As a fan of a wide variety of popular (and not-so-popular) music from the 1950s (and sometimes even earlier) up through the present, one of my bucket list projects for years has been to put together a list of my 100 favorite songs of all time. At some point I decided that, once I got around to figuring that out, I could put it out on a blog, for the infinitesimally small proportion of the Internet world that might be interested. So, here we are. While the Top 100 will be a major focus, I also plan to post on a variety of other musical (and occasionally non-musical) topics, in which you may or may not be interested. (If a particular posting doesn’t ring your bell, you’re only a few clicks away from a dancing cat video on YouTube.)
“Cocaine Bear” includes such lines
as “An apex predator ... high on cocaine ... and you’re headed right towards
it” and “The bear! It f---ing did cocaine.”
“The Courage to Be Free” includes
such lines as “The failure to robustly wield authority permits the
unaccountable leviathan to metastasize.” (This is a description of the federal
government.)
…
What kind of things would you
text your friends while you consumed it?
“Cocaine Bear”: “cocaine bear is
phenomenal”
“The Courage to Be Free”: “This
book will never end. Yet is somehow only 262 pages long.”
“[We should] give children a window into the real past, as
the people living there saw it, rather than compress their reading material
into an eternal now. If our moral ideas are so self-evidently correct (and to
be clear, I think that in many cases they are), then it should be easy to train
children to recognize the past’s mistakes. In the process, we can teach them
that even people they love and admire are capable of grave errors.”
Table 102, Seat 4 – front and center,
4-person table. Exactly the same seat I had when I saw
him in 2019.
It happens that Richard Thompson was the last
live show I saw (January 22, 2020) before the pandemic shut things down.
That was at the Birchmere, and Zara Phillips was there to provide backing
vocals on several of the songs. Going back to check, about half of the material
overlapped between that show and this one.
After striding on stage in his black beret/pants/short-sleeved
shirt, Thompson showed that he had lost nothing in terms of voice, guitar
artistry, or sense of humor. Only a few of the songs were from this century; most
came from his Fairport Convention days, his albums with then-wife Linda Thompson,
and his 1990s efforts on Capitol – for better or worse, he may have the record (pun
intended) for most labels for which an act has ever recorded. While the
audience reacted most enthusiastically to the classics “Beeswing” and “1952
Vincent Black Lightning”, as well as the singalongs on the up-tempo “Johnny’s
Far Away” (his “cruise” song) and “My Daddy Is A Mummy”, they also paid rapt
attention to the ballads, such as the show-closing “Dimming Of The Day”. Thompson
also paid tribute to the late Jeff Beck (prior to “Walking The Long Miles Home”)
and Sandy Denny (with his performance of her “Who Knows Where The Time Goes?”).
At one point he broke into a few bars of “Stewball”, after someone asked whether
he had any “horse-racing songs”.
