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Loudon Wainwright and Richard Thompson brought their extraordinary talents to the Carolina Theatre on Thursday night. Ironically billing themselves as “Loud and Rich,” these top-tier singer/songwriters were not very loud (both men played acoustic guitars) and no one was getting rich, judging from the crowd size. (It fell short of a sellout.)

To my thinking, the opportunity to see either Wainwright or Thompson in the intimate confines of an 1,100-seat venue would have been ample cause for excitement. But to have both on the same bill should’ve incited a run on tickets and a three-figure scalping frenzy on eBay. Whether musical ignorance, cultural apathy or “the economy” was to blame, it was disgraceful that the event didn’t pack the rafters.

Still, a crowd of 800 or so hard-core fans enjoyed every minute of the three-hour show. Each artist performed a 75-minute set, with Thompson joining Wainwright for a few songs and again for the encore.

Wainwright played first. Wearing button-down, business-casual attire, he appeared deceptively normal. Yet once he began strumming his Martin guitar and singing in a rich, keening voice about dysfunctional families, love gone bad, and death and decay, a wellspring of emotional intensity and disarming wit poured from him.

He played a new song, “Dead Man’s Clothes,” written about the experience of rummaging through his well-known journalist father’s Manhattan apartment after his passing. “Half Fist” found him musing on his grandfather’s recklessness and anger and how those qualities passed down the generations.

Wainwright also performed several numbers from “High Wide & Handsome: The Charlie Poole Project,” including the title track and a few of Poole’s more sentimental “mother” songs. His duet with Richard Thompson on Poole’s big 1920s hit, “The Deal,” was a showstopper.

There were some plainly funny numbers, too, including a howler about “the new Depression” titled “Cash for Clunkers.” A song about Florida –– written for a musical staging of a Carl Hiaasen novel –– nailed the Sunshine State’s bizarro-world mixture of sunbaked madness, drug-stoked weirdness and mindless opportunism on overdrive. Wainwright accompanied himself on ukulele for that one.

Richard Thompson followed with an instrumentally dazzling performance of songs that were no less intense in their withering scrutiny of human disingenuousness and folly, be it at the level of faithless lovers or war-making nations.
He got the crowd to sing along on a mock sea shanty about infidelity on the high sea (“Johnny’s Far Away”). At the other extreme, he sang a tender, elegiac new song about departed friends and loved ones –– allowing that he’d suffered three such losses lately –– titled “A Brother Slips Away.”

Preceded by a darkly comic rant about dissembling politicians, financiers and celebrities, “Time’s Gonna Break You” specifically aimed its barbed lyrics at former President George W. Bush and his legacy.

Thompson’s guitar work –– particularly on “1952 Vincent Black Lightning,” “Sunset Song” and a riotous song about “the worst tour I was ever on” –– was simply astounding. Using a pick between thumb and forefinger while fingerpicking with his other digits, he sounded like three guitarists at once, playing solos, chords or arpeggios, and a bass line. And he made it all look easy.

Loud and Rich’s three-hour tutorial on intelligent song writing, impassioned singing and superlative playing concluded with a Thompson oldie (“Down Where the Drunkard’s Roll”) and a lighthearted take on an old Coasters song (“Smokey Joe’s Cafe”).

Contact Parke Puterbaugh at parkeputerbaugh@earthlink.net