Barbelith Underground > Radio & Music > YOUR MY GEETAR HERO!!!

Seth: Eddie Van Halen - the greatest of all time, bar none. Hendrix was a pussy.

When, exactly, did you go all wrong in the head?

Let's face it, Eddie's a bit... well... limited, isn't he? Mood-wise, I mean. He's fucking useless on, say, a ballad, or a slow blues. He's very, very good, for all that, and within his limited field he is absolutely the best he is at what he does.

But he's essentially a genre unto himself, and only functional within that genre. Does that make him the best of the best? No. It makes him the World's Strongest Cripple.

Jimi, on the other hand, had range for days.

But I'm not here to talk about Jimi Hendrix, friends—many already have, and more articulately than I could hope to. No, I'm here to talk about Richard Thompson, who can play anything and make it altogether his own, who oozes musicianship from every pore—an aboslute geek for traditional music and jazz and 20th C. avant-garde, who can play a show called "1000 Years of Popular Music" and demonstrate knowledge of every one of those years, covering Thomas Tallis to ABBA and everything in between, who can filter all those influences through a folk-rock sensibility and always sound thoroughly like himself. Always different: always the same.

Not to say he doesn't play well with others: sideman of choice for Nick Drake, Suzanne Vega, various permutations of the Finn Bros./Crowded House, Loudon Wainwright—and Lee Konitz (who played with Miles at the Birth of the Cool, and knows from talent; one day it's Pere Ubu's David Thompson on the phone, then it's Bonnie Raitt. Or T-Bone Burnett, or the Golden Palominos, or Dagmar Krause. For fuck's sakes, he's played with both J.J. and John Cale!

Tears it up on acoustic and electric (and banjo, and mandolin, and hammered dulcimer, and and and...). Breathtaking technique: he can play clean and pristine when he wants to, or gawdawful sloppy when he needs to. Shimmering, achingly melodic showers of notes; inarticulate waves of atonal scree; picking so intricate you'd swear there's got to be another guy in there with him; he's got more arrows in his quiver than any other three guitartists you'd care to name. He can make a rocker soar or howl or twitch or stagger; the slow ones can squeeze your heart or freeze your blood or make your flesh creep.

Richard Thompson is mighty. His guitar kills demons.

Plus he gets mad props for a legendary show at Lupo's Heartbreak Hotel in providence—the last show he ever played with his soon-to-be ex-wife Linda; she quit the band—and the marriage—after the main set, and he came out to play the encore after she'd smashed a bottle over his head to drive home the point. Blood down his face, glass in his hair, and a bitter song in his black, black heart: what else can you do, really, but play it loud?