Seeing Richard Thompson at the advent of summer has become a rite of passage in New York (I wrote about one of his summer concerts in my very first blog). His arrival seems to herald the summer concert season, at least for Celtschmerz types like myself, and last night’s concert at the Prospect Park bandshell was a fitting opener, timed nicely as it was with the solstice. (Did yesterday seem really long to anybody else?)

Though the skies were clear when I left on foot from Ft. Greene, ominous clouds had gathered by the time I arrived at the park — twenty minutes later. The Sybil-like weather of summer serves to remind us how little we are in charge of, so it was fitting that we ended up sitting beside a row of guys from a local AA group. (My friend Ellen Oler deduced this by asking the aging punk rocker in the seat beside her about the A-in-a-triangle tattoo on his arm.) As the umbrellas came up two songs into Thompson’s set — and he and his band were forced to flee the stage probably out of fear of electrocution — the Bill W gang sat there getting drenched and singing “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” and laughing at the rain. (“It could be worse — we could be crucified!”)

Backed by a versatile three piece band, the Mock Tudor man drew from his ridiculously deep catalogue of songs (including such Richard and Linda standards as “I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight” and “The Wrong Heartbeat”) while bypassing his more recent output. Pride of place was given to songs from his latest CD, Sweet Warrior, which sounds like it could be his best since, uh, Mock Tudor. While some detractors (and fans) say he is stuck in the 16th century or so, there are some topical numbers here, most notably the Iraq war song, “Dad’s Gonna Kill Me.” The title, he said, was inspired by hearing soldiers in Baghdad refer to the city as “‘dad” as in “Dad’s got the blues tonight.”

The theme of mortality recurred like the rain, most notably in oldies like “Wall of Death” and “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” (the theme of suffering soldiers — these from WWI — got a reprise too with “Al Bowlly’s in Heaven,” in which Thompson took a solo that sounded like he was channeling Django Reinhardt) but when the dark clouds parted, and we were all cold and wet, he blessed us with the middle-eastern sounding “One Door Opens,” reminding the faithful that each end marks a beginning as seasons roll over each other. By the time his son Teddy joined him on an encore of “Persuasion” (which dad cowrote with Crowded House’s Tim Finn), the crowd didn’t need that much persuading. The mostly older (and white) Brooklynites who had gathered for the occasion were no strangers to thoughts of mortality, I suspect. But rather than lie down and wait for their dirt bath, most of them came to play, to stand and shout back on the chorus of “Tear Stained Letter” as the dark clouds were carried away toward the sea.