doolittle

The Pixies expanded their sonic pallet with the surreal mix of polished surf pop, primal punk noise, country & western, reggae, and brooding balladry that comprise this alternative rock and roll animal.  The band had built up a reputation for their aggressive alternative sound with their debut EP 'Come On Pilgrim' and its full length followup 'Surfer Rosa'.  For their next album they decided to work with producer Gil Norton, who also engineered the sessions at Downtown Recorders in Boston, Massachusetts and Carriage House Studios in Stamford, Connecticut.   The album features Black Francis on vocals and rhythm guitar;  Kim Deal on bass guitar, vocals, and slide guitar on "Silver";  Joey Santiago on lead guitar and backing vocals;  David Lovering on drums, lead vocal on "La La Love You", and bass guitar on "Silver";   with the addition of Arthur Fiacco and Ann Rorich on cello, and Karen Karlsrud and Corine Metter on violin for "Monkey Gone to Heaven". 

The working title for the album was 'Whore'; but Black Francis decided to change it too 'Doolittle' from a lyric in the song "Mr. Grieves":   "I thought people were going to think I was some kind of anti-Catholic or that I'd been raised Catholic and trying to get into this Catholic naughty-boy stuff...A monkey with a halo, calling it Whore, that would bring all kinds of shit that wouldn't be true. So I said I'd change the title."

 Dave Lovering    “We didn’t feel like we were making a masterpiece.  I guess I can see that it’s a classic now. At the time of its release, I just thought of it as another Pixies album. It was the next thing we were doing...When we did 'Doolittle' with Gil, the production became more polished and pro.  The songs were more accessible, too, which just might have been where we were going as a band. Not to say that I didn’t like it; in fact, I was extremely proud of 'Doolittle' when I first heard it being played back. I couldn’t believe it was us – it sounded so big and accomplished...It’s a great record.  After all these years, it’s like it hasn’t aged. Time sort of caught up with it.”

 Kim Deal reflects:    "It’s OK actually. I think Charles’ singing is really strong, I think it’s a lot better now. I think his singing is really good, so…maybe if he couldn’t hit the notes the songs wouldn’t have aged very well. Some singers write really high when they’re younger...It felt different but it was like… we were gone from our home. I can’t even remember what state we recorded it in now."

Black Francis AKA Frank Black AKA Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IV considers:  "I’m very much about the moment, not necessarily in my life, but in my music. When I’m making music, or performing music or writing music, I’m just very much about what I’m doing at the moment, and it doesn’t require different hats really, it doesn’t require different ways of thinking. For example, I really like playing with musicians that are really great, but I also really like playing with musicians who are not great — they’re just simple musicians because the goal is the same. As long as everyone understands, we have to make this moment, we have to make this song or performance as good as we can, and you can be really rough about it or you can be really inept about it, but there’s a spirit of 'We’ve gotta make this good' — as long as everyone’s on that page, it doesn’t really matter...It might be a nostalgic [thing] for certain members of the audience, but it’s not really [nostalgic] for me. It’s part of my repertoire, my canon of songs; it’s what I do. It’s not like in 1989 I was trying a different kind of music altogether, or something that was about the moment in fashion. It’s hard for me to think about it in terms of nostalgia. I think that it’s all gotten so blurry anyway with all of the different pop genres. Everything is essentially so derivative that I think it’s pretty rare that you get a totally new form of popular music.  I mean, think about something like hip-hop and rap records, for example: There are a couple of hip-hop records that I’m very familiar with that came out, like, 25 years ago. They were, like, doing the rap 25 years ago, and that has become such a big part of the mainstream cultural vocabulary. It’s hard to say, 'What really is new?' There may be new tags, but what popular music form would you say — I’m not saying there aren’t any — but to me, the last new thing that I can remember that was really, truly new, is rap and hip-hop music...I like the Iggy Pop quote: 'It’s all disco.' I totally get it, I totally get it, it’s all disco."

