BEESWING:
Losing My Way and Finding My Voice
By Richard Thompson
The demands were cooled considerably by other biographies I read after the vicarious thrill of Richard's enthused embrace of his wild ways. Bob Dylan's book Chronicles, Vol. 1 had the Maestro speaking obliquely about his life, influences, not revealing much that wasn't already in the dedicated fan's knowledge base. That wasn't wholly unexpected since Dylan has been cagey about talking about his personal life. When he wasn't making things up, he simply out large chunks of his coming of age. Similarly, Jorma Kaukonen wrote of his time as lead guitarist for the San Francisco's iconic Jefferson Airplane in Been So Long: My Life and Music, a memoir of his life growing up in the fifties and thriving as an artist in the swirling 60s counterculture. His prose was flat, and his feelings influences, friends, politics, and the free-love spirituality of that pugnacious decade are soft-spoken. The detachment from his history made it seem like he talked about someone else's life and career. Kaukonen, perhaps, would instead have not been charged with writing about them at all. I suppose the lesson was that although there's an overabundance of rock stars with stories as horrid, funny, and chaotic as Keith Richard's. Some of the stories are quieter in the telling, deservedly so.
Beeswing:
Fairport, Folk Rock, and Finding My Voice, 1967–75, a new book by acclaimed Richard Thompson, guitar
hero, songwriter, and singer and co-founder of the influential British folk-rock
band Fairport Convention Richard Thompson, is appealing,
soft-spoken but overly cautious telling of the facts of his life. Not without
sin, sizzle, disaster, or tragedies that need to be overcome as eventual
success comes to the music and the music maker. His style is reflective,
meditative to a degree, choosing his words and descriptions carefully. There's
also a tangible air of hesitancy while he recounts his story, a seeming concern
to avoid the dramatic, the sensational. Too much caution, however, as there are
moments where eloquent rumination on incidents would have given Beeswing
greater philosophical heft. To this day, it's one of my low expectations that
old guard rock stars have something resembling a pearl of elegant and lengthy
wisdom that's formed over their years of music-making on an international
scale. Thompson is the soft-spoken sort, it seems, and the soft written as
well. Elegant in his brevity and occasionally minimalist prose, he trades not
in a scandal, gossip, or revenge snark; he goes forth like Joe Friday in Dragnet,
just the facts as best he remembers them, told as well as he can manage. The
album sold meagerly, but it was a fruitful starting point for the legendary
band as they progressed. Sandy Denny, a woman blessed with an ethereal and
silver-toned voice, replaced original co-lead singer Judy Dyble, Thompson's
girlfriend. The addition of Denny to share lead vocals with singer, guitarist,
and songwriter Ian Matthews coincided with Fairport's burgeoning desire to grow
conspicuous American influence and instead explored and made use of their own
rich of British and Celtic music folk styles. The following three
records-- What We Did On Our Holidays, Unhalfbricking, Liege, and
Lief—marked a band that had invented a new kind of folk-rock, based on a
fascinating combination of blues, jazz, and rock filtered through the gossamer
textures of British and Celtic melodic construction and overtone. Fired by the
unique sensibilities of Thompson's guitar work, the songwriting collective in
this band gave the world that singular thing in pop music history, a distinct
body of work.
Thompson
doesn't belabor song meanings or origins nor deep dive into the tricks and
techniques of his laudable guitar skills, preferring to limn lightly through
the scuffling days of the years 1967 through 1975. Again, there isn't much in
the way of sordid detail, strong opinion, or linguistic scene-chewing, but the
book does provide a breezy, montage-like feel of Fairport and the bands they
knew gigged in the same towns at the same clubs, pubs, and meeting halls. The
elements of low paying gigs, the band's eventual adapting an abandoned,
unheated pub as band living quarters and rehearsal space, creative tensions in
the band, and having a singer in Sandy Denny who was as strong-willed and
undisciplined as she was brilliant, and alluring are the ingredients of a rich
tale that here seems told only by a third. Beeswing has
concise and breezy pacing that the book gives off the feeling of being a
treatment for a motion picture music biopic. The chronology of events has the
air of a "greatest hits" list with the details scantily fleshed out
to satisfy the requirements of a screen screenwriter who can squeeze everything
into an entertaining and pat 120-minute feature. You want to know more and can't but feel a bit cheated.
What might
deeper feelings there have been within Thompson when he had to fire Denny from
the band? He makes a note of the difficulty in weighing Denny's great talent
against her insecurity and hard-drinking. At this point in a much-detailed
story, we witness a conflicted choice to make sure that the band he co-founded
remains a stable entity for the sake of his free expression and reason to
exist. It's apparent that as much as he loved Denny and cherished her talent,
he felt it better that he and the rest of Fairport move ahead without her.
Thompson writes of this deftly but is sketchy on the emotional details. The
book is full of matters that cry for a fuller accounting, episodes such as
Thompson's eventual conversion to Sufism, meeting his eventual wife and
songwriting-performing partner, encounters, and music with John Lee Hooker and
Van Dyke Parks, and Linda Ronstadt. Incidents get mentioned, briefly described,
sometimes with significant poetic effect, but too often being a glancing
overview of a crowded with meaningful encounters and musical landmarks. In the
end, the style and amount of details are suitable for a making-of-the-band
movie or an outline for a limited series for a streaming service. As a book,
though, it's a slight effort often poetically expressed. Thompson has a
reputation as a potent lyricist who condenses emotional states and situations
to brief, evocative epiphanies. It may be the case that his habit of
compositional mind influenced his decision to avoid revealing too much of his
inner life. The subtitle of Beeswing: Fairport, Folk Rock,
and Finding My Voice, 1967–75, tells
us that the book covers only eight years of the author's career, hinting that
there's another part of the story to be told, another volume forthcoming. With
one book done, it would be a sweet deal if Thompson warms up to the idea that
he's now a writer and composes the next volume fearlessly, with verve, detail,
and nuance. Thompson is a magnificent
talent, and the world needs him to tell his tale of a critical and enthralling time in popular music history with the vividness it deserves.
(Originally published in The San Diego Troubadour. Used with permission).