Tag Archives: Caramoor Center for Music and The Arts

Could Richard Thompson Have a Hit Single?

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On the Friday night before the long July Fourth holiday weekend, I drove alone in my car beneath a dark, threatening sky. As I approached the turnoff to the hamlet of Chappaqua, New York, home of Bill and Hillary Clinton, the rain began to fall but I decided to move forward. A few miles north on the twisty turns of Route 22, the sheets of water — along with the snap, crackle, and pop of the thunder and lightening — forced me to pull off the main road to wait it out.

An outdoor summer concert is always a spin of the wheel when weather chooses to roll in, and I knew Richard Thompson had easily sold out the venue to which I was headed, the intimate Spanish Courtyard at Caramoor, which holds no more than five hundred souls, if that. On the grounds of what once was the summer estate of a prominent and wealthy New York family, the arts and music center is now a seasonal destination for fans of classical, opera, pop, jazz, and American roots music.

Fortunately there are several venues on the sprawling grounds of gardens and trails, and so the show was moved to the larger, tented Venetian Theater. The upside was twofold: more tickets could be sold to those who had previously been denied a seat and whose names sat on a waiting list, and we all kept dry.

I’ve seen Thompson on quite a few occasions over the years, so I was unsurprized when he dazzled and delighted the crowd this night with his usual mix of guitar wizardry, song selections from Fairport Convention and the repertoire he recorded with ex-wife Linda, and titles pulled from his voluminous solo work. With an always comical and interesting stage patter, he was both engaging and sentimental. Acknowledging the recent passing of fellow musician and friend Dave Swarbrick, Thompson spoke of the upcoming 50-year anniversary of Fairport, which he co-founded in 1967. To mark the occasion, he delivered a moving version of Sandy Denny’s “Who Knows Where the Time Goes,” which has become a standard at many of his concerts.

So the “hit single” thing…

Last year, as a bonus-trackon Thompson’s Jeff Tweedy-produced album Still, he introduced a song called “Fergus Laing,” which is about a wealthy developer who buys property and builds golf courses in Scotland. Sound familiar? It didn’t take much persuasion to get the Caramoor crowd to sing along with glee to the chorus:

Fergus he builds and builds
Yet small is his erection
Fergus has a fine head of hair
When the wind’s in the right direction

With the protest song movement of the 1960s merely a faint memory, it fascinates me that it takes a man from England who lives in Los Angeles to write a song that eviscerates with sarcasm and humor the man whom the Huffington Post describes daily in ways such as this:

Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liarrampant xenophoberacistmisogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims ― 1.6 billion members of an entire religion ― from entering the U.S.

I imagine it’s simply my little dream, but it would be quite the coup if “Fergus Laing” got picked up by social media and terrestrial radio only to spread as fast as the Pokemon Go app. Since nothing else seems able to stop the blonde-haired beast, maybe a song can.

With very few artists as of yet willing to stand up to the Trump Train (I do love the Dixie Chicks), many people might enjoy having an anthem to raise their voices to. Perhaps with just a little promotional push, “Fergus Laing” can stand beside “Eve of Destruction” and “I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore.”

Here’s the lyrics, and at the bottom is Thompson performing it. (Yes, You Tube’s spelling is incorrect. Let that not deter you. Raise your voice.)

Fergus Laing is a beast of a man
He stitches up and fleeces
He wants to manicure the world
And sell it off in pieces
He likes to build his towers high
He blocks the sun out from the sky
In the penthouse the champagne’s dry
And slightly gassy

Fergus Laing, he works so hard
As busy as a bee is
Fergus Laing has 17 friends
All as dull as he is
His 17 friends has 17 wives
All the perfect shape and size
They wag their tails and bat their eyes
Just like Lassie

Fergus he builds and builds
Yet small is his erection
Fergus has a fine head of hair
When the wind’s in the right direction

Fergus Laing and his 17 friends
They live inside a bubble
There they withdraw and shut the door
At any sign of trouble
Should the peasants wail and vent
And ask him where the money went
He’ll simply say, it’s all been spent
On being classy

Fergus’ buildings reach the sky
Until you cannot see ‘um
He thinks the old stuff he pulls down
Belongs in a museum
His fits are famous on the scene
The shortest fuse, so cruel, so mean
But don’t call him a drama queen
Like Shirley Bassey

Fergus Laing he flaunts the law
But one day he’ll be wired
And as they drag him off to jail
We’ll all shout, “You’re fired!”