'Doolittle' became the band's biggest success, going to number ninety-eight in the US (eventually being certified platinum), sixty-six in France, fifty-three in the Netherland, eighteen in the Netherlands, and number eight in the UK (where it has been certified gold).  It has sold over a million copies worldwide and has been cited as one of the greatest albums of all time by numerous music publications.  







http://www.pixiesmusic.com/‎










"Here Comes Your Man"



"Monkey Gone to Heaven" 



"Debaser" was inspired by the silent surrealist short film by the Spanish director Luis Buñuel and artist Salvador Dalí 'Un Chien Andalou'  (An Andalusian Dog) from 1929.   
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVyS9JwtFoQ









'Doolittle' 
full album 



All tracks were written by Black Francis, except where noted.

"Debaser"  – 2:52
"Tame"  – 1:55
"Wave of Mutilation"  – 2:04
"I Bleed"  – 2:34
"Here Comes Your Man"  – 3:21
"Dead"  – 2:21
"Monkey Gone to Heaven"  – 2:56
"Mr. Grieves"  – 2:05
"Crackity Jones"  – 1:24
"La La Love You"  – 2:43
"No. 13 Baby"  – 3:51
"There Goes My Gun"  – 1:49
"Hey"  – 3:31
"Silver" (Francis/Deal)  – 2:25
"Gouge Away"  – 2:45



demos

secret treaties

Blue Öyster Cult took their cagey career to new heights with the diabolical dominance and subhuman submission of this flaming jet powered harvest.  'Secret Treaties' is the third and final installment of their 'black and white' period after their eponymous debut and 'Tyranny and Mutation'.   The album was recorded at  CBS Studios in New York City with Eric Bloom on lead vocals, stun guitar, and keyboards;  Donald "Buck Dharma" Roeser on lead guitar and backing vocals;  Allen Lanier on keyboards, rhythm guitar, and synthesizers;  Joe Bouchard on bass and backing vocals;  Albert Bouchard on drums and lead vocals on 'Dominance and Submission'.  The Bouchard brothers and Bloom share lead vocals on 'Cagey Cretins'.  Murray Krugman and Sandy Pearlman produced the sessions.  

Bloom says:   “['Secret Treaties'] is my personal favorite. We had a band house in Eatons Neck, New York. I lived there by myself. By this point, everybody else had their own apartments or lived with girlfriends, so when the band left, I’d be there with all the guitars and equipment. I would work on ideas and tunes, some of which became songs like ME 262.  'Secret Treaties' has been the basis of our live act since it came out. A lot of the fans love the songs on it, and it’s an album we feel very strongly about. It’s held up beautifully.  The record has been called a blueprint for a lot of metal, but I can’t really speak about labels. That’s something somebody else thought of. When you write an album, you don’t sit there and say, ‘I’m going to write a proto-metal record.’ You just write what you write ...  I believe the ME-262 on the cover of 'Secret Treaties' was a tribute to technology rather than any kind of political statement...I think the umlaut [in the band's name] had a bit of tongue-in-cheek humor about it plus it made the band’s name look cool in a way."

Roeser reflects:   "I was personally schooled by our early lyricists, Sandy Pearlman and Richard Meltzer. When I was a kid I barely listened to words at all. I was very much into the music and very much interested in musicianship and less about lyrical content  as it was typically some teenage love song. But I got to appreciate lyrical content in our early days with the original band. That's carried through as an aesthetic with Blue Öyster Cult to where we couldn't write trivial songs. (laughs) It wouldn't suit us at all... Through Sandy's words, we considered ourselves a literary band. That and cinema is what we shoot for. We try to really create a picture so we are always mindful of that, of creating an experience for the listener...When we first met Patti [Smith] she just about to make the transition from poet to performing artist. There was actually some talk of having Blue Öyster Cult be her band. Now obviously that didn't happen and she began to work with Lenny Kaye and the band that she has developed out of that. We never actually wrote songs together as an intentional project, what we would do is Patti would give us a lyric or we would go in her book of writings and take a section of something and create songs from it...As a listener I really like melody. One thing I notice is that the older I get the more melodic I like to be as a listener and as a player. The energy and the angst of heavy music is appealing to youth but it seems like the older I get the more melody I want to hear. If that makes me a fuddy duddy, so be it.  Melodically I have to have that to satisfy myself and my playing in general. I always want to please myself and entertain myself. Okay, you can play fast or play a lot of notes, but for me everything you do has got to have a reason...'Secret Treaties' is really like the culmination of the first three records which sort of link conceptually in my mind. 'Secret Treaties' is Sandy Pearlman's concept of what the band was and us really feeling our way creating what it was."

