Meanwhile, Teddy was growing up with his mom in London and seeing his dad on weekends and holidays when he could. Teddy knew his mother had been a professional musician, of course, but she had not gone on tour since he was six, so he never really saw that side of her.
“Just because she wasn’t a working performer doesn’t mean I didn’t think of her as a musician,” Teddy insists. “She was always writing, but she didn’t have the outlet or perhaps the will to do anything with it. Music was always a big topic of conversation in our house; we’d always buy the new Bob Dylan record and mull over it; we’d listen to Hank Williams in the car on our way to camping trips. Even today it astounds me that most people don’t center their lives around music.”
Teddy left London at 18, partly because he wanted to live with his dad for a while, partly because he wanted to pursue music in America, and partly because he wanted avoid the fallout when his awful exam scores were released in London. Richard not only took Teddy out on tour in 1999, but also let him showcase some of the songs that would form his self-titled debut album in 2000. True to the family tradition, that disc received warm reviews but sold poorly.
“I don’t think my family name really helped me get a deal,” Teddy claims. “If I’d been in the same vein as my parents, it would have mattered, but the people at the major labels in L.A. didn’t care. Which is sad, because it shows that the labels aren’t run by music people. If I were Bruce Springsteen’s kid, it might have made a difference. But if they looked at my parents’ sales records, it could only hurt me.
“But touring with my dad made me better musically. It was invaluable to play with really good people, just to learn what’s required of you in that situation and what you’re capable of. If I asked him, he’d show me the odd thing, but I’m not really that kind of person. So it was mostly just watching him at work.
“When I was on tour with Rufus [Wainwright], we were all young people and all we thought about was music. We’d play a show, and get on the bus and keep playing or go to a record store. But when you’re 50, you think about other things. You do the show and then you want to play Scrabble or talk about cricket. It was fun just to hang out with him, and I think it will be fun to tour with my mum this fall.”
That’s when Linda will test her voice and her new crop of songs with her first tour in twenty years. She and Teddy will be joined by another guitarist, a bassist, and a multi-instrumentalist, but when we talked in late May, she hadn’t decided on who would fill those slots.
“After playing with Richard all those years, it’s hard to find the right accompanist,” she explains. “Husbands you can replace; guitarists are impossible.”
In a review for The Washington Post earlier this year, ND contributing editor Geoffrey Himes suggested that Caitlin Cary’s “While You Weren’t Looking” was a welcome substitute for the new Linda Thompson album we were never going to get. He is happy to have been proven wrong.
