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Let It Rock - November 1975
Busy Being Born
The tears and logic of Loudon
Wainwright III scrutinized by Graham Taylor
 Loudon Wainwright's got three songs about
drinking. 'Drinking Song', which details all the different kinds
of drunk there are; 'Central Park Song,, a moving description
of two lovers stumbling home one night, drunk and happy; and
'Down Drinking At The Bar'. about a blossoming alcoholism. Loudon's
attitude to drink in these three songs seems to reflect his own
"politics of being", i.e. his attitude to just about
everything - it's ok as an aid to survival, as a temporary refuge,
but to get caught in it (as in the latter song), to think it's
the only solution and the only way, is a cop out, a form of dying.
So his humour consists largely of ridiculing the answers
which other people think they've found - whether the answer is
as silly as a pair of trousers ('Bell Bottom Pants'), going to
San Francisco ('I Don't Care'), gratuitous violence ('Clockwork
Chartreuse'), self-pity (Mr Guilty), suicide ('The Suicide Song'),
or something even sillier, like religion and mysticism.
On which topic Loudon's got four
songs. 'Guru' isn't very good, so let's forget that. But
the other three are funny and biting and show clearly why Loudon
dislikes the metaphysical. 'Glad To See You've Got Religion'
has him congratulating a friend on finding God.
Glad to know you don't discharge
a drop
Of your procreative juice,
Me I'm still in trouble
Sorry sick and sad
Me I'm still in trouble
But that's all right, because I'm
Glad to know you don't get raunchy
Glad to know things are in hand
I'm glad to know you have decided
This will be your last life stand
Religion equals impotence here.
And the "last life stand" is seen as a deadening
finality, a turning away from life, its troubles and its (growing)
pangs. Similarly, "four is a magic number," sings
Loudon in the song of that name, adding, "but then again
so is five." Mysticism is so restrictive. Finally,
one of his most hilarious songs is the beautifully blasphemous
'I Am The Way', about this guy who hangs around Jerusalem all
day shouting out, "I am the Way." He probably
comes to a sticky end, too, cos Loudon's laconic conclusion is
"Every Son of God get a little hard luck some time,"
with the later admonishment, "Especially when He goes around
saying He's the Way."
Loudon seems concerned, then,
with remaining open to all contingencies, to maturing through
a dialectic of experience and intelligence (or "tears and
logic", as he says in one song) unhampered by any preconceived
ideology. He distrusts religion because it's a way of filtering
and categorising reality, of closing off one's self from the
possibility of change and abdicating from the task of understanding
things. His is the existentialist equation of freedom as
responsibility. But the root problem is obviously not religion
itself so much as an attitude of mind - that desire for escape
and release which we all feel, and which so easily becomes bad
faith. Loudon acknowledges his own need in 'Movies Are
A Mother To Me'- "there's nothing like a movie to move me
back to sanity" - but the important thing is not to let
your method of escape turn into a new trap. So, for example,
he gets very paranoid about living in the past in 'Old Friend'
- "your present tense is reminiscing, I won't rehash it,
I won't repeat" - and is extremely wary of two complex situations
which, being both a rock star and a normal sort of guy, he often
finds himself in: fame and love.
'Motel Blues' is an anti-fame
song, about loneliness on the road. It works because it's
stark and honest but together with 'Saw Your Name In The Papers'
from the same record (Album III), it suggests that Loudon was
finding entertainment a rather heavy business at the time. In
fact, 'Saw Your Name In The Papers' explicitly paints the artist
as a martyr:
The people are all dying
And somehow you help them live
But the people will destroy you
That love will turn to hate
Make yourself a master
But know you are a slave
'AM World', from the later Attempted
Mustache, corrects this view with half-cynical humour: "they
love my ass I go first class/Who needs a heart of gold. . .I
got three guitars I got credit cards/I got more money than you."
And the recent 'Unrequited To The Nth Degree' is a kind of funny
revenge-fantasy, in which he warns his detractors he could die
at any minute just so they'll regret not appreciating his talent
sooner. Which is a purely comic variation on the above quote.
His most elusive song about music
(at least I think it's about music) is the lovely 'Red Guitar',
a brief, strange fable which describes how he smashes up his
guitar one drunken night, is chastened by the tears of his wife,
goes off to New York to buy a new one, and has this ripped off
by a junkie three days later. The last line of the song
is "God works in wondrous ways." I think it's
great, but I can't explain; maybe it's-not about music at all.
A handful of songs on Unrequited,
his latest album, indicated Loudon's various attitudes to love.
("It's an amazingly complex, difficult thing which I'm still
trying to figure out. I don't expect I'll ever understand how
it all works. I suppose that's why I write about it." is
what he says himself). 'Kick In The Head' is the pain when
love goes wrong, a pain which leads to a form (albeit perverse)
of self-discovery, "now you hate the two of them more than
you knew you could hate." And in 'Whatever Happened
To Us', Loudon bitterly remarks, "that's a whole lot of
crap about a tender trap, what it is is a suicide snare."
On 'Crime Of Passion', though, he's more ambivalent: "it's
a kind of suicide that simply must be tried, must be delicious";
and 'Absence Makes The Heart Grow Fonder'
But now things are different
Cause now you are gone
And I'm not sure I can carry on
I always knew you were important to me
But now I see you as a necessity~
Cause otherwise, I start to go insane
So again there's fear of traps,
of suicide and death; but Loudon struggles through this to a
realistic evaluation of love because he realises that, unlike
religion or fame, love need not be an inauthentic solution, just
a necessity. Besides which, he likes kids
Yes, Loudon's got some baby songs;
too. 'Dilated To Meet You' welcomes his child with the
dire advice "you cannot get back inside again, once you
have come out"; 'Rufus Is A Tit Man' deals with his son's
feeding habits; 'Lullaby' is a "shut up and go to sleep"
song which acknowledges that babies can be a nuisance - a useful,
though affectionate, corrective to the earlier 'Be Careful There's
A Baby In The House', in which the baby is idealised (perhaps)
as a touchstone of honesty. "A baby will not be fooled,"
he warns, "all that coochie coochie coo is a lot of poo
poo." The freedom and clearsightedness of the newly-born
(at least in this song) is, I guess, what Loudon aspires to in
all his music. Mysticism, self-pity, stardom etc., etc.
are different lots of poo poo, and it's far better to keep being
born (even though it can be painful) than to die slowly in one
of those tender traps. The politics of being is about staying
alive but it's more like coming alive: a struggle constantly
renewed. A song by his wife, Kate McGarrigle, on Attempted
Mustache has it:
We've come a long way since
we first shook hands
Still got a long way to go…
All my life I wanted to roam
To go to the ends of the earth
But the earth really ends where you started to roam
You and I know what a circle is worth
Or like Loudon himself says,
in 'Four Is A Magic Number':
Every time I sit you down
To tell you what is true
For safety's sake, remember please
I'd shut up if I knew
I should also mention that I
like his guitar work (energetic, refreshing, surprisingly tuneful;
that he was born (the first time) in North Carolina in 1946;
that he's had one hit single - 'Dead Skunk', which, a friend
of mine says, "sums up America" (whatever that means);
that he's made five albums to date (two, solo, for Atlantic;
three which make frequent use of backing musicians, for CBS),
and has recently moved to Arista. But there's no more room. |
