I found a record of a night I unaccountably missed a year ago in writing my “Twenty Years Ago Today” series.

I’ve been to a fair number of concerts in my life. Good ones (U2, Saint Paul Civic, 1987; Ian Hunter, First Avenue, 1989; Stevie Ray Vaughan, Riverfest, 1986), fair-to-middlin’ ones (Hüsker Dü, First Avenue, 1987), awful ones (The Butthole Surfers, First Avenue, 1987) – and a few that are drilled into my head as great moments in my life; Los Lobos and Warren Zevon (different nights a week apart at First Avenue, 1991); Bruce Springsteen (several times, but especially on the second night of the Born In The USA tour at the Civic in ’84 and on his greatest hits tour in ’99)…

…and, 21 years ago tonight, Richard Thompson at the First Avenue, touring in support of Across a Crowded Room.

I went to the concert with my usual gig posse from back in that day; my fellow Don Vogel producer Dave Elvin, and his college classmate, whom Twin Citians now know as MPR’s Chief Political Correspondent Mike Mulcahey. It was a chilly night that kept whispering “winter is coming”.

“Rue Nouveau”, a local band led by art-pop-rock stalwart Gary Rue, opened. They were actually really good, although I don’t remember much; I point it out merely to show that I do, in fact, remember they existed.

And then – a set-change and two beers later – Thompson took the stage, playing (as I recall) “Little Blue Number“.

And I’ll have to confess – while I was a huge Thompson fan, at that moment I really only had two of his records – Shoot Out The Lights, the 1982 classic I wrote about at some length last year, and I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight, an equally-classic 1972 album that was my introduction to Thompson and his by-this-time ex-wife Linda. At any rate, I didn’t know an awful lot of the songs, which spanned what was already almost two decades of recorded output.

In a way, it was a good thing; sometimes hearing something for the first time, without preconceptions, enhances the impact. At least, that’s one possibility for why that concert, 20 years later, is still pounded into my head.

The band was one of the most fascinating ensembles I’d seen. Clive Gregson played guitar and keyboard; Christine Collister, about 5’0 and 105 pounds (and five were hairdo) played acoustic guitar and percussion and contributed improbably-big, booming contralto backing vocals along with Gregson (with whom she recorded several albums apart from Thompson); Dave Pegg played Bass, Dave Mattacks was the drummer, and Danny Kirkpatrick sat on the drum riser playing the three-row button accordion.

And, above all, Thompson himself, the most amazing guitar player I’d ever seen. He played a brown Fender Strat, and had a peculiar picking style; most guitar players either play a flatpick (between the thumb and forefinger) or they fingerpick (using their fingers, or, like Nils Lofgren, metal picks perched on their fingertips). Thompson did both – held a flatpick, and also picked heavily with his middle, ring and pinky fingers…

…all of which sounds technical and clinical, and explains nothing about the impact watching him play had on me, standing there, swaying limply back and forth, trying to absorb it all, vowing to repent of everything I’d ever done on the guitar and start over from scratch later that night.

The rest of the setlist? I didn’t know most of them in the first place, other than the ones from Shoot… and Bright Lights, and the titles of some albums (“Hand of Kindness” stood out), so the only thing that still registers, twenty years later, was that it was all amazing. Thompson is either the world’s funniest depressing artist, or the world’s most depressing funny artist; his music swerves from odes to hope and joy (“Wall of Death“) to harrowing trudges through the darkest of nights (“Shoot Out The Lights“) to keening pleas for forgiveness (“For Shame of Doing Wrong“).

Two moments stand out, still, though.

One – very late in the night – was a long, gorgeous version of “Calvary Cross”, the centerpiece of Bright Lights; the lights dimmed, and the song started, quieter and more subdued than the original (it’s the audio track on this Youtube video, although the video itself has nothing to do with Thompson or the song), with Thompson weaving the vocal through his reedy guitar part. Collister and Gregson hummed the background parts from dim backlight as the song – about the unpredictability of a writer’s muse – swelled through the second verse and then through a long, inspired improvisation on the guitar that left me pretty well physically drained.

And then – as the clock closed in on 1AM, and after two encores that left the crowd cheering for still more, Thompson took the stage alone, holding his Strat, and played “End of the Rainbow“, also from Bright Lights, the most depressing song in the history of the English language. It didn’t “clear the room”, per se – he knocked the song dead – but the audience was subdued as the lights came up; they filed out pretty quietly.

Dave and Mike dropped me off at the house. I went downstairs and started on my mission to re-learn the guitar.

For a sense of what the night was like, check out this series of Youtube vids, pulled from a video Thompson released from that tour. Same band, and much of the same setlist.