'Secret Treaties' went to fifty-four in Canada and fifty-three in the US.  It was named one of the albums of the year by NME and was voted  "Top Rock Album of All Time" by a Melody Maker critics poll.  It has been certified gold.  





http://www.blueoystercult.com/

 'Secret Treaties' 
full album:

Side A :

00:00 - Career of Evil (Patti Smith Albert Bouchard)

04:00 - Subhuman (Eric Bloom)

08:38 - Dominance and Submission (Bloom, A. Bouchard)

14:02 - ME 262 (Bloom, Donald Roeser)

Side B :

18:49 - Cagey Cretins (Richard Meltzer A. Bouchard)

22:05 - Harvester of Eyes (Meltzer, Bloom, Roeser)

26:47 - Flaming Telepaths (Bloom, A. Bouchard, Roeser)

32:06 - Astronomy (A. Bouchard, Joe Bouchard)

chicago transit authority

Chicago Transit Authority created a moving synthesis of jazz and rock and a serious social statement with the free form sonic experimentation, bluesy jams, and brassy pop of this liberating introduction.  The group started from a group of students at Chicago's DePaul University.  After playing in Chuck Madden's cover band The Missing Links; saxophonist Walter Parazaider, guitarist Terry Kath, and drummer Danny Seraphine left to form their own group The Big Thing with occasional trumpet player Lee Loughnane.  They invited  trombonist James Pankow (who had just transferred to DePaul University from Quincy College) into the fold and then keyboardist Robert Lamm who was leading Bobby Charles and the Wanderers at the time.  Pankow remembers:   "We had a get together in Walter's apartment on the north side of Chicago.  It was Danny, Terry, Robert, Walter, Lee, and myself, and we agreed to devote our lives and our energies to making this project work...We figured that the only people with horn sections that were really making any noise were the soul acts; so we kind of became a soul band doing James Brown and Wilson Pickett stuff."

While touring as a sextet, they met up with Parazaider's friend from DePaul Jimmy Guercio who had become a producer for CBS Records. He was very impressed and told them he would be in touch.   In the meantime, they toured with another group The Exceptions and caught the attention of bass player Peter Cetera:   "I had heard a lot about these guys.  I was just floored 'cause they were doing songs that nobody else was doing, and in different ways. They were doing the Beatles' "Magical Mystery Tour" and "Got To Get You Into My Life" and different versions of rock songs with horns...At the end of the two-week stint, I was out of the Exceptions and into the Big Thing."

According to  Loughnane, it was the final piece of the puzzle:   "We needed a bass player at the time.  Robert was playing the bass pedals on the organ. He did a pretty good job, but there just wasn't enough bottom with the bass pedals. You needed a real bass in the band. And we needed a tenor voice. We had two baritones (Lamm and Kath), so we had midrange and lower notes covered. But we needed a high voice for the same reason that you have three horns. You have trumpet, tenors and trombone. You cover as much range harmonically as you can, and we wanted to do the same thing vocally. When Peter joined the band, that solidified our vocals. You could get more color, musically, and we started building from there."

