⅓ title.

Bruce Jenkins is the author of Vinyl Connection, a long-running music blog.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting, but the thread where the author pretends to be a failed musician going through his own version of Dante's Inferno in some sort of strange parallel with Richard Thompson's deteriorating relationship with his wife, Linda, during the recording and release of this album, is unnecessary, if not distracting. Better to miss your contracted page count than to burden an otherwise compelling narrative with this detour.

[Nathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wasn't really convinced by the narrator in this book. Sure, I could see the tie-in to Dante, but I wanted the narrator to be more believable, to have a bit more of a relationship with the album itself, rather than just an afterthought. Still, this book wins alone for its appendices.

[Hayden]

I wrote this! The description is inaccurate, though.

33 1/3 blog has an excerpt available online.

[Dave · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting when he's doing a close analysis of Richard and Linda Thompson's music. Not as much so with the fictional parts and some literary pretensions.

[Leonard Pierce · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hayden autographed my copy of this, so he gets five stars. See how easy this is, people?

[Robbie Bashore]

My husband might enjoy this. He's a big Richard Thompson fan. We saw him in a nice intimate club in Pittsburgh a few years ago, and it was great.

[Joe Faust · Rating 2 out of 5]

Half autobiographical novel (?) and half term paper paralleling the album with the circles in Dante’s Inferno, this isn’t the best of the 33 1/3 series – but it’s not the worst, either.

[Don · Rating 2 out of 5]

These little books are supposed to be about the record. Way too much of this one is about the author.