“I Don’t Need No Light In The Darkness . . .’

by whiteray

Sometimes new stuff comes at you when you don’t expect it. By the summer of 1989, when I landed in Anoka, Minnesota, for an eight-month stay, I was digging into musical performers and styles new to me (though some of those performers and styles had been around for some time). 

The digging was for the most part spurred by the contents of two boxes of records I’d bought at a North Dakota flea market during the late winter of 1989, boxes whose contents had introduced me, for one, to Mother Earth and had encouraged me to dig into performers about whom little I knew but their names, like Quicksilver Messenger Service, Ian Lloyd, Thin Lizzy, Terri Garthwaite and more. After years of letting music come to me when it would, I began to actively seek out new sounds. 

And in July of 1989, a ladyfriend and I went to a concert in St. Paul, a show featuring Ringo Starr with the first incarnation of his All Starr Band. Beyond Ringo himself, familiar names studded the lineup: pianist Dr. John of New Orleans funk and swamp-drenched  rock, keyboard maestro Billy Preston, saxophonist Clarence Clemons of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, guitarist Joe Walsh of the Eagles and the James Gang, drummer Levon Helm and bass player Rick Danko from The Band, session drummer Jim Keltner and guitarist Nils Lofgren. 

Of all of them, I probably knew Lofgren and his work the least. I knew he’d been in Grin and that very early on, he’d worked some with Neil Young. And I was aware that he’d filled the spot created when Steve Van Zandt left Springsteen’s E Street Band in the mid-1980s. And in the interims, I knew, he’d done his own work. But I knew nothing about that work at all. 

At mid-concert, as the musicians supporting Ringo were taking their solo numbers, Lofgren counted in a song that started with a shimmering figure above a descending bass. My date and I, standing on our chairs in the sixth row, looked at each other. “You know this one?” she whispered to me. I shook my head, but as I listened, I told myself that I was going to learn about the song very soon. 

The first step was the song’s name, “Shine Silently,” which my ladyfriend and I learned the following morning as we read reviews of Ringo’s show in the Twin Cities newspapers. From there, finding the song took a little longer than I’d expected; I had to work for a living, and there was so much music out there and so much to do at home. 

But I continued to keep Lofgren’s name and music in mind as I wandered shops and flea markets. And in February 1990, I found in an Anoka shop a 1981 Lofgren anthology titled The Best, which included “Shine Silently.” A little more than a year later, in 1991, after I’d moved from Anoka, first to Conway Springs, Kansas, and then to Columbia, Missouri, Ringo released an album pulled from his 1989 concert tour that included Lofgren’s live version of the song, and I grabbed that album the first day it was out. 

I eventually learned that the song originally was on Lofgren’s 1979 album Nils in a slower – and lower-pitched – version than the one that showed up on The Best. Without knowing for sure, I’m thinking that the version on The Best was the single version released in 1979 as A&M 2182. I prefer that take and the one from the Ringo Starr tour to the one on Nils. 

Even more than thirty years later, the song is a favorite of mine, partially because I’m a sucker for a descending bass line but mainly for its gentle and loving tone: 

Shine silently.
I don't need no light in the darkness.
Shine silently.
No I won't get lost while your loves shines,
Shines on me . . . shines on me.