It was billed as “Loud & Rich,” sounding like a musical team that has been around for a while. But it’s hard to imagine a more disparate yet dynamic duo than Loudon Wainwright III and Richard 
Thompson. Playing a show at the Pabst Theater Friday night, they demonstrated a mutual love for folk classics, performing songs by Bob Dylan and country legend Marty Robbins, but the similarities ended there.
He was touted as the new Dylan when he landed on the scene in the 1970s, but Wainwright has more Broadway than bohemian in his often self-lacerating, autobiographical songs. The witty sense of play in his lyrics owes as much to Ira Gershwin or Cole Porter as goateed 60s Greenwich Village habitués, but he digs deep into his life and soul for material. His Pabst set was even more “family-oriented” than usual, offering confessional and bittersweet songs about his relationship with his mom, dad, (Loudon, Jr., a Life Magazine editor), and son (Rufus).
Despite Wainwright’s tales of alcoholism and familial dysfunction, there’s a conspiratorial joy in his music, a throw-your-head-back-and-wail kind of glee in revealing primal secrets, know
ing that we’re all tangled in similar, secretive webs of deceit and guilt. Though he’s more mid-Atlantic than New England, his work is cut from the same confessional cloth as Spaulding Gray.
Richard Thompson is no enemy of the shadows of the soul, but his music is more elemental than personal. While Wainwright seems to shout his stories from a therapist’s couch, Thompson’s are a dusky voiceover to a motorcycle ride through the British Midlands, steel-mill smokestacks whizzing by. Schooled in the traditions of the Celtic ballad—going back centuries—Thompson brings a whispery murmur to the lyrics, while his guitar suggests the violent abandon at the heart of his songs. Not that his playing is showy. Using both pick and finger-plucking (a “hybrid” guitar style), Thompson plays both rhythm and lead when he performs solo. There’s a percussive energy in his solo playing that rivals that of rock quartets with bass and drums going full-tilt. A guitarist whose playing serves his music without flash or ego, Thompson is quite simply the real thing.
PHOTOS BY CJ FOECKLER
