Loudon Soft
Sun., June 5 & Mon., June 6
, 425 Lafayette St. (betw. E. 4th St. & Astor Pl.),
212-539-8778; 7 & 9:30, $30.
Take Loudon Wainwright III, the Westchester bard whose 35-year career and its 21 albums form a veritable catalog of quixotic folly and rage-all delivered through a clenched Cheshire grin that begins with menace and fades, often within a stanza, into an almost masochistic self-mockery. Running from his responsibilities to pursue delusions of grandeur that he can neither believe in nor compromise for, Wainwright seduces listeners with cheeky, self-deprecating punchlines. While he once wrote a song from the perspective of Prince Hal, Wainwright's pathos is pure Falstaff: the clown who couldn't cry.
Ruthless candor has been a hallmark of Wainwright's songwriting since his eponymous 1970 debut. Together with John Prine, Springsteen and others, Wainwright was heralded in those days as a "new Bob Dylan," a blue-jeaned folkie out to change the world. But unlike all of them, he never romanticized bohemian-styled pilgrimages into counterculture, nor cheered along the changes allegedly being wrought within it. The times may have seemed a-changing for Dylan and co., but as Wainwright sings to his son, the now borderline-superstar Rufus, on a more recent album: "Everything changes, but nothing is new."
Instead, Wainwright romanticizes the self-in all its selfishness, stupidity and yearning-which is probably what appealed to me so directly when I first heard him at 14.
I was in New England then, and like most adolescent American want-it-alls, I wanted to be in New York. Loudon sang about this town, and sang to this town, on nearly every record, memorializing the downtown/uptown split with cutting irony, capturing the city's polemic of high aspirations/low-life living with an edge only a skeptic trickster can own. I would later learn that his father was a lifelong journalist at Life in the 50s, a daily commuter from Westchester into the city, and that Loudon himself was a descendent of the wampum-mad Peter Stuyvesant.
Like another New York icon I first pursued-Woody Allen-Loudon was much loved for his earlier, funny stuff. And as with Allen's films, Loudon's records were becoming more unavoidably, uncompromisingly serious, the jokes and manic wordplay giving way to ballads about divorce, lonely dinners, familial anomie, and trying to get high on substances that no longer did the trick.
"Country and Eastern," is how Wainwright once described his brand of folkie ferocity. Or, as one friend put it: "He's like a punk dressed like a campfire singer."
Wainwright's 13th album, History, marks a watershed in his songwriting. The aches of what Wainwright calls "unhappy love" are still felt, but what's new are these straightforward verses that betray a craftsman at the peak of his powers. "The Picture" captures in a few minutes' time what few writers in any form seem capable of doing: conveying the warmth of sibling love as the nearest thing to unconditional acceptance, as a buffer from the rest of the family and the world beyond.
The album concludes with a trio of tracks that limn the passing of generations. "A Father and Son" teases out Oedipal rage as a byproduct of fraternal love; "Sometimes I Forget," about the death of Wainwright's father, is an excruciating account of the mind's unwillingness to incorporate loss into its catalog of the mundane; "A Handful of Dust" marks Wainwright's attempt to write a song out of one of his father's poems.
Years after I arrived here from New England, everything's changed: Staples and Starbucks rule New York; my drinking pals have kids; the Bottom Line is gone; and two of Wainwright's children, Rufus and Martha, are becoming more famous than Dad ever was, despite Wainwright the Elder's recent Hollywood cameos.
Like so many other stalwart New Yorkers, Wainwright in the last few years packed up and left. He headed west.
On Wainwright's latest release, Here Come the Choppers, the title track imagines L.A.'s streets and strip malls being decimated as ruthlessly as Baghdad. Among other gems, the CD contains the best post-9/11 song anyone's penned thus far: a five-minute account of a subway ride on the C train, from Chambers Street to Chinatown, in the days immediately following the attacks. Gliding beneath the former towers, Wainwright sings: "I survived, somehow was living/But somewhere I shouldn't be."
This weekend, Wainwright plays four shows at Joe's Pub. Everything changes, sure, but nothing is new. I'll be there to collect my reward for coming home.