When Guercio came back again he was blown away by their development and urged them to keep working on their original material.  He agreed to become their manager, had them move out to Los Angeles, and came up with a new name:  Chicago Transit Authority.  Pankow recalls:    "He got a little two-bedroom house near the Hollywood Freeway, and he told us that he was ready.  We made the move in June of 1968. We threw all of our lives in U-haul trailers and drove across the country. The married guys left their wives at home at first because they couldn't afford to bring their families out. We got disturbance calls from the neighbors five times a day because all we did was practice day and night."  

The group spent seven months playing around small venues in L.A., building a following, honing their sound, and scraping by.  They were given two opportunities to play for CBS executives and were turned down both times.  At one point Guercio had to take a job producing another band.  Parazaider reveals:   "Jimmy called me up, and be asked me to ask the other guys, would it be okay if he did the Blood, Sweat & Tears second album.  At first I was going, 'Well, jeez, man, that's horns, and what's going on?' and I voiced that opinion to him. He says, 'To tell you the truth, I really haven't recorded horns as a whole band situation. I've recorded horns that did sort of blaps here and there or little parts here and there. This would be a good way for me to learn how to record horns.' I don't think it was lip service, because he really hadn't recorded horns per se. We were basically a band with integrated horns in the band, not as backup horns. I hate to believe him on this because, if you think about it, what the horn section did, from the start, was a lot different from Blood, Sweat & Tears, and the sound was copied many times over after we got the Chicago horn sound. So, I think with Blood, Sweat & Tears the horns were recorded in a much different way than Chicago's horns were. Of course, if you look at the two bands, you would say that they were really a jazz-rock 'n' roll band, where we were different. They called us a jazz-rock band after Blood, Sweat and Tears faded away, but we were basically a rock 'n' roll band with horns."

Guercio cut a demo and that started a buzz in the industry and led to CBS president Clive Davis making the call to sign them.  They were flown to New York and given only ten days to record their debut album.  Parazaider confesses:    "We actually went in and started making 'Chicago Transit Authority' and found out we knew very little about what we were doing.  I had done commercial jingles in Chicago, but this was a totally different thing for all of us. The first song was 'Does Anybody Really Know What Tine It Is?' We tried to record it as a band, live, all of us in the studio at once. How the hell do you get seven guys playing it right the first time? I just remember standing in the middle of that room. I didn't want to look at anybody else for fear I'd throw them off and myself, too. That's how crazy it got. I think that we actually realized after we didn't get anything going that it had to be rhythm section first, then the horns, and that's basically how we recorded a lot of the albums."

The sessions took place at Columbia Recording Studios with Peter Cetera on bass, vocals, and agogo bells;  Terry Kath on guitar and vocals;  Robert Lamm on keyboard, vocals, and maracas;  Lee Loughnane on trumpet, vocals, and claves;  James Pankow on trombone and cowbell;  Walter Parazaider on woodwinds, vocals, and tambourine;  and Danny Seraphine on drums.  With three songwriters (Kath, Lamm, and Pankow) in their ranks, they had enough material for a double album; but Colombia would only go for it if they would take a cut in their royalties.  It was agreed and 'Chicago Transit Authority' was released in April of 1969.  It took a month for it to chart, with college students embracing the sound on FM album oriented radio stations.  It would peak at number seventeen and spend over one hundred and seventy one weeks on the album chart, eventually going double platinum.   When they went on tour, the group was sued by the actual Chicago Transit Authority over the their name and agreed to shorten it to Chicago.  

Parazaider ponders:  "Your life dream is to have a hit record.  It was amazing because we were close friends, we had gone through all of this upheaval of leaving Chicago, moving to L.A. at a young age, leaving our families, just rolling the dice. We stuck real close together, kept everybody's ego in check. I think for some guys in the group it was harder to cope with the success than others. I don't think there were any of us that sat down around my kitchen table that day in February of '67 and said, 'Hey, our goal is to be famous.' The one good thing that seemed to help us is, we were the faceless band behind that logo."

