I don't think I directly answered the question, but yeah, I intend to travel to do these interviews. Richard Thompson lives in LA now, and I think Linda lives in Boston, although Joe Boucher would have to confirm or deny that impression. I don't know anything about the money.

He's been in Santa Monica for years, but I thought she lived in London. As of the Fashionably Late tour she still lived there. I'm not having any luck finding anything more recent. I'll bookmark the interviews I find & send them to you. Love this from a KGSR interview:

Q: You've been married to Steve Kenis, who is a motion picture agent, for about 20 years. How did he feel about this reunion and the fact that you use your surname (as) your stage name still?

A: Oh, well, he's in the movie business so he completely understands that. He's from Hollywood. He's a Los Angeles person. I think if he thought I was going to sell records, he'd let me remarry Richard.

Unfortunately the link to page 2 is broken & none of the permutations I tried managed to find it. Know anyone at the station? Tell them their state funding is dependent on fixing the link, or even better on reposting the audio.

I would like you to ask one or both of them the following: "How close to killing Gerry Rafferty did you come when you heard the tapes?" Even he couldn't fuck up "Walking on a Wire" but the others I heard are terrible.

And yes, I intend to interview as many major players in the making of that album as possible, including Richard Thompson, Linda Thompson Kenis, Joe Boyd, Gerry Rafferty, and anyone else who'll talk with me.

I guess I should note here that my editor at Routledge on the Lost in the Grooves book, Richard Carlin, toured with Richard & Linda Thompson on the Shoot Out The Lights Tour. (Accordion, I think. Maybe concertina.)

eta: Googling indicates concertina.

Richard left Routledge but I could probably track him down for you.

Here's his concertina website with an email connection, Corwood.

He's a real nice guy, and I'm sure he'd be willing to answer some questions and maybe give you some connections as well. Use my name, and point him at the High Hat so he knows what you're on about. He'll like the High Hat.

Just catching up here, so chiming in with the congrats David & Hayden!

And even though you may have heard about the RFP elsewhere, I distinctly remember posting about it here, so I am going to take partial credit for your successes.

And even though you may have heard about the RFP elsewhere, I distinctly remember posting about it here, so I am going to take partial credit for your successes.

I think I saw it here first, though Kim notified me too. So claim away!

For those curious, here's my actual pitch. You can see that board assisted as well:

********

Swordfishtrombones doesn't lack for fans or critical cachet, but it's gotten a meager share of ink over the years. For a variety of reasons, Rain Dogs and Franks Wild Years drew more press than the record where Tom Waits radically reinvented himself, and reshaped the musical landscape. Swordfishtrombones stretched so far beyond the expectations of anybody who had followed his career that there didn't even seem to be words to describe it. He pawned his tenor sax for a bass marimba.

And yet, Swordfishtrombones wasn't unprecedented. There are hints in his earlier work that point toward it. There are fascinating parallels with artists and musicians as various as Joseph Cornell, Conlon Nancarrow, Edward Gorey (and the Poet's Theater he did with Frank O'Hara and Alison Lurie), George Herriman, Moondog, and Edgar Ulmer. Swordfishtrombones benefits tremendously from hearing it in context, from knowing the range of Waits' references (literary, cinematic, theatrical and musical), and how he pulled those elements into something wholly original.

There's a lazy tradition of Waits reportage that paddles along in his wake, quoting his shaggy dog tales, and rolling over for his sly, evasive charm. He's copy on the hoof. This approach has left a lot untold. His peer group through the early seventies included a number of vintage pop diletantes, all swimming upstream against the hippie effluent. At that point his career looked similar to that of Dan Hicks, Leon Redbone, Randy Newman and even Tiny Tim. His early beat/jazz/Bukowski persona (and full commitment to that lifestyle) became an unexamined endpoint. Everybody underestimated Tom Waits.

Two entwined narratives run through the creation of Swordfishtrombones and will form the backbone of the book. As the seventies ended, Waits felt increasingly constrained and trapped by his persona and career. He became bitter and desperately unhappy, so he moved to NYC in 1979 to change his life. It wasn’t working. At that low point he got the call that changed everything. Francis Ford Coppola tapped Tom to write the score for One From the Heart. Waits moved back to Los Angeles to work at Zoetrope's Hollywood studio for the next 18 months. He cleaned up, disciplined himself as a songwriter and musician, collaborated closely with Coppola and met a script analyst named Kathleen Brennan – his "only true love."

They married within two months at the Always and Forever Yours Wedding Chapel in Watts at Two O'Clock in the morning. Swordfishtrombones was the first thing he recorded after his marriage, and it was at her urging that he made a record that conceded exactly nothing to his record label, or the critics, or his fans. There aren't many love stories where the happy ending sounds like a paint can tumbling in an empty cement mixer. (Okay, or as spare and beautiful as "Johnsburg, Illinois.")

Kathleen Brennan was sorely disappointed in Tom Waits’ record collection. She expanded his musical range exponentially. She forced him out of his comfortable jazzbo pocket to take in foreign filmscores and German theater and Asian percussion. These two stories of a man creating that elusive American second act, and also finding the perfect collaborator in his wife will give the book a natural forward drive.

For this book I'd consciously avoid stale Waitsisms about his "gravelly voice." If you dropped a cherry bomb down a fiberglass clown’s painted mouth, that would sound like Tom Waits. But that’s just one of the voices he inhabits. There’s also his Prince fan's falsetto and his gargle of glass and turpentine shaken in a bullhorn and his confidential wiseguy aside and his Beefheart bellow and his pensive whisper. (continued...)

( continues...) Musically his voice is limited. As an instrument to express character and language? It's vast.

