THE MADNESS OF LOVE | PAGE 1, 2, 3
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In the aftermath, Richard has recorded some great love songs, running the gamut from comic ("Two Left Feet") to the confessional ("When the Spell Is Broken"). Some say that he lost his best instrument when he lost Linda, and it's true he is no nightingale ("a good half-octave" is what he calls his singing range), though he can be quite expressive within his limitations. And though it would be unfair to say that without him she is nothing (she has since recorded solo), singing other people's songs she is rather unremarkable. Remarried now, Linda runs an antique jewelry shop on Bond Street. She has given up singing and has been diagnosed with a condition called hysterical dysphonia: "You open your mouth," she says, "and nothing happens." It is as though they fulfilled each other for a time, two halves of a broken whole.

His output since their divorce has been nothing short of remarkable, a few brilliant albums ("Hand of Kindness," "Rumor and Sigh"), most of the rest just great. He married Covey (who runs a travel business now), with whom he has a son, Jack (his son Teddy, the second of three children with Linda, is grown now and has toured with his father). He divides his time between Los Angeles and England. His fans, though smaller in number than, say, the Dead's or Dylan's, are no less rabid. There are Web sites devoted to his every move, filled with transcriptions of his songs, set lists, tunings, musings over each line and its significance. "They're worse than real critics, they're amateur critics!" he has complained of them (one group now calls itself the Amateur Critics) and offered an object lesson in idolatry with the photo shoot for the 1994 album "Mirror Blue." After commissioning a series of plaster statues of himself for the shoot (they appear in cars, on lawns, in boxes) he smashed every one, recalling Abraham, who, according to the Koran, sneaked into the temple to break the idols there. And though he protested the "gold-watch" treatment afforded him by tributes (and would probably hate the summing-up implied in a "Brilliant Career"), he seems to be accepting his lot.

"It's a multimedia world," he said recently. "You have to be on a bookshelf or you have to be on a CD-ROM or on the Web. These are the places people are looking. So for people like me, one has to troll a little wider to find one's audience." There is a CD-ROM available, of course ("Richard Thompson Teaches Traditional Guitar"), and a bio by tireless British rock biographer Patrick Humphries. None of the attention (however subterranean) seems to have gone to his head; he tours quietly, playing big clubs and small halls, and is circumspect about his faith, having abandoned the robes he and Linda affected in their commune days. "I don't practice religion," he has said. "It's just a way of life."

And while some fans decry the influence of producer Mitchell Froom (R.E.M. et al.) and Thompson's use of studio musicians, living in America has had a liberating effect on his music. There's a loose, rollicking sound to the up-tempo rockers he's done stateside ("Crash the Party," "Little Blue Number"). And though his last studio album -- the 1996 "You? Me? Us?" -- seemed a bit saturnine, there is no sign he is mellowing. "Mock Tudor," due to be released next month, was produced by Rob Shnapf and Tom Rothrock; the erstwhile Beck producers and Bong Load co-founders may bring out Thompson's humorous side. For who cannot love a man who rhymes "playing to the gallery" with his lover's name, Valerie, or who sang, on the oft-covered "Tear Stained Letter," "My head was beating like a song by the Clash/Writing checks that my body couldn't cash"?

And always there's the playing. Close your eyes, fans will tell you when seeing him live, and you'll swear there are two guitarists up there, and it's true. With a guitar pick held between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, Thompson drives the rhythm as the three free fingers pick a myriad of notes, while high atop the neck his spidery left hand bends the strings to alarming effect, seeking (as Lesley Berman wrote) the connection between James Burton and John Coltrane. Thompson's music is polar, rock and jazz, traditional and modern, just as his songs embrace the tragic and comic, sometimes in a single line. That night at St. Ann's he shattered the church air with his solo on "Slipstream," his strings at once sounding taut and slack, the moving web of a dangling man. Before the song reached its irredeemable conclusion -- the object of his love just out of reach -- Thompson picked the dimensions of his dilemma. Jazz chords and sharp notes ran past in a rapid rush that echoed the roar of white water, the melody slipping and straining like a runaway raft with the guitarist the boatman, pulling you along on a dangerous ride until you emerged on the other side, frightened, soaking, glad to be alive.
SALON | March 16, 1999

Sean Elder is editor in chief of New York CitySearch.

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