POP MUSIC REVIEW : A Joker in the Deck : Richard Thompson Adds Farce to Acoustic Show

Richard Thompson’s talent has always been aces. Now he seems to have added a joker or two to his hand as well.

The British folk-rocker’s solo acoustic show at the Coach House Wednesday night was a wonderful, two-hour grab bag of strong new songs, familiar pleasures and uncanny surprises.

The familiar pleasures--familiar, at least, to the cult of fans who know him as one of rock’s richest one-stop repositories for singing, songwriting and guitar-playing excellence--included Thompson’s assured weave of tragedy and pathos, ire and droll wit, a regard for rock’s traditional roots, and a willingness to explore beyond their bounds. The joker in the deck was a seemingly new-found knack for farce.

Thompson always has been a pretty funny guy when he wants to be, especially on stage. But his sense of humor typically has been dry and ironic, his musical jokes the sort that draw a grin or a chuckle, but not a roar. This time, Thompson used a new tune of his own and a couple of borrowed ones to provoke belly laughs.

The show’s first farcical installment was “Now That I Am Dead,” written by John French for French, Frith, Kaiser and Thompson, a side-project consortium that allows Thompson to indulge some of his more offbeat passions. French, who knows a thing or two about offbeat passions from his days as Captain Beefheart’s drummer, may have written the song with Thompson in mind. It’s about a rocker who, after a lifetime of commercial neglect, finally wins wealth and fame. Unfortunately, this turnabout is posthumous. Thompson, who knows all about commercial neglect, played the dead star’s role with wicked glee. Putting on a Vincent Price monster-mash vibrato punctuated by ghoulish cackles, he sang a succession of comic verses along the lines of “Now that I am boxed, they say my music rocks--it’s taken on a new appeal.”

Better, because it was even stranger, was Thompson’s own “Psycho Street.” The song depicted a very British neighborhood populated with lunatics and perverts beyond even David Lynch’s ken: “A man sticks his neighbor’s cat on the barbecue and turns on the gas and says: ‘Are you going to talk, or am I going to get nasty?’ ”

More than the lyrics, which were the product of a fertile mind testing the limits of its power of warped imagining, the music made this song a delightfully crazed novelty. Thompson delivered the verses with a donnish, “Masterpiece Theater” intonation that echoed Viv Stanshall’s approach with the Bonzo Dog Band (that great, eccentric British humor-rock band of the 1960s that later spun off into the Rutles and various Monty Python productions). The chorus to “Psycho Street” was a jaunty, vaudevillian thing seemingly tailored for a barbershop quartet. Appended to all of that was some demonic, punkish guitar flailing and howling. It was a singular piece of music, to say the least.

To show that he also can mine tradition for broad laughs, Thompson closed with a Louis Jordan song, “Don’t Roll Those Bloodshot Eyes at Me,” redone rockabilly style with a punch line in every verse.

A feisty audience that was full of wisecracks and song requests helped loosen Thompson up to the point where the show took on a delightfully uncharted feeling. Asked to play the Who’s “Substitute,” a song he has done live in the past, Thompson instead embarked on a jokey, finger-snapping, a cappella rendition of “My Generation.” Then, caught up in the spirit, he picked up his guitar and gave the old anthem a proper rocking--and followed it for good measure with a burning, clenched “Substitute.”

Such antics gave the night a special, heady flavor, but Thompson, always more the tragedian than the comic, did not stint on emotional gravity. Running through his work is a deep sense that life is an agonizing business full of horrors and rife with moral outrages ranging from romantic betrayals to the exploitative rigging of whole social and economic systems. He painted those dark shades vividly, depicting the broken outcasts of “Down Where the Drunkards Roll” and wallowing in the utter hopelessness of “The End of the Rainbow.” Thompson was especially strong and eloquent on “Wall of Death” with its determination to face and embrace life’s most dangerous and precarious situations.

The high quality of the five new, unrecorded songs Thompson included in his 23-song set indicate that, at 41, he has suffered no creative let-up. The concert began with two excellent new numbers, “I Misunderstood,” a fine lover’s plaint, and “1952 Vincent Black Lightning,” in which a fleet, springy, bluegrass-tinged guitar propelled the vibrant tale of a doomed outlaw biker--a sort of “Bonnie and Clyde” on two wheels.

As always, Thompson’s guitar work was little short of astonishing. Few other rock guitarists can achieve the churning, obsessive quality with which he colored “Shoot Out the Lights” and “When the Spell is Broken.” He accomplished it with lurching rhythmic shifts, sudden notes bent and held to the point of stress fracture, and inexorable, hammering bass figures like the Indian war dance thrum of “When the Spell is Broken”--all harnessed for strictly expressive purposes, not mere show. The solo in “Down Where the Drunkards Roll” was a lovely display of lyricism, while the blazing country licks at the end of “Valerie” were propulsion personified. Thompson made his guitar sound like a train rumbling nearer and nearer, with whistles blowing. It was a fitting evocation from a rocker who, 22 years after his debut with Fairport Convention, still has his creative engines stoked and burning.