I'd explore Waits' language, which is distinctively allusive, playful, and mythic. He has a unique gift for braiding metaphors out of nursery rhymes and carny barker spiels and blues tropes and Mississippi brags . On Swordfishtrombones he traded in his Edward Hopper imagery for something closer to Brueghel. If Brueghel worked for the WPA.

Tom Waits writes famously beautiful melodies and lyrics. Without abandoning either talent, on this record he built a sexy, lurching, inexorable groove chassis out of washtubs and wagon wheels and bedsprings. He's a serious rhythm slut. This needs to be told.

In the seventies there might have been such a thing as a casual Tom Waits fan. Not any more. The music demands more. You're either all the way in, or you don't bother. Since the Frank Trilogy Tom Waits has established himself as something more than a gifted songwriter. He's become an icon to musicians and music fans, a figure of uncompromised vision and integrity. This Tom Waits is capable of a towering snit. He'll get litigious on your ass. For all the romance of failure he once courted, his cranky integrity wouldn't allow his soul to be sold for Fritos. He's also deeply, bountifully loyal to his friends. His rare performances over the last decade have almost all been benefits or memorials. There's an unyielding spine in his sloppy posture; he's a scarecrow that spins in the wind, but won't fall over. He was nobody's drunk, nobody's joke, nobody's shill. Morrisey and Dylan may be the only other songwriters who inspire such obsessive devotion.

I don't see a particular need to interview Tom Waits; there is a vast store of Waits interviews to reference, all carefully maintained online by his devotees. Though if given the opportunity I would be compelled to ask these three questions:

1. Shane MacGowan - blow-dried prettyboy or countrypolitan crooner?

2. Bob Dylan once described himself as some combination of Sleepy John Estes and Mortimer Snerd. What combination of puppet and blues musician best characterizes your music?

3. Interviews have typically described your apparel as "shabby," "rumpled," and "non-descript" - completely ignoring your fashion innovations with hairnets, moustache wax in the eyebrows and alligator shoes. Do you feel like you've been misunderstood as a fashion icon?

Jon, I'm so sorry about your father. My condolences.

All the strength in the world to you, Jon. I am so sorry.

Jon, I am very sorry for your loss.

Joe, I'm afraid KGSR would see my threats as puny and ineffectual. I do hope to ask Richard and Linda about Rafferty's Folly. And Gerry Rafferty, whom I think is still alive.

David, thanks for the link to your friend. I look forward to speaking with him.

I also appreciate reading your pitch. It's so good that I really have no idea how I made the cut. To wit:

Shoot Out The Lights is the most vivid and beautiful examination of emotional devastation ever recorded. Sure, there’s plenty of other contenders out there, like Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, Rumours, or George Jones and Tammy Wynette singing “Golden Ring,” but Shoot Out the Lights brings the listener closer to the woozy highs and lows of the end of the affair than any other collection of songs in rock or country music. Richard and Linda Thompson never sang together better, never expressed the emotional subtleties of their songs more expertly, and never sounded more perfect for each other than when they were breaking up.

The 33 1/3 treatment I’m proposing would primarily focus on the context: the personal history driving the songs on Shoot Out The Lights, the difficulty in recording the album, and the subsequent fall-out, while integrating a track-by-track analysis of the lyrical content and music on the album.

The story of the Thompsons’ marriage, though it only lasted for nine years, was particularly tumultuous. When they met, Richard was still scarred from the late ‘60s death of his girlfriend in a bus crash. Linda was as a backup singer on his first solo album (1971’s Henry The Human Fly, allegedly the worst-selling album in the Warner Brothers catalog), and they were married within a year. She had equal billing on the next album, 1972’s I Want To See The Brights Lights Tonight (which regularly appears on best-album lists from Rolling Stone), and the Thompsons worked as collaborators on five more albums until their divorce. Their marriage appears to have been filled with sheer emotional turbulence, with Richard demonstrating a rather generational need to follow his muse regardless of the costs, including a conversion to Islam and two years spent living on a British Muslim commune in the mid-70s, during which his spiritual advisor would not let him touch his guitar (and during which Linda left him twice, only returning because of her pregnancy).

His first two post-commune albums were two of the worst he ever recorded, burying some wonderful songs (and some much less than wonderful) under production flourishes that ranged from disco to Middle Eastern. They sold terribly, and the Thompsons were dumped from their label. In an attempt to make the next album more commercial, the Thompsons hired Gerry Rafferty (yes, the “Stuck In The Middle With You” songwriter) to produce the tracks that would become Shoot Out The Lights. Rafferty’s production was, to put it mildly, an utter disaster (available as a bootleg called Rafferty’s Folly for those who just can’t get enough of great songs buried under boring and dated production). The Thompsons fired Rafferty and re-recorded five songs and three new ones with Joe Boyd, a longtime friend (who just happened to be the noted producer of albums for a who’s who of Brit-folk artists like Nick Drake, Sandy Denny, the Fairport Convention, and the Incredible String Band, not to mention Toots & The Maytals and Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd). The result was the timeless clean production of Shoot Out The Lights, an album that sounds like it could have been made at any point between 1971 and 2005. Critics loved the hell out of it, and, like Bright Lights, it regularly pops up on best-album lists from Rolling Stone and Spin.

Before the Thompsons’ 1981 tour, Richard admitted to Linda that he was in love with another woman (the proprietress of the legendary McCabe’s Guitar Shop, no less), which led to a brittle onstage awkwardness between the two, including the occasional mild physical violence. Although Time Magazine declared Linda the female vocalist of 1982, she never reached the heights of (continued...)