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Cover of a 1976 Programme |
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Inside Page (with autograph) |
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- REGENT'S PARK, London
- (8th August '76)
- By Barry Coleman
Loudon Wainwright
LET'S NOT BE silly about Loudon
Wainwright. Let's not exaggerate. Let's just say that he's probably
the most deceptive, witty, and worthwhile performer in his entire
field. All that impedes his final rise to what passes for the
top in the music business is that it still isn't at all clear
precisely what his field is.
He plays the international folk
circuit; he's not a folk singer. He records some fine, driving
rock numbers and uses the best country musicians in the business;
but he's not a country singer and he's certainly not a rocker.
He's funny, calculatedly so, but he isn't a comedian.
The fact is that he's that fairly
common bird, the artist without a tradition, which is bad enough.
But worse, he works in an industry which is not only indifferent
to tradition but is incapable of defining its artists except
in terms of promotion and sales technique. It has never known
what to make of him. With luck it will find out before his work
is seriously affected.
At the Open Air Theatre on Sunday
he seemed a trifle uncertain, sometimes a little stretched in
his characteristic clowning with the crowd. The major force of
his wit remains in his wry, melancholy songs, and the kidding
around was occasionally distracting. It pitches the mood too
strongly and can deaden the variety in his work.
The strength of Wainwright's
output doesn't seem to flag. The new songs he sang this time
were as piquant as the old ones which in turn are ageing nicely;
still funny, still wistfully anarchic. The one about the dead
skunk, the one about swimming, the one about the golfers golfing
are funny partly because they don't seem to be about anything.
Cunningly crafted pieces of whimsy, but with a good smarting
sting., That's something like an art form. Someone should get
a label on it, and sell it, hard.
From 'The Guardian' newspaper
(17th Febuary '78)
Song of the Suburbs
 Guilt, doubt and despair. Fear, neurosis and
pressure. These are a few of Loudon Wainwright III's favourite
things. Since he first started performing eight years ago, Wainwright,
an amiable, 31-year-old American singer-songwriter, has established
a sizeable reputation for living out his his anxieties in public.
This Sunday, at the London Palladium, British audiences will
once again have the opportunity to see Wainwright run through
his study in living angst - what he calls his "schtick."
On stage his tongue lolls from his mouth, his eyes roll and his
body quakes as if racked by some unspeakable pain. His songs
are bitter sweet, whimsical melodramas about unrequited love,
drinking too much, a fear of flying and the desperate need for
a cigarette that can beset a man at three in the morning when
his packet is long empty.
"I write about what I know,"
says Wainwright cheerfully. "I know that I'm frightened
of flying, that I have had chaotic romantic adventures and that
like a lot of people I have vast reservoirs of guilt. So these
are the topics I'm concerned with. Mine is just the ordinary
20th century guilt which everyone has: guilt about failures,
guilt about successes, guilt about my parents and about my children.
I'm just being honest. Frank Sinatra gets up and sings that he's
screwed up his life, did this and that, but 'I did it my way
- I have no regrets.' I want to write a song that says 'I have
all kinds of regrets;' that if I ever had to do it all over again
I would do it a million different ways and some things I wou;ldn't
even bother with. That's truer to me..."
Wainwright blames it all on the
suburbs where he grew up and where he now lives. Desperation
and guilt run deep in the suburbs, he says. It may be more undercover
- but it's out there...
His father, Loudon Wainwright
II, was a journalist for Life magazine who inculcated in his
son the merits of literacy and the virtures of hard work. Wainwright
wanted to be an actor, and studied for a year and a half at the
Carnagie Mellon Drama School in Pittsburgh before dropping out
to become "a kind of wandering hippy." He started writing
songs and made his first record in 1970, an idiosyncratic collection
which bewildered some critics enough for them to dub him 'the
new Bob Dylan.' "At least it made people come along and
see me," he says wrily. "And it's one instance where
I've proved the critics wrong."
He has recorded five more albums
since then (his seventh, Final Exam will be released shortly)
and toured prolifically in America and Europe. This is his tenth
visit to England to perform. "Audiences here are less fickle,"
he says. "If they like you the chances are they'll come
back to see you. In America you can have a career spanning all
of three years...
"I do work hard. That's
one thing I don't feel guilty about. My father always used to
tell me the most important thing in my life would be to work.
I never really believed him, but now I'm all grown up I can see
it's true. It's a great thing to have to be able to do something
that you like to do. Being a performer is a gamble. You become
a target. The minute you walk on stage you're asking for it;
but you also get adultation and love and money and fame. That
and getting to make an exhibition of yourself makes it worthwhile."
He says that when he is not working
he prefers the peaceful life. He recently moved out of New York
City, back to the beloved suburbs, "five minutes from Mom."
There he watches television, ignores the neighbours and paddles
his canoe on a nearby lake. "Jung said you need to be near
a body of water to be content, and I'm not about to argue with
him," he says. "I know it's fashionable to be contemptuous
of the suburbs, but I know what I like. It's very quiet and very
beautiful too. I wake up each morning, throw open the windows
and take a deep breath." Somewhere underneath all that cynicism
and guilt a John Denver lurks.
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*** Everything
on this page kindly supplied by Chris Kelly *** |
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