From today's SF Chronicle.....
(and by the way... the whole tour dates pages is on:
http://www.rounder.com/tours.asp?search_type=primary_group_name&searchterm=Linda+Thompson
She's in LA at The Troupador on Saturday night...
SF/Great American tomorrow night...
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Linda Thompson makes a resounding comeback
Joel Selvin, Chronicle Staff Writer Wednesday, October 9, 2002
Linda Thompson is now the poster child for hysterical dysphonia, a
rare and mysterious condition that reduces the afflicted to speaking
in hoarse whispers, if at all. Doctors have only recently begun to
suspect that the disorder might not be entirely psychosomatic. In any
case, until recent medical advances, Thompson couldn't sing.
"It's not a very known thing," she said. "It happens in pregnancy and
it happened to me. And anything that doctors couldn't see 30 years
ago, they said it's all in your mind. I'm a hyper-dyper person
anyway, so somebody tells me I'm nuts, I go, 'Well, yeah, you're
probably right.' If they say, 'It's all in your head, calm down,' I'd
go, 'They must know what they're talking about.' "
But, improbably enough, Thompson, whose 1982 album with her
ex-husband Richard Thompson, "Shoot Out the Lights," is one of the
most highly regarded rock albums of its era, is not only back with
her first new album in 17 years, but she has also started a U.S.
tour, her first public performances in even longer (she plays
Thursday at the Great American Music Hall). This is not just another
comeback; it is a triumph over great adversity.
"That's the angle I'm going for," she said. "That's the thing I'm
pitching to Harvey Weinstein at Miramax at the moment. It is a
triumph over adversity. But if I look at it that way, it makes me
feel like some tragic old diva. What it seems more like to me is
there was a lot of adversity, and I did have these vocal problems.
And also, I just didn't envision myself singing again.
"I don't think I'm back, like in shoulder pads or something. I made
this record thinking, quite honestly, it would dribble by. I've been
surprised and thrilled by the response. But I certainly never thought
I was going to tour or anything like that again."
So everything's gotten out of hand?
"Completely out of f-- hand," she said.
Thompson, 54, long ago gave up life as a musician. She has remarried
and been running a London jewelry store as Linda Kenis. On the phone
from New York, where she was starting rehearsals, she chatted
happily, a rambling, stammering self-effacing stream of consciousness
("I was sitting in bed today thinking, 'I wish I could be a gay
icon,' but gay men hate folk music," she said). Recent breakthroughs
in treatment for dysphonia gave Thompson back her voice.
"I've been to therapy," she said. "I've been to every single thing,
and the upshot of it is that I've had some Botox in my throat, which
has completely taken it away, which is hilarious. I'm still as
wrinkled as ever, but I'm the only person in the Western Hemisphere
with an unlined esophagus. I'm so fashionable.
"My doctor says my brain has been sending the wrong messages to my
throat forever. He thinks it's physical, but I think it's a matter of
both. I did know it wasn't just nerves because I could be really
nervous and sing fantastically. I could be really calm and be
stricken by this thing. But now it's gone."
Doctors believe that Botox provides only temporary relief and that
further injections will be needed every three to six months.
"Obviously, it's something you've got to top off," she said. "That
is, if I ever want to do this again."
As Linda Peters, she sang on a 1971 album of '50s rock 'n' roll
oldies by a loose collaboration called the Bunch with former members
of the recently split Fairport Convention, including Sandy Denny and
Thompson. A year later, while he was finishing his first solo album,
they were married.
The next year, with the landmark "I Want to See the Bright Lights
Tonight," they began a series of Richard and Linda Thompson albums
that would culminate with the 1982 masterpiece, a record that
constantly makes lists of the all- time greatest albums. By the time
the album was released, however, their marriage had disintegrated,
and their professional partnership did not survive beyond one last
disastrous, acrimonious U.S. tour. She cut a couple of solo albums
(one went unreleased) and disappeared from the music scene. But her
luminous, heartbreaking vocals on recordings of "Dimming of the Day"
or "A Heart Needs a Home" have only grown more lustrous over time.
With her 26-year-old son, Teddy Thompson, a recording artist himself,
as her collaborator, Thompson recorded "Fashionably Late," a gorgeous
collection of folky songs highlighted by guest appearances from her
children, her former husband, friends of her children, such as Rufus
Wainwright, and onetime Beach Boys collaborator Van Dyke Parks. She
finds her enduring reputation as a musician somewhat surprising.
"It's amazing, that," she said. "I know when I was contemplating
doing this again, asking people like Van Dyke Parks to help, the
alacrity with which people helped me and accepted the pittance that I
was going to pay them, that was amazing to me.
"And even now, when I go into a bar in New York -- which is
frequently -- there'll be a little coterie of young people who say,
'You're Linda Thompson.' I think that's so fantastic. You probably
get fed up with it if you're Madonna, but it's only a little, tiny
bunch of people with me."
