He did meet Dylan a couple of times, once when he and a friend came to see him
perform and congratulated him on a song called Dead Skunk, which was
the surprise chart hit of Wainwright’s career. “My hands were shaking when I
met him,” he recalls, “but when he said he liked that song, I thought I just
might have a hit on my hands.” It was 1973, when all lyrics went into
compulsory analysis and Dead Skunk was widely taken as a lament for
man's destruction of the natural (the skunk had failed to look left or right
when crossing the highway), or else an allegory about Nixon. One US preacher
even took it as a text from which to attack the state of the church (the
dead animal is described as “stinking to high Heaven”). “Well, OK,” says
Wainwright with open palms. “But for me, it was just about a dead skunk
lying there in the highway.”
He reckons there are a few things he has said in songs which he now wishes he
hadn’t. “But, interestingly, Hitting You is not one of
them. When I wrote it, I vetted it, and I performed it to Martha. I remember
saying, listen to this. She was the first person I played it to. That was
when she was 14 and she was living with me in New York. Our time together
that year resulted in a number of songs and that was one of them. We were
having a difficult year, as any parent would with a 14-year-old, considering
we had never really lived together.
“The marriages were broken when the kids were very little. I wasn’t on
the scene. I didn’t grow up with my kids. Now that’s an interesting title,
right there. I was absent. Missing in action. Out of action. Whatever. I was
on the road, touring, involved in my own life, which they were a part of,
yes, but… when that [separation] happens, it’s a kind of disaster for
everybody, and we’re all still trying to get over that earthquake,
explosion, or whatever it was that happened 25 and 30 years ago.”
He goes on to say that the “kids” are still the most important people in his
life, and that the dynamics of those relationships remain in play. “Now, I’m
not saying, ‘Watch out, here comes my next broadside.’ It’s not like it’s a
battle of the bands. We are writing about what we are writing about, what we
are feeling. I am, and they are too. We have to. This is who we are.” But in
being that thing, they strike chords that resonate deep into the audience.
The origins of the material are specific, but the relevance is universal. He
says that with that song, the hitting one, people regularly come up to him
after a concert to say that this has happened to them. They don’t mean that
they were once struck by their own parents, but that they too have been
overtaken by their own rage, lost it. “It happens all the time. It’s
happening on this island. The shock is in the recognition, of guys thinking,
‘Oh God, I lost it just like that.’”
If the novelist Graham Greene was right about difficult childhoods being a
writer’s best resource, then the Wainwrights are extravagantly qualified.
Loudon Wainwright II was, according to his son, a chilly, unapproachable
man. He was also an alcoholic, although he spent his last 20 years dry. He
was a columnist for Life magazine. A good one, says Loudon, though
far better when writing about himself and his own feelings than when
discussing politics.
Wainwright’s new album is called Recovery. Given the drinking in
the family, this begs the question “From what?” He admits that he too drank
too much for many years, but “decided that I wasn’t an alcoholic. I still
drink beer and wine. But I know about it. It was not just my father, but his
parents. My mother’s father as well. I’ll stop there.” For a while it must
have looked like another legacy Rufus and Martha had picked up, as both have
done their share of substance abuse. In Martha’s case, when she had left
Montreal and come to New York in her twenties, it was drink; in Rufus’s it
was the drug methamphetamine. It brought him to despair and temporary
blindness. Elton John helped him into a successful course of rehab.
“I can understand why people might think Recovery is about
drinking, or not drinking,” says Loudon. “But it isn’t.” He’s right, despite
the presence of one track called The Drinking Song. This is recovery
in the sense of salvage, taking and re-working some of the early songs.
There’s a heartfelt, apocalyptic one called Man Who Couldn’t Cry,
which was covered by Johnny Cash; an unsparing one about not being able to
write, in which he once more turns his gun on himself – low self-esteem is
not as new as we sometimes think; and a clear-eyed take on that other
addictive substance, fame: “Make yourself a hero/ It’s heroes people crave./
Make yourself a master/ But know you are a slave.”
The songs for the Edinburgh show, Lucky You, came about when he was
approached by one of its co-producers, Jon Plowman, who is head of comedy at
the BBC. Wainwright didn’t know Hiaasen’s work, but mugged up, jumped at the
commission, then beavered away and got his stuff in ahead of deadline. On
the evidence of the songs, Plowman’s instincts were good, with Wainwright’s
style of lyric (“The state is in the shape of a big old handgun”) a natural
match for Hiaasen’s Florida satire on race, religion and the lottery. A
special reading of the show script for the famously picky novelist was
staged in Florida by the director and adaptor Francis Matthews, and got his
blessing. After Edinburgh, the production plans to come to London, via
Oxford.
To suggest that Wainwright has mellowed would be to come up with the sort of
conclusion he would deplore. This is a man who fights mawkishness with every
ounce of strength, even though he has never managed to squash his
sentimental leanings. What he has done is change. Late in his career he
released an album called Social Studies, which set about public
people – Bill Clinton, O. J. Simpson, Tonya Harding, the skating champion
whose ex-husband hired someone to attack one of her opponents. Now he’s
resurrecting a lyric, President’s Day, which is as hostile to
George Bush as any of his contemporaries were to Nixon. “We have this
holiday called President’s Day at the end of February,” he explains, “and
it’s meant to commemorate Washington and Lincoln. I wrote it four years ago.
It’s all about how depressing the holiday is because we have another
president called George. I’m singing it again because this time not only is
there the hope but also the certainty that that idiot won’t be there in
January.”
Angry Young Man at last? Late-life rebellion against the apolitical young?
Atoning for his own years of self-study? “We’re getting better,” he says
again. It’s a reference to recovery, but of his extended family rather than
of the nation. That is still his specialism, and as evidence of this
recovery he mentions Martha’s recent marriage, back in Canada, to her bass
player and producer Brad Albetta; how every-one was there, singing, playing,
getting along. He hasn’t done with the subject yet. None of them has. It’s
where the action is and, as he says, it’s what they do. There may be no
business like showbusiness, but there are no affairs like family ones; no
issue like issue.
Recovery is released by Yep Roc Records on August 19. Lucky You
opens on Thursday at the Assembly Hall, Edinburgh, until August 25