'Chicago Transit Authority'  went to number nine in the UK.  Lamm says the response from the crowds during their first European tour gave them more confidence:   "Even we were not aware of how edgy and different the first album was.  We were just doing what we were doing, and we were hoping that it was different enough for people to notice it was different. But when international audiences heard the album, it just really stopped them cold. We played in clubs all over Europe, and the audience took to it much more readily than we had experienced anywhere in the States. When we came back, the album had gone gold, and we began headlining a little bit, but still the feeling was that American audiences didn't really get it. They got that the band was becoming popular, but we didn't have the sense that they were hearing the music for what it was. So, I think laying in Europe and being treated to a certain musical and artistic respect was eye-opening and really encouraging to the band. It made us realize that what we were doing was substantial, was artistic, and was respectable rather than just this pop commodity that we always felt like in the States, because of the audience, the press, and the way the record company regarded us. That success in Europe and the feeling that we got from the regard we were given as artists really told us in a way that has lasted to this day that this is more than just kid stuff."






http://www.chicagotheband.com/







"Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?" went to number seven in 1970.  





"Beginnings" made it to number seven in 1971.  





"Questions 67 and 68"  
only charted at number seventy-one in 1969; but would peak at number twenty-four when it was re-released two years later.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qupeVLtXWLY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whMZ0Th9-4M




"I'm a Man"  hit number forty-nine in 1971.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYzxErU-UjY








'Chicago Transit Authority' 
full album:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHRJ5qFPfnQ

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=ALBTKoXRg38BBkSKHx-O09hi5KK4G716vl





Side One
1. "Introduction" Terry Kath  lead vocals:  Kath 6:35
2. "Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?" Robert Lamm  lead vocals:  Lamm 4:35
3. "Beginnings" Lamm  lead vocals:  Lamm 7:54
Side Two
4. "Questions 67 and 68" Lamm  lead vocals:  Peter Cetera/Lamm 5:03
5. "Listen" Lamm  lead vocals:  Lamm 3:22
6. "Poem 58" Lamm  lead vocals:  Lamm 8:35
Side Three
7. "Free Form Guitar" Kath 6:47
8. "South California Purples" Lamm  lead vocals:  Lamm 6:11
9. "I'm a Man" Steve Winwood/Jimmy Miller  lead vocals:  Kath/Cetera/Lamm 7:43
Side Four
10. "Prologue, August 29, 1968" James William Guercio 0:58
11. "Someday (August 29, 1968)" James Pankow/Lamm  lead vocals:  Lamm/Cetera 4:11
12. "Liberation" Pankow  lead vocals:  Kath 14:38

on fyre

The Lyres arose from the ashes of DMZ to create this nostalgic punch drunk garage punk prosopopoeia.  Jeff  'Monoman'  Connolly was the driving force of both underground Boston bands:   "I remember being four years old and the day we moved away from Albany, New York....We said goodbye, visited some family who had an electronic piano/organ, but it looked just like a regular piano. Also, I used to bang away at my grandma’s baby grand when we stayed with them in New Hampshire. There was a Sears Silvertone record player that my parents owned and they had a few LPs, not much. I think I really liked Prokofiev’s 'Peter and the Wolf', that got heavy play, and also '76 Trombones'…That was kinda the '96 Tears' of its day...[When I joined DMZ the music scene in Boston was] very local, not much, the real rock ‘n’ roll groups were very underground. Then in the spring of 1976, it just kinda appeared all of the sudden everybody wanted in on this thing and it turned into a scene, almost overnight. Remember, this was the 200-year Bicentennial Anniversary of the USA, and people in Boston were very energized already...The music that DMZ and Lyres were perpetrating was not the kind that lent itself to great success on a commercial scale. People [like David Robinson] left to go back to University, to better-paying bands, like what became the Cars. DMZ and Lyres have musical leanings that make stability of the line-ups nearly impossible. I get along with almost everybody who’s been involved...My favorite and first band [whose records I collected] were the Searchers and they were the role model for me as far as searching out undervalued songs and ideas. That pretty much underscores 99.9% of all my activity. There’s that intoxicating rush of “hearing” a song that’s been there all along, that makes you say, 'Where was I? How come it took me so long to find this?'...Some of these rock tunes translate better than others. DMZ and Lyres always had a bit of the 'think tank' streak in it. All the other bands did it to some extent, but we were the ones that “painted ourselves into a ’60s corner,” according to one big guy ... When we recorded the stuff for 'On Fyre', we weren’t thinking at all!  ...  We've always stayed in our category, waiting for people to like us for what we are, not what they could make us be...Every record I've made for Ace Of Hearts [record label] was done completely live in the studio." 

