O.C. POP MUSIC REVIEW : Melancholy Man : Richard Thompson Roams Emotional Range at Coach House

If you ever want to short-circuit Richard Thompson while he’s performing, try shouting out: “Hey, play that really depressing song you do!”

Inasmuch as he seemingly has hundreds of tunes that fit the description, that should keep him pondering for a while. Broken hearts, disabled vets, fall-down drunks, soul-lost wanderers and a song about a dad telling his baby in the cradle how wretched life will be: Thompson’s got one for all occasions, delivered in a resonant baritone. The same way Eskimos have a hundred-odd words for defining the minutiae of snow, Thompson’s muse is finely attuned to the gradients of human failure.

The thing about the British singer/writer/guitarist’s glum songs, though, is that they’re exquisitely sad. The emotion and awareness in them run so deep and profound that they wind up being life asserting, weaving the broken strands of life into high art, with a polka beat no less at times.

Along with his sad bouquet, Thompson also has songs that are about as uproarious, whimsical, incisive and romantic as songs get. Combined in a 17-song set at the Coach House on Sunday night, they added up to a performance that came as close to assaying the range of human experience as art is likely to get.

Fortunately, Thompson also is a remarkably accessible entertainer, so the experience isn’t at all like having the Encyclopaedia Brittanica dumped on your head, unless you happen to be a guitar player. His mastery of the instrument is so awesome, and the emotion and intelligence he expresses through it so intense, that it appears to the rest of us poor plunkers that he must have signed a sulphurous pact in blood to achieve it.

Thompson’s vocabulary on the instrument spans 16th Century Celtic hornpipe tunes, Hot Club jazz, wild rockabilly and avant-garde atonalities. One of the joys of seeing him perform without a band is that his guitar becomes a one-man orchestra. The trade-off: His solos generally are a bit more earthbound than when he’s plugged in with a band, since he’s simultaneously providing his own accompaniment.

Sunday’s show offered the best of both worlds: Thompson was backed on acoustic bass by folk fellow-traveler Danny Thompson (no relation), best known for his folk-jazz hybrid work with Pentangle. He was perfect for the job, giving the music a solid foundation, adding lyrical commentary to vocal lines, engaging in a rarefied interplay with the guitar, and never stepping on Thompson’s subtle touches.

While Thompson’s “Shoot Out the Lights” can be a springboard for some of his most unfettered electric playing with his band, it usually comes up wanting when done on an acoustic. But with the bass slapping it around, Thompson’s solo was a jarring masterpiece, so well-matched to the menace of the lyrics about a brain gone bad that it caused goose bumps.

The Coach House gig was part of a short West Coast tour Thompson was doing as a warm-up to going in the studio next month. He broke in five new songs during the show, including the opening number, “Easy There, Steady Now,” about a person reeling from a breakup:

A jack-knife of a precious load

Spills its guts out over the road.

Excuse me, I had to smile,

Lost my grip, too, for a while.

I said easy there, steady now.

She didn’t have the decency

To sweep away what’s left of me.

I don’t have the presence of mind

To walk along that straight line.

I said easy there, steady now.

Another new song, “Mingus Eyes,” is about people pathetically affecting “Brando mumbles” and other personality traits, in order to look cool and because “it’s easy to live another man’s life.” “Taking My Business Elsewhere” is another of Thompson’s jilted love tunes, this one in a barroom ballad setting that could lend itself to a Sinatra interpretation.

On the comic side, Thompson debuted “MGB GT,” a very British response to ‘60s American car songs. Set to a 16th-Century traditional tune, the lyrics are full of references to obscure English car parts. “Two Left Feet,” from 1983, alternated between wildly rhymed verses about a clutzy dancer--”You’ve put me off my Cream of Wheat, Just get rid of those two left feet”--with jaw-dropping guitar solos. He also performed the rollicking polka sing-along “Don’t Step on My Jimmy Shands,” about a nerd at a party guarding his precious records by old-time bandleader Shands, who Thompson described as “Liberace in a kilt.”

Even his comic songs can have chilling overtones. “Read About Love” from his most recent album, “Rumor and Sigh” (1991), is a tune he described as “filling that gaping stylistic void between the Sex Pistols and Benny Hill.” It’s a driving, Who-like romp about a boy who learns about love only through naughty magazines: “He gave me a book, the cover was plain, Written by a doctor with a German name.” But at the same time the song is a tremendously sad commentary on how lovemaking--which can be the most profound of communications--gets reduced by some to preconceived maps and mechanics.

Love, being one of life’s more mystical and elusive things, usually gets a necessarily trite treatment in four-minute songs. Thompson, rather, most often traces the magnitude of love by delineating the sobering void of its absence. Two of his better efforts, “I Misunderstood” and “Waltzing’s for Dreamers,” were given beautiful readings Sunday. His lesser “Ghosts in the Wind” was upgraded to a new status by a moody new arrangement and some eerie bowed harmonics from Danny Thompson’s bass.

“1952 Vincent Black Lightning,” a remarkable folk-style tune of love and death played out on the seat of a vintage motorbike, was followed by a new song, “Shane and Dixie,” which Thompson aptly prefaced by saying, “Here’s the same thing: Boy meets girl--blood everywhere.” He closed the show with a raving version of “Shake, Rattle and Roll.”

It’s popular in some circles to dump on Orange County as a concert site, the presumption being that acts are at their best in more cultured areas such as Los Angeles. But even though Thompson’s L.A. stop this time was at the excellent McCabe’s in Santa Monica, the Coach House drew a far better and somewhat longer performance out of him.

The show was opened by banjo player Alison Brown, about whom it is possible to have mixed feelings. On one hand, she is a phenomenal talent, taking her five-string banjo into new musical areas with a rare dexterity and ease. Those virtues were heard to great effect during her recent tour backing Michelle Shocked.

But with her own quartet, Brown seemed to be plowing her instrumental prowess into sterile ground. As is the case with many young post-New Grass Revival players, there was considerable skill applied to emotionally vacant music that might more aptly be labeled Blue Age than New Grass. The eight-song set--mostly drawn from Brown’s current “Twilight Motel” album--only struck sparks with the closing uptempo tune, “Shoot the Dog.”