Wright Thompson
speaker
994 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Jun 2025
last heard 17 Sep
Wright Thompson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The pool is just smaller. You know, I'm one of those people who, like, if the SEC just broke off and played its own thing, that would be fine with me. Like, I don't particularly like, you know, I watch whatever the SEC game is. Like, I understand I'm part of the problem. So I don't it's always sort of been this way. But look, the South is changing tremendously. And the. You know.
I'm from a little farming town in Mississippi and our farm 50 years ago, we needed 400 families living on it to farm it. And now we farm it with, I think we have 18 people and that's because the tractors can't turn themselves around. Uh, they, the tractors are GPS control, but you have to have a person in them to turn them around on the pads at the end of the roads.
Rose, we're 10 years away from that being gone. And so now you can farm enormous swaths of land with 4 people. It's like the rural South. which is in many ways been the heartbeat of SEC football fandom, is totally emptying out in a way that sort of no one's really talking about. The farm economy, I don't know if you guys have been following this, but the price of cotton and soybeans
I mean, might be destroyed for a generation. It's going to be a really, really hard time. Mississippi and parts of Louisiana and Alabama and Georgia. And so, you know, there is a at a time when the only thing that matters in college football is how much money you can raise. That's a scary thing if you live in the poorest part of the country.
I did get kicked out of school.
Well, you know, shout out to the Woodbury forest school. Uh, the, uh, you know, I just went and spoke there. It was really interesting. Cause, uh, they asked me to come talk and I was like, you guys know you, are you sure? Like, you know what I mean? Like you're going to give me access to your student body.
At one point you decided that wasn't a great idea, but it was really, you know, it was a fun night. Uh, so a lot of people, but yeah, man, I, uh, It's interesting. I read a book by a writer named Willie Morris called North Toward Home after I got kicked out of school. And it really, I didn't know, well, two things. One, I didn't know that being a magazine writer was a job until I read this book.
And two, he talked about the South in the way that I felt about it, which is very much what Patterson Hood calls the duality of the Southern thing. If you only hate the South, you're kind of a jackass. And if you only love the South, you're kind of a jackass. And I mean, it better be both. And in the conflict of that and in the inability to sort of separate those feelings lies the experience.
And so, you know, it's sort of like being a Catholic convert. Like if you didn't go to a Catholic school and your parents didn't beat guilt into you, you're not Catholic. I don't care if you take communion, you know. And so like it's a tribal thing. And so I read that book. And before then, I just was totally lost. And that book really clarified a lot of things for me.
Like, you know, I sort of thought, you know, I'm going to run this farm and never leave this town. And that book really opened a world to me.
Well, look, man, I mean, every time people start bitching about him, it makes my head want to explode.
Like when the greatest guitar player in the world, not named Derek Trucks, falls in love with your favorite band and devotes himself to learning it note for note. You should be nothing but grateful. I mean, the only appropriate response to John Mayer is thank you. Yes.
You know, I don't really want to write a story so much as I want to write a book that no one else seems to want me to write, which is I want to just randomly pick 25 bootlegs out of my tape collection and then write a memoir about listening to them over and over again and call it Nakamichi.
Like after my tape deck. And so I got a great Nakamichi tape deck in my office and I have all of my old tapes and like, you know, so like in my car, I just go to re-listen and like whatever the day show is. Like today, let's see today, the show on YouTube, What is it? I'm pulling it up. Here we go.
So today, the current Grateful Dead played 6-5-93 at Giant Stadium, 6-5-80 in Tempe, 6-5-75 at the rehearsal, 6-5-70 at the Fillmore West, 6-5-69 at the Fillmore West.
And they're also different. And you kind of go through phases like I'm very much right now and have been for a while on like a late Brent. phase. Yeah. 89 into early 90. Like to me, that's my favorite iteration of the band. My friend, David Ray Morris would slap me and be like, no, it's 74 moron. Go listen to those five nights at the winter land.
And so like, I love the fact that one, there is no right answer, but you kind of go through phases. Like I like that.
Well, you know, I mean, those guys got really rich really quick. And I love the idea of... There's so many great – I just did all these voiceovers for the PGA Championship, and the number of Grateful Dead lyrics, I snuck into those things. Yep, I noticed. Yeah, we got a – you used to play for Silver, now we play for Life.
I got a totally apropos of nothing, Moses came riding in on a quasar or something. Yeah. I'm talking about sand traps, and I did Dark Star. I'm not even trying to make it work. I'm just like, no, this is what we're doing now. I'm turning this enormous sporting event into my own weird sort of deadhead insider crossword puzzle.
Sorry, the hotel they're trying to call me. Yeah, huge debt.
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