'On Fyre' features Jeff Conolly on vocals, organ, and tambourine;  Danny McCormack on guitar;   Paul Murphy on drums;   and Rick Coraccio on bass and backgroud vocals.  The album spearheaded the neo-80's garage revival and became a cult classic.  






Don't Give It up Now
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ba0bybFE2PM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=U0dIi--fxfk



Help You Ann 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LqF5P3Fa84

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cpboa7u1KAA





'On Fyre' 
full album:




1. Don't Give It up Now  (Jeff "Monoman" Conolly)
2. Help You Ann - 4:09  (Conolly) 
3. I Confess - 6:40  (Ray Graffia / Jerry Kollenberg )
4. I'm Telling You Girl - 9:32 (Conolly)
5. Love Me Till the Sun Shines - 11:12  (Dave Davies)
6. I Really Want You Right Now - 15:11 (Conolly) 
7. Tired of Waiting - 18:51 (Ray Davies)
8. Dolly - 21:59 (Conolly) 
9. Soapy - 26:18 (Lyres)
10. The Way I Feel About You - 30:03 (Lyres)
11. Not Like the Other One - 32:47 (Conolly) 
12. Never Met a Girl Like You Before - 36:10 (Ray Davies)
13. How Could Have I Done All of These Things - 39:10 (Conolly) 
14. Swing Shift - 42:44  (Lyres)
15. Trying Just to Please You - 46:51 (Conolly) 
16. Busy Body - 51:17 (Lyres)
17. Someone Who'll Treat You Right Now - 53:34 (Conolly) 
18. She Pays the Rent - 56:40 (Conolly) 
19. You've Been Wrong - 58:58 (Conolly) 
20. I'll Try Anyway - 1:02:55 (Tony Waddington)

i want to see the bright lights tonight

Richard and Linda Thompson found perseverance and a frail beauty in the drunken mess of this highwire act of heartbreak and hope.  Linda was born Linda Pettifer and changed her name to Linda Peters in college when she began performing in coffee houses around London:   "I come from Scotland, and my parents hated anything English. It was all about the Yanks to them, so I heard American pop as well. When I first moved to London in the early '60s there was a lot of folk stuff going on. Phil Ochs was around, and Tim Buckley. Dylan was in town at one point doing 'Madhouse on Castle Street', a play on the BBC. They all played at the Troubadour and dingy basements around town. There was a brief moment in the '60s when everything seemed to be a folk thing. Like everything's a Starbucks now... On a typical night [at the legendary Troubadour club] Sandy Denny would be there, or Annie Briggs, Bert Jansch, John Renbourn. Nick Drake sitting in the corner. Alan Lomax was around in those days, too. Didn't stay open that late. Maybe one-ish, and then we would all go to people's flats...I knew [Sandy Denny] before [she was in Fairport Convention]. I knew her when she was a nurse. She used to come down to London to sing. She was brilliant. She was my best friend."

Linda also recorded advertising jingles and was eventually invited to take part in the recording of 'Rock On' as part of the supergroup The Bunch with Denny and other members of Fairport Convention, including Richard Thompson:   "He was a very intense young man and I was a flibbertigibbet. And you know how that goes...a weekend hippie...I was not really into that peace and love and brown rice thing. I just thought the clothes were nice, the beads and the bells."

