Hippies vs. Punks: Richard & Linda Thompson's "Light(s)" Albums, Pt. 1, I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight

"The way up and the way down is one and the same."

Heraclitus, Fragment 60, Diels: Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker

Each week on Friday I have a Hippies vs. Punks post. The idea is to take a band, usually an album from that band, immerse myself in it during the work week, and then report back at week's end. I have chosen the period from 1975 to 1979, the time the Hippies, the main motor of the '60s cultural revolution in the West, give up the ghost and slink off the center stage and the Punks take over. ("The king is gone but he's not forgotten/This is the story of Johnny Rotten.") Nineteen-seventy-five to 1979 is the main focus -- particularly the years 1977 and 1978 -- but I allow myself to roam free both before and after. For instance, a number of posts have dealt with 1970 -- bombing of Cambodia, Kent State nationwide campus riots, the Cincinnati Pop Festival.

In any Present Age there is more than one avant-garde, perhaps a counter avant-garde or contra-garde. As the Punks assumed the cultural vanguard in the middle 1970s and the Hippies split into miscellaneous camps -- hard rock, glam, prog rock, etc. -- some Hippies kept fighting the good fight. Richard Thompson, a co-founding member and lead guitarist for folk rock giants Fairport Convention, and his wife Linda were two of those Hippies.

No truer statement of the facts of life can be found than Richard & Linda Thompson's debut album, I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight. It is a rich sonic narcotic, easily one of the greatest albums of all time (though it only squeaks in at number 471 on Rollings Stone's "500 Greatest Albums of All Time" list).

Recorded quickly and on the cheap in the spring of 1973, I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight went unreleased until the following spring owing partly to Island Records executives' discomfort with the Thompsons' bleak existentialism and aversion to celebrity, but also due to a vinyl shortage resulting from the Arab oil embargo.

Thompson had become reacquainted with Linda Peters, a session singer, while the two worked on his solo debut, the fantastic and underappreciated Henry the Human Fly (1972). That album took a brutal and undeserved hazing from the music press which no doubt instilled some bitterness and self-doubt in Thompson, a guy who was already shy. After Thompson marries Linda (October of 1972) and the two become a duo, she becomes the frontman. Her beauty is electric.

While I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight received some decent reviews, mostly it was ignored when finally released by Island in 1974. By then Richard and Linda had become Sufis, the esoteric branch of Islam that is the polar opposite of the Salafi movement that is having such a violent, transformative effect on the Middle East today. Their next two albums, Hokey Pokey (1975) and Pour Down Like Silver (1975), are both recorded while the Thompsons are living in a Sufi commune in East Anglia; following Hokey Pokey and Pour Down Like Silver, they retire from the music industry for several years; they return with First Light (1978), which will be the subject of next week's Hippies vs. Punks post.

So I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight really stands by itself. Even though Hokey Pokey shares some similarities and is a great album, it doesn't hang together, it doesn't resonate as an organic unity like Bright Lights. Bright Lights is a masterpiece, plain and simple. It is a profound Hippie assessment of the world after the last rays of light from the Summer of Love have disappeared. It is a winter's album. Cold, dark, harrowing. It is a tribute to secularism and existentialism. The stories are of work and suffering. No greater tandem of songs to end an album can be found than "The End of the Rainbow," which Thompson wrote for his newborn daughter! and "The Great Valerio":

I embraced this album when I left the university and moved to New York City with my wife so she could attend medical school (a period I regularly explore with the "The Colt 45 Chronicle" posts). We played Bright Lights a lot, introduced it to friends who went out and got copies for themselves. It spoke to all of us because we were about the same age as the Thompsons -- early to mid-twenties -- when they recorded it, and we were confronting the same bleak themes. The reality of what life looks like in your middle twenties when you're just starting to travel the long road of work, marriage, survival is crushing. It says something that a beautiful young Hippie couple could create an aural document more devastating and stark than anything the Punks ever came up with.

Do yourself a favor. Get the album. "The Calvary Cross" is one of the greatest rock 'n' roll songs of all time. And if you get a chance, check out the compact documentary the BBC did on Richard Thompson, Solitary Life:

Yesterday morning at work sitting at my desk I came across this video of Thompson performing "The Calvary Cross" with a young band, Dawes, about whom I know little. Looking up from where I sit, through one of the windows, I can see the Comfort Inn next door. In the window of the Comfort Inn I saw, barely, the form of a cleaning lady making a bed, and I wondered if it was the pretty young Latina who I ride the bus with in the morning and who works at the Comfort Inn and who I suspect is undocumented since she will never cross against the light even if there is no traffic for as far as the eye can see. Then I thought about the time when I worked in the north tower of the World Trade Center, a time when I survived on a steady diet of Richard and Linda Thompson, a time when I broke up with my wife. I thought about the brilliant blue sky and looking up at the towers of the World Trade Center from the courtyard below and how I entered the building and began my shift.