HOFFSTACK PLAYLIST #8 - Richard and Linda Thompson, "For Shame of Doing Wrong"

Take me back to old remembered days.

Here we are, once again, on Glorious Sunday Morning, listening to songs of devotion and spirituality. Today’s selection is by the extremely British songwriter/guitarist/singer Richard Thompson and his former partner in life and music, Linda Thompson. Though you’d never know it by pressing play on the link up top, this selection is actually a testimony to the pair’s adopted Sufi Muslim faith.

Well, maybe if you look at the original front and back cover of the 1975 album Pour Down Like Silver you’d get a better sense of that.

Yeah, I don’t know that either would roll with artwork like this today—especially not Linda, who is no longer in the faith. (Richard, who currently lives in Montclair, New Jersey, still is, though it is never explicit in his work.)

Pour Down Like Silver was recorded when the couple lived among a pretty hardcore group of adherents, led by a sheik who tried to dissuade them from a music career. (Not that they were top of the charts at the time; Richard had left the more successful group Fairport Convention to strike out on his own, and was not exactly selling platinum albums.) The compromise was that the work could continue so long as the work honors God.

So, the lyrics to this song, which are very simple, seem to be about a woman thinking regretting a breakup. But I guess it could also be about someone returning to Faith. Being vague has its privileges.

It’s a simple song, with Linda in absolutely terrific voice. I love to sing along to this one, horribly. Richard is marvelous with the accompanying vocals, too, and the repetitive nature in the second half has almost a trancelike quality. Sufi Islam is the one with the whirling dervishes, right?

In the album version you get a lot of accordion, the high and light tones of which balance nicely with Linda’s deep register. What you don’t get too much of is what makes Richard Thompson one of my all-time favorite musicians, his sheets-of-sound guitar shredding. In fact, there’s only a little bit of a guitar solo as the song begins to fade away—and it’s a much more pointillist solo than we usually expect from him.

Luckily, there are several live versions of this song, like this one from 1985, in which the vocal parts are reversed between man and woman (that’s Christine Collister in the group here) and, more importantly, there is and epic RT blaze of glory jam that extends for several minutes. (Go right to the 3:20 mark if you simply can’t wait.)

No one on Planet Earth plays the electric guitar like Richard Thompson. He puts notes where they seemingly don’t belong, but unlike Thelonious Monk at the keyboard, he eases it in, and keeps it consonant. Until it builds and then all hell breaks loose. To see him do this live, as I have done several times, is truly witnessing a man with a divine gift.