Loudon Wainwright III – IIIrd act
“It makes sense that Rufus, Lucy, and Martha would all become musicians,” he says, “because they grew up in households where people sang, and where there were banjos, guitars and pianos. They grew up with people going to the airport, and they all went on tour. So it made perfect sense to me that they would wind up in the so-called family business.”
They also grew up with a father who’s said that he sometimes feels like he’s living alone, even when he’s not. “Loudon has moved a lot,” says Joe Henry, “and you wonder how much that is in service to his material, or how much his material is influenced by the fact that his life is not simple. If you drew out his family tree, either spiritually or literally or psychically, it’s complex. As I joked to him, ‘Never a dull moment at the holidays, I bet.'”
Wainwright says his mother was his biggest fan, and that his relationship with his father was more complicated, and competitive. “When I was a kid,” he told Entertainment Weekly, “if my mother was in the stands, I’d hit a home run. If my father was in the stands, I’d strike out.” Now his son Rufus is an openly gay pop star playing in major venues around the world.
“It’s funny,” Wainwright told Time in 2001, “and maybe just coincidental, that at 55, after losing both my parents, my career seems to be doing better than ever, with the TV show [‘Undeclared’] and this slightly more mature CD [Last Man On Earth]. I wish they were here to see it. I understand more about my father now that Rufus, who is so talented, is doing so well. There’s an ambivalence; you’re proud and excited, and you’re also asking, ‘What about me?'”
Brad Grey’s in L.A.
Yeah OK I should stay
There’s no place that’s better I know
For a wannabe star
Stuck in a car
On a freeway with nowhere to go
— “Grey In L.A.”, 2007
“I heard somebody’s singing about me,” said Brad Grey to Judd Apatow. Grey is the CEO of Paramount Pictures, and has known Apatow since his days as executive producer of “The Larry Sanders Show”. Count on Wainwright to put Grey’s name in a song about cloudy days in Los Angeles.
Wainwright spoke to me again on his cell from JFK airport in New York while waiting for a plane. His guitar case was close by. He’d done a scheduled show in North Carolina on Saturday, and flew to New York after getting a last-minute call to do “Late Night With Conan O’Brien” on Tuesday. His pickup band included Larry Campbell on pedal steel; they rehearsed “Daughter” during the soundcheck and nailed it on the show. Across the country, on the same night, Apatow told fart jokes while promoting Knocked Up on “The Tonight Show”.
Wainwright moved out west after living in hotels while working on “Undeclared”. He got a part in Tim Burton’s Big Fish and appeared on episodic TV shows including “Ally McBeal” and “According To Jim”. Wainwright’s musical career has helped him get acting gigs ever since Larry Gelbart made him a singing captain on three episodes of “M*A*S*H” in the mid-’70s. When he first met director Cameron Crowe, who cast him in Elizabethtown, the first thing they talked about was how Crowe interviewed him when he was 16.
In 2005, Wainwright married Rita Marie Kelly, an actress and the mother of his fourth child, 14-year-old Alexandra. His daughter’s taking piano lessons, but injured her hand at volleyball. In fact, the whole house, located in the San Fernando Valley, is discombobulated because there’s an addition in progress. Hammers aside, Wainwright paints the picture on the Strange Weirdos track “Valley Morning”, a lyric that illustrates his reportorial eye atop a musical arrangement that is soft and sweet and unfolds like a sky blue morning:
“The slap of the paper, the hiss of the sprinkler, the beat of the coffee machine/The drone in the distance that says there’s a freeway/The gardeners will soon make the scene, ’cause it’s Thursday/Soon they’ll arrive on the scene.”
“It’s kind of funny because he’s got a real suburban kind of life going,” says Apatow, “a very traditional sort of happy life. One thing about this record is that it’s got love songs that aren’t ironic or angry, which is something new for Loudon.”
From sea to shining sea, and from Westchester to the Valley, Loudon Wainwright has lived a folkie’s American dream. “In the beginning,” he says, “I had the romantic notion that I would be dead by the time I was 25. But now only am I not dead, but I’m having my house renovated.” Pause. “Yesterday there were six Mexicans here, three working in the yard, and three more on the house.”
John Milward is a writer and musician who lives in Woodstock, New York. Thirty-some years ago, he interviewed Loudon Wainwright III for the Chicago Reader, and then saw him play at the Quiet Knight.