This was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside on the No Depression website.

Photo credit: Pamela Littky / richardthompson-music.com

Bli Kjent High Plains Jamboree

1455394470_High_Plains_Jamboree_Photo_by_Ali_CopelandThey may not smoke marijuana in Muskogee, but they sure do love country music in places like Vinstra, Gulsrud, and Seljord. Last weekend, just a couple of days before the Austin-based group High Plains Jamboree took off for a few weeks of concerts throughout Switzerland and into Norway, I got a chance to see them perform at the American Roots Music Festival on the grounds of Caramoor Center for Music and The Arts, a short ride north of Manhattan.

Aristotle is credited with saying, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” To his point, while the four musicians in HPJ are each outstanding and successful on their own, together they create a sound very different and unique. While guitar, fiddle, mandolin, banjo, upright bass, and close harmony vocals screams “bluegrass,” HPJ’s vibe is a modern country-western style, where song composition, lyrics, and virtuoso performance take them to a different plane (pun intended) than other stringbands out on the road today.

Last April, I stumbled upon a late-2015 album titled Brennen Leigh Sings Lefty Frizzell, and it immediately became one of my favorite song collections that I still can’t stop listening to. Not being familiar with her previous work, I discovered that Leigh was a founding member of HPJ, that she often writes and tours with her partner Noel McKay as a duo, has had songs recorded by Sunny Sweeney, the Carper Family, and Lee Ann Womack, and, as I discovered when I saw the band perform, is a smokin’ hot mandolin player.

Noel McKay is a songwriter from Texas who met Guy Clark back in 1993, and together they wrote “El Coyote,” which appears on Clark’s Grammy-winning My Favorite Picture of You album. Performing as the McKay Brothers with sibling Hollin, Gurf Morlix produced their 2003 album and said, “Noel was just starting to become a really good songwriter. I saw it coming. Then he hooked up with Brennen, who is fantastically talented. They became a couple and everybody was so pleased about that.”

Morlix also produced the Leigh-McKay duet release Before the World Was Made in 2013 and adds, “On top of being extremely fine human beings who can both play guitar and sing really well, it’s the writing. These songs are really sophisticated.”

Born in Kentucky and raised in Alaska, fiddler Beth Chrisman moved to Austin back in 2006 and is a member of the Carper Family. Their debut studio album Back When was named Best Country Album by the 2012 Independent Music Awards. The band has performed on Mountain Stage and A Prairie Home Companion. Chrisman has recorded and toured with Alice Gerrard, John C. Reilly, Hjames Hand, and the Heartless Bastards. In addition to really tasty fiddlin’, she has an incredible voice that soars as much in harmony as when she takes a solo.

Bassist and oldtime banjo player Simon Flory is an interesting dude from Indiana who has played throughout the Midsouth with bluegrass legend Donny Catron (Tennessee Gentlemen, Jesse McReynolds, Doyle Lawson). He also studied and taught at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music, and after working in the bass boat industry, scrapping metal, logging cedar trees, hauling hay and working cows on ranches, he sold his truck and his pistol to record a solo album, Unholy Town.

What really worked for me when I saw their set was how they each took turns at vocals. The harmonies came at you in various combinations, instruments were switched around, their staging and positions shifted. I’ve got to tell you: I love this band.

You can see them in Norway this month, and then Leigh and McKay will do dates in the UK before the band comes together again for August dates in Alaska. Check out their website for more shows (Brooklyn 9/25), pick up or stream their EP, and fly off into the depths of the interwebs in search of their various projects and videos.

While the whole is great, the parts are as equally satisfying. Good stuff.

This post was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside on the No Depression website.

Photo by Ali Copeland