Loudon Wainwright III – IIIrd act
“It’s a way to draw in the audience, to get them laughing and then turn around and clobber them with something serious. You can do all sorts of things with humor, and I’ve always liked to think of myself as a switch hitter in that way, that I could hit in either direction.”
The shtick got him noticed. When he opened for John Hammond Jr. at the Gaslight in 1969, a writer for the Village Voice wrote a rave review that attracted talent scouts including Nesuhi Ertegun from Atlantic Records and John Hammond Sr. from Columbia Records. Wainwright ended up cutting his first two albums for Atlantic, and the next three for Columbia.
Wainwright would become the first of many performers touted as “the new Bob Dylan,” a marketing strategy he lampooned in a 1991 song, “Talking New Bob Dylan” (“I got some boots and a harmonic rack/A D-21 and I was on the right track”).
In retrospect, he thinks it was an easy time to get a record deal if you had some genuine talent. “Considering that I started to perform in 1968,” he says, “and started making my first record in 1969, there weren’t a lot of lean years.”
Signing with Atlantic prompted one last bit of theatricality. “Because Loudon is such an unusual name,” he says, “and because my dad was a pretty well-known journalist at the time, it was suggested by a number of people, including my dad, that I use my technical name, with the Roman numeral on it. My dad said, ‘I think your grandmother would appreciate it.’
“Years later, when he was dying in the hospital [in 1988], I remember going to visit him once and going, ‘Hey dad, remember in 1969 when you said I should use Loudon Wainwright III in honor of Loudon Wainwright the first? How come you were never Loudon Wainwright Jr.?’ He’s dying in a hospital bed and I’m giving him grief. But that’s what happens to you. ‘That’s OK,’ he said. ‘You can have the name when I die.'”
For twenty-odd years I have strummed on guitars
Five thousand lost flatpicks, four fingertip scars
— “Career Moves”, 1985
This past spring, Wainwright toured the British Isles, where he’s always been more popular than in the United States largely because of the avid and early support of the late John Peel, the influential BBC disc jockey. He typically ended his show with “Career Moves”, and had to raise the number of years, flatpicks, and broken G strings noted in the lyric. Wainwright has been on the road for a long time, and in a song called “Road Ode”, says carrying his guitar is akin to Willy Loman struggling with his sample cases.
“You go to these towns over and over again,” he says, “and there’s a kind of familiarity about it, and a sense of belonging to the town for the 36, 48 hours that you’re there.” In Dublin he seeks out a pint at Kehoe’s; in Chicago he walks along Lake Michigan and thinks of a long-gone favorite club, the Quiet Knight; in San Francisco he visits his hippie past and jokes about recognizing acid freaks in Golden Gate Park.
Once in a blue moon, he performs with a band, but usually he plays solo. “I’ve mostly done it by myself, which is a cost-effective way, and also a dramatic way,” he says. “There’s something pretty powerful about one person standing up there with a guitar. I certainly know that a lot of my fans prefer me stripped down like that.”
Wainwright guesstimates that he typically earns 95 percent of his annual income from touring. He’s never sold a lot of records; his albums have never gone gold. His best-selling LP was his third (the one that included “Dead Skunk”, which reached #16 on the pop charts in 1973). He did two more albums for Columbia after that, but they were disappointed, he said, when they couldn’t find another “funny animal song.”
Longtime fans argue over favorite Wainwright albums, though there’s general agreement that his strongest include the first two on Atlantic and two of more recent vintage, History (1992) and The Last Man On Earth (2001). Wainwright’s first album was as eloquently depressed as your most morose Ivy Leaguer. “Melody Maker described it as ‘bed-sit music,'” says Wainwright. “Me and Nick Drake, you know, neurotic, unhappy young guys.” It’s also probably no coincidence that his more recent highwater marks contained moving songs about his late father and mother.
The solo tours have had an indelible effect on his performance and songwriting, sharpening his lyrical diction, vocal syncopation, comic timing, and the rhythmic thrust of his D-28 guitar. The traveling has also probably made it harder to hold onto a place that a troubadour can call home.
In the early 1970s, Wainwright married Kate McGarrigle, who would soon become known for her songs and musical partnership with sister Anna. They had two children, Rufus and Martha. Wainwright celebrated the birth of his son with the song “Rufus Is A Tit Man” (“Rufus is a tit man, suckin’ on his mamma’s gland”) and later wrote a harrowing song called “Hitting You” about smacking Martha in anger (“I pulled the auto over, hit you with all my might/I knew right away it was too hard, and I’d never make it right”). He later lived with Suzzy Roche of the Roches, and they had a daughter, Lucy. All three children are musicians; Lucy opened for her dad on his British tour.