Many American families who have issues on the scale of the Wainwrights would
spend most of their time and money on therapy. This great and scattered
tribe may have the money; what they lack is the time as they are far too
busy writing about each other. The 61-year-old patriarch, Loudon Wainwright
III, has been doing it for decades, marking the ups and downs of domestic
life in songs so frank they are literally breathtaking. You really could
hear the audiences gasp as he launched into the confessional Hitting You,
about the time he struck his daughter when she was a child. “I was aiming
for your buttock but I struck your outer thigh…”
This daughter, Martha Wainwright, is now 32 and has become a star in her own
right. So has her 35-year-old brother Rufus, whose earliest feeding habits
Loudon chronicled with a song called Rufus Is a Tit Man. Not any
more; he now lives in New York with his boyfriend Jorn, a German arts
administrator. Both these siblings have made such an impact that if you tell
anyone under 40 that you are off to see Loudon Wainwright, they look
uncertain and ask if he is anything to do with Rufus and Martha. He sure is.
It’s not only his singing talents they’ve inherited, but also his notions of
what a song can say, and to whom. Rufus wrote a real stinger called Dinner
At Eight, apparently inspired by a dreadful row he and Loudon had about
which of the two could take the credit for their being on the cover of Rolling
Stone. Martha showed she could do forthrightness too, with a number
about her father called Bloody Mother F****** Asshole. He says that
when he first heard it he didn’t think it was about him, but about “some boy
she’d had a bad run-in with, and I thought, ‘Ooooh, that’s a bit much.’ And
then, to use that great English expression, I twigged.” How did it make him
feel? “It made me feel I didn’t like hearing it. I was upset by it. Why
wouldn’t you be?”
Not that this was the first time a woman had hurled a song at him in anger.
Thirty years earlier his first wife, Martha’s mother, Kate McGarrigle, had
written one called Go Leave, but he had already done so. Later, while
the children were still small, he produced a song of terrible poignancy
called Your Mother and I, in which he attempted the impossible task
of explaining parental breakdown to people too young to really get it, but
old enough to, well, twig.
Sometimes the “children” do his old songs. There is one called One
Man Guy which, like its maker, is deceptively sensitive, looking like an
ode to ego but turning out to be a call for self-knowledge. When you see
Rufus doing it, so like his dad and yet so theatrically camp and operatic at
the piano, it gets complicated. The Wainwrights can indeed come over like an
opera of the soap variety, but it’s all rather darker than that – something
from Arthur Miller, but with gags that throw you off the scent. Either that
or else a very alternative Partridge Family, with all the neuroses worn on
the outside.
While he concedes that his time is passing, he is not gone yet. The son has
risen, but total eclipse has yet to happen. In fact, the father’s lease
could be extended by all this fascination with the family and its global
young stars. Either way, there is enough oedipal stuff here to make the
dourest Freudian want to sing, and the pride of each in the other is less
straightforward than the lyric-writing. “Rufus is who he is,” says Loudon.
“My own father liked some of what I did, and didn’t like others. The same
applies to me, and I imagine the same applies from Rufus towards me.” LW III
has his own new album out, made all the more intriguing by his reprise of
songs that he wrote when he was ten years younger than Rufus is now. “Be
careful, there’s a baby in the house,” he sings, sounding more menaced than
mellow. “If I Love You is an IOU, don’t expect to get a good deal.” He has
also written his first songs for a stage show, an adaptation of the comic
thriller Lucky You by the American novelist Carl Hiaasen. This gets
its UK premiere on Thursday at the Assembly Hall in Edinburgh. Wainwright
has a long-standing relationship with Britain. Fifteen years ago he was
writing topical songs for Jasper Carrott’s TV show. Between 1985 and 1997,
he had a flat in Hampstead, which he used when he was touring in Europe.
Earlier in his career, before the children, he and his wife Kate rented a
flat in Holland Park in London.
To reach him now you go to Shelter Island, which lodges in the fork of land at
the far end of Long Island. Three hours on the train from New York to
Greenport, then a ferry. He’s been coming here for more than 20 years, and
was introduced to the place by his sister, whose real name is Martha, like
her niece, but who is called Teddy, for reasons her brother can’t remember.
He has a house here, a big wooden one with woodland at the back, a hammock
in the garden and a boat at the quay. There is an old Volvo, left by Lucy,
the 27-year-old daughter from his second marriage. She too is a successful
singer and songwriter, as is her mother, Suzzy, who is one of the three
sisters in the folk group the Roches. Loudon says that his relationship with
Suzzy is very good, although they are long divorced. “We have managed to
stay great friends,” he says, “and she is one of my favourite people ever.”
With his first wife, Kate, he says, it’s been tougher.
“But it’s getting better,” he adds brightly. “If you marry somebody… I’d
better say this quick…” There is the sound of his front door opening. “If
you marry somebody and have children, you are always married to them. Maybe
you are, even if you don’t have children. I don’t know.” The condition must
have kept its appeal because he married for the third time three years ago.
It’s his wife Rita, an actress, coming in now. They have a 15-year-old
daughter, Lexie, and the family splits its time between here and their home
in Los Angeles.
Because the scars of his earlier marital conflicts are kept in view by the
songs, you might think it’s surprising that he’s married again. “It
surprises me that I did,” he says. “As you know, I have been quite
pessimistic about relationships in general, but this just felt like the
right thing to do. My parents had a really bad marriage, so I’ll blame them,
and they’re not alive any more so they won’t care if I say it. Bad marriages
are everywhere. There are probably 20 of them within a stone’s throw from
here. But I don’t think I’m as selfish as I used to be, and I’ve slowed down
a lot, and this person [Rita] is different.”
The notion of meeting Wainwright is a little daunting. You can’t be sure
whether you’re going to get the sparkling satirist or the sore bear. His
songs come in both those modes and more, and they are, as he intends them to
be, an accurate report of his condition. He turns out to be relaxed and
oddly at peace. Oddly because of the anguish in his life and songs, and
because of the whooping, piratical presence he has been at the microphone.
He’s in good shape, too, considering; gut-free, unfurrowed of brow, and
reticent to the point of modesty.
For the past 40 years he has picked a path between the rock of contemporaries
such as Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Lou Reed, the traditional folk of his
ex-wives and the social anthropology of The Simpsons. Right from the
early stuff, he has been coming in at an angle, turning out grand, sardonic
miniatures about the dreams and terrors of middle-class America: a 12-bar
blues about not feeling bad, a hymn to the joys of a day without sun in LA,
a hippie being traumatised by a haircut; and all the time a nameless sense
of distress at his shoulder – the blues of empty affluence. Set beside the
general imagery of rock, his landscape is the alternative one – Country Club
pools, lawn sprinklers, pets, ageing, the weather – all sung about in a
voice which, like Rufus’s, can veer from tender beauty to drain-clearing
rasp in the space of a bar. The switch is matched by the words. A song
titled Lullaby opens with the line: “Shut up and go to sleep.” In his age
group, only Randy Newman has gone through this minefield of subversion and
self-mockery with comparable skill, swagger and plain old stamina.
He has also kept a decent acting career running alongside, from Captain Calvin
Spalding, the singing surgeon in M*A*S*H, through the Cocoanut Grove
vocalist in The Aviator to Dr Everett Howard in Knocked Up,
which last year inspired a new collection of songs, Strange Weirdos.
To his great amusement he was the first of many to be hailed as the New Bob
Dylan, which missed the point hilariously. For a start he was dressing
preppy, right in line with his well-to-do upbringing in suburban
Westchester, New York. Whatever his peers were rebelling against, he looked
as if he was rebelling against them. He had also worked out, ahead of the
field, the many ways in which the personal is political, and found in his
own conflicts a richer source of protest than in Vietnam or President Nixon.
He admits he was hugely influenced by the emerging Dylan, and some of his
songs have more or less the same chords. But that’s about it. Where Dylan
goes off on his glorious expressionist freeways, Wainwright has virtually no
use at all for poetic ambiguity. That’s the user-friendly thing about him,
but also the danger; there’s nothing to mediate the starkness of his
reports. That song about striking his infant daughter goes on: “…I pulled
the auto over/ and I hit you with all my might/ I knew right away it was too
hard/ and I’d never make it right.”
