LOUDON ALONE
by KARL DALLAS
 The
PR man in the coffee lounge of the Hotel Russell was anxious
about the Loudon Wainwright's appearance. "Is he cleanshaven
or bearded." he wanted to know. "Everytime I see him,
he puts our publicity pix out of date."
For the record, Loudon Wainwright
is bearded, very bushily.
But I could understand the publicity
man's anxiety. Loudon Wainwright has what you might call a changeable
image.
A lot of it might have to do
with him being somewhat of a loner. He dropped out of drama school
because his particular brand of loneness coincided with "all
those wonderful things that they were doing in San Francisco
in 1967."
"I had trouble with the
whole concept of collaboration", he recalls. "You're
an actor and you read the playwright's line and you take direction
from the director."
Loudon Wainwright III (to give
him his full bank president-style title) sitting in his twin-bedded
room. Lenny Bruce on the dressing table, dental floss on the
TV console, a bottle of Carling Black Label in his hand and a
magnum of champagne cooling in the bathroom. Very much the contemporary
singer-songwriter dealing with a series of interviews set up
by his record company. Alone.
 His
loneness would explain why he finds the whole idea of going out
on his own, just him and his guitar, so appealing, because though
he gets bookings at folk festivals, in no way is he a folk artist
in the proper sense of the word.
"What I do is not really
rooted in any kind of folk tradition apart from the fact that
I happen to play a guitar and write songs. But I like to play
folk festivals - Ken Woolard has asked me to play Cambridge this
year which would be nice."
"Folk festivals are very
good audiences. They're very attentive and sophisticated too,
I would say."
"But one reason I prefer
performing solo to singing with a band is that I never grew up
playing in a band like lots of kids who start out when they're
teenagers playing in a band. I mean, I listened to rock'n'roll
bands when I was growing up but I guess the earliest music I
was affected by was the music that my parents played on their
record player when I was ten years old or something - Dixieland
jazz, Californian jazz like Gerry Mulligan, but mainly musicals
like 'My Fair Lady', 'Guys and Dolls', 'The Pajama Game' and
'South Pacific'', legitimate Broadway writing.
"I can remember singing
along with the records and that's where the strongest influence
is musically, that particular kind of music."
"The people who played on
my third record were a band called 'White Cloud' and I did one
gig with them at the Cafe A Go-Go. I went out for the first half
and I played my guitar and then I became almost just the lead
singer in the band."
"I felt uncomfortable doing
it. And a little more than a year later I tried to put a band
together. We rehearsed and everything but once again I found
I wasn't really interested in it. I like working with other musicians
in the studio situation but that's totally different."
"It was just this general
feeling that I just couldn't relax into the thing, the rehearsing
and having to blend in with the others. That may change, you
know, I may take another stab at it, but for the time being I
intend to just continue along as a solo."
"But for the moment I'm
egocentrical enough so that I feel more relaxed and more in control
when it's just myself. And you don't have to divide the money."
Money, the excrement of that
bitch-goddess success. It's supposed to be uncool for musicians
to care much about it but in a world where the price of everything
is going up and industrialists will pay thousands to buy off
trade unionists from going on strike, it oughtn't to be too surprising
to find that even the wandering troubadour expects to find someone
willing to pay the tune.
"Yeah, I think of it as
a job", he agreed. "I play music and I like writing
but I don't think I'd be here unless it could lead to the fact
that I'm going to be paid for coming back and playing. I get
paid for it and I relate to it as that."
"Of course, writing can
get your rocks off, kind of get it off your chest. And while
you're singing the audience absorbs it and they'll give you back
something which you can absorb, which may be the applause, the
adultation if there is adultation, the respect, the money - you
know the whole spectrum."
"It's cartartic to me but
I don't know if it's cartartic to them. It entertains them, that's
basically what it does."
"There's a microphone and
a stage and they've paid money, so they're entertained and I'm
entertained by doing it, but I'm also doing it for the other
reasons I mentioned."
"It stimulates reaction
and in some cases some kind of emotion. They might laugh at it
or they might think about the subject or they might get angry
about it."
"One 14-year-old girl wrote me a letter and said that 'Dead
Skunk in the Middle of the Road' - my one hit single, it got
to number ten or something - was the cruellest, saddest thing
she had ever heard and I should be ashamed of doing it."
"People react and I classify
that reason in the context of what I'm doing."
"I once sang 'Motel Blues',
the one about the lonely singer looking for a girl to take back
to his motel room, on a Women's Liberation programme on a radio
station in Chicago."
"The moderator was a very
angry woman and she suggested that perhaps I ought to have my
genitals removed. She reacted to it very strongly, in a very
hostile way."
"And other people and other
women have talked about that particular song and said that it's
good I can talk about it and .... I don't know."
"When I wrote it I wasn't
thinking about Women's Liberation. I was thinking about motel
blues."
"All I can say is, you know,
my relationships with women have always been good and bad and
complex and confusing and great and never clear and never one
thing or another."
"It's an amazingly complex
difficult thing which I'm still trying to figure out. I don't
expect I'll really ever understand how it all works. I suppose
that's why I write about it."
"There's lots of references
to men and women in my songs, and sex - not screwing so much
- but it's just that the sex thing, the battle of the sexes or
whatever that cliche is, it's a good topic because there are
always men and women out there in the audience."
Some people, whose roots are
in the days when the singer-songwriter was a dusty-booted political
sloganer, criticise songwriters like Wainwright for not laying
a powerful message on their audiences - but Loudon claims his
songs are just as political as the next man's.
"I don't write songs about
Vietnam or impeaching the President or Women's Liberation or
the Black situation, you know they're not protest songs or social
political songs."
"The ones that I usually
end up dealing with are the sort of things that are discussed
at the breakfast table. For instance, I've got songs about drinking,
which is a very political thing, I think."
"People drink, and it affects
the way they treat other people and treat themselves and decisions
are made or are not made and things are done or not done under
the influence of alcohol and that makes it political. That's
the politics of being, of existing, almost."
KARL DALLAS
(From the British Pop Paper 'Melody
Maker' - June 1st 1974) |
