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For singer-songwriter
Loudon Wainwright III, the personal is still the political. As
long as it's a good tune. By Andy Gill
All the news
that's fit to sing
 Loudon
Wainwright III has been tacking back and forth between the personal
and the political ever since his songwriting career began at
the start of the Seventies. Despite the genre's reputation
for navel gazing self-absorption, few singer-songwriters have
dealt with their own lives with such unflinching honesty, picking
away at the scabs of marriage, divorce and family life in a way
in a way which would be unbearable were it not for his native
wit and intelligence. Indeed in the Father/Daughter Dialogue"
co-written in the early Nineties with his daughter Martha (now
a singer in her own right, as is son Rufus), she took Dad to
task for putting so much of his family's life into his songs.
Even before his first marriage
(to singer Kate McGarrigle), Wainwright was skilled in peeling
away the deceits and conceits of his own youthful attitudes in
songs such as "School Days" and "Motel Blues". The
prickly articulacy of those early albums, with their understated
covers featuring the Westchester boarding school bard in shockingly
short hair and grey Brooks Brothers trousers, led to Wainwright
being acclaimed as a possible successor to Bob Dylan, despite
the obvious differences in tone and style.
"I was the first New Dylan,
I believe", he claims with wry pride as we share a bottle
of water in his Notting Hill hotel room. "I think
I predated John Prine by about a year! But though I admire
Bob Dylan and was very influenced by him, I don't think of what
I do as very Dylanesque. For one thing, he was a mysterious,
cryptic kind of songwriter, and mine are so clear, there's no
mystery about what I'm writing about." There's certainly
no mystery about the issues on his latest album, Social Studies,
where Wainwright's attention turns to more public, political
matters. Older readers may recall Loudon's weekly slot
as resident topical troubadour on Jasper Carrott's TV show; through
the Nineties he's held a similar position on the state-subsidised
National Public Radio in America, offering whimsical commentary
upon contemporary mores - the O.J. trial, the Tonya Harding affair,
Jesse Helms, Bill Clinton's enduring appeal, the millennium bug
etc. - the best of which are gathered together on the album.
"The topical song is a dying
art, which I'm trying to resuscitate," he acknowledges.
"I'm very influenced by Tom Lehrer, especially when
I began in the late Sixties there was a bit of a tradition in
folk music of topical songs, protest songs, various talking blues
making fun of Tom Foster Dulles or the John Birch Society, and
I've done a bit of that throughout my career, so I thought, why
not do an album of them? And in my case, so much of my
stuff is personal and autobiographical, it was a bit of a relief
to write about other people for a change."
Written to short deadlines, the
songs helped Wainwright keep his eye sharp and his powder dry.
"National Public Radio would call up and say, the
Beatles are releasing 'Free As A Bird', we want a song about
the Beatles in two days, or whatever," he explains. "So
it was like journalism, writing to order. But I generally
write pretty quickly - once I get an idea, the song's usually
done in an hour or two." Sometimes, however, thats
not the end of the matter. The oldest song on the album,
"Jesse Don't Like It", deals with ultra-conservative
Senator Jesse Helms' campaign to dismantle the arts funding machinery
provided by the National Endowment for Arts, an implicit attempt
to introduce censorship which, despite Helms' failure, has insinuated
itself into the publicly funded bodies anyway.
"Since then, the NPR would
be very wary," Wainwright explains. "Like in
the OJ song, they OK'd the line about 'There's white folks,
black folks, brown folks at the bar', but baulked at 'On
the bench in glasses is the bearded yellow man', because
'Asian-Americans are not ready for that colour thing, can we
change that'? I said, Well, no, because the whole joke
is about the colours."
"They said, 'We can't take
the chance, because of our funding for National Public Radio'.
So in a sense, it's a form of censorship." A
similar dread marked the reaction to the millennium bug song
"Y2K", which explicitly places the blame for the bug
at Bill Gates's door. The song was OK, but the record company
took fright at the album cover, a group of caricatures of Bill,
Jesse, OJ, Tonya, John Lennon and Father Christmas.
"They wanted to sticker
the album because they were afraid that, of all the people on
the cover, Bill Gates was the most litigious, and they thought
he would sue because I was using his likeness to sell a product,"
he recalls, mind still boggling. "They wanted to put
something on saying 'This is Satire' or something like that."
Loudon chuckles derisively. Wainwright's great strength
as a topical songwriter - apart from his eye for the absurdity
and his liberal sensibilities - is rooted in his humour, which
bubbles through even the most downbeat songs.
"I earn my living primarily
as a performing songwriter, and in my show I use the laughs as
kind of buoys," he reveals. "There are a lot
of serious songs too, some that contain both laughs and tears.
But comedy or novelty songs aren't very popular in popular
music - they're dismissed, yet there's such an honourable tradition:
writers like Tom Lehrer and Stan Freberg and songs like 'A Boy
Named Sue', 'The Monster Mash'. Shel Silverstein, who died
recently, was one of my favourite songwriters, and he wrote mostly
novelty songs. I love to write comedy songs, and to make
audiences laugh." Laughter is the staple element in
virtually all of Wainwright's endeavours, which have included
several movie and TV appearances, the latest in the forthcoming
Sandra Bullock rehab drama, 28 Days. Besides his
short run as Captain Spalding, the Singing Surgeon in M*A*S*H,
he played the original keyboard player in Spinal Tap (Michael
McKean, aka David St Hubbins was a college chum), and was David
Letterman's original singing sidekick. "This was the
original afternoon format, before they went to late night,"
he explains. "I was there for the whole thing, singing
and talking with him, then they decided the guy with the guitar
didn't work and they needed a band, so they got Paul Shaffer
and went to nighttime. Story of my career!" He
may be right, at that. Given Becker and Fagan's recent
claim that he turned down the opportunity to join the fledgling
Steely Dan, Loudon could be forgiven for thinking he was doomed
to always be in the right place just a little ahead of the right
time. Perhaps it's just as well: a lifetime of solo performance
has kept his wits sharper and his attitude more focused than
might have been the case in a collective situation. And
judging by the spring in his step as he lopes off, guitar case
slung over his back, it's kept him younger in spirit than most
of his contemporaries. As he sings in "Inaugural Blues",
"Hope we grow up before we're old". Some chance! |