That same year Linda sang on Richard's solo debut 'Henry, the Human Fly' and the two were married in October.   Richard reflects back:    "Fairport was a  folk punk band and we played the sort of music that was a mixture between traditional music and rock music ... I left Fairport as a gut reaction and didn't really know what I was doing, except writing. I was writing stuff and it seemed interesting and I thought it would be fun to make a record. And at the same time – 70–71 – I was doing a lot of session work as a way of avoiding any serious ideas about a career ... When I left Fairport Convention, it wasn’t over personal differences; I just knew I wanted to do something different musically. I was feeling claustrophobic being in a band, so I got out. It was a gut feeling. Going solo didn’t occur to me. I’d met Linda during the making of 'Liege & Lief', because she was in the next-door studio recording a cornflakes commercial, and I enjoyed working with her and having her voice as a vehicle. But even that wasn’t really planned. It was simply that it was a fantastic way to hear the songs I’d written.  We looked at who we were and what we were doing and decided the only way we could survive was in the folk world, and so for at least a year around 'I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight' we played the clubs. It was great fun because it was novel for me to be independent. I don’t think we ever stayed in hotels – we’d sleep on the promoter’s floor. Although, at a certain point, we felt we’d outgrown the folk circuit and got a manager to book us bigger gigs.  People talk about ‘doom and gloom from the tomb’, and I think I’ve always gravitated towards that side of things. It’s partly to do with my growing up. I’d been raised in a part-Scottish household with Walter Scott’s novels and the poetry of Robbie Burns and the border ballads on the bookshelves. The language of all that stuff was on the heavy side. But I don’t really see it as doomy. It’s just taking things seriously… I'm not that affected by surroundings when I write music.  There is an inner landscape that you draw on, a sort of inner Brontë. It's a bleakness in which I always see songs happening. It's a fictional world. Maybe it doesn't even exist."

'I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight' was produced by Richard Thompson and John Wood at at Sound Techniques in London and features  Linda Thompson on vocals;   Richard Thompson on guitar, vocals, Hammered dulcimer, mandolin, whistle, piano, electric piano, and harmonium;  Timmy Donald on drums;  Pat Donaldson on bass guitar;  John Kirkpatrick on accordion and concertina;  Simon Nicol on dulcimer;  Brian Gulland and Richard Harvey on krummhorn;  Royston Wood and Trevor Lucas on backup vocals.   The album was recorded quickly in May on 1973; but would not be released until April of 1974.   The bleak songs about death and futility are tender and emotional, sometimes giddily so.  Linda says she enjoys the dark subject matter:   "That's the kind of traditional music that I like...They're just your standard, run-of-the-mill murder ballads, mate. [laughs] It's what happens every day...You know how they say comedians are the most miserable people on God's earth? I'm the opposite. I'm very easygoing in everyday life, but I've obviously got the soul of Ingmar Bergman."






http://richardthompson-music.com/



http://lindathompsonmusic.com/







"Withered and Died"   3:24
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5RRbQFSSR4&feature=kp

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6D2DobNZMtA






"Down Where the Drunkards Roll"   4:05
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXdx1fwEKrw






"We Sing Hallelujah"   2:49
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlTyMPqI508





"The End of the Rainbow"   3:55
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTZWXrVWtvg










'I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight' full album



All tracks written by Richard Thompson (except for "Together Again", by Buck Owens).

Side one
1. "When I Get to the Border" 3:26
2. "The Calvary Cross" 3:51
3. "Withered and Died" 3:24
4. "I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight" 3:07
5. "Down Where the Drunkards Roll" 4:05
Side two
6. "We Sing Hallelujah" 2:49
7. "Has He Got a Friend for Me" 3:32
8. "The Little Beggar Girl" 3:24
9. "The End of the Rainbow" 3:55

10. "The Great Valerio" 5:22