By Richie Unterberger
Loudon Wainwright's self-titled 1970 debut album (also reissued on CD by Collectors' Choice Music) introduced a refreshingly iconoclastic talent into the burgeoning singer-songwriter scene. As witty and varied as the plainly arranged songs on Loudon Wainwright III were, however, they didn't ring up many sales, despite collecting numerous critical accolades. Much the same deal took place when 1971's Album II came out, leading to Atlantic dropping Wainwright from the label, though fortunately he was able to continue his recording career without much interruption.
Like Loudon Wainwright III, Album II had little in the way of
backing instrumentation. Where his debut LP had nothing but
Wainwright's voice and acoustic guitar, the follow-up did at least have
one track, "Old Paint," with backup vocals by his then-wife Kate
McGarrigle (herself a recording artist of note, though she had yet to
start recording as half of a duo with her sister Anna) and harmonica by
Saul Broudy. Plus, Loudon moved over to the piano for "Samson and the
Warden." Otherwise, however, it was as stark an
acoustic-guitar-and-voice production (which for "Me and My Friend the
Cat," "Cook That Dinner, Dora," and "Glenville Reel" was credited to
Milton Kramer, and for other tracks to Wainwright himself) as its
predecessor. This led him to not only often be classified as a folkie,
but also sometimes labeled a "new Dylan," though he wasn't nearly as
steeped in folk and rock traditions as many singer-songwriters were,
and already had an acerbic persona that set him far apart from Bob
Dylan.
"I'm not interested in rock and roll," he confessed
to Melody Maker in 1971. "I'm
no big rock and roll freak. Okay. I like to listen to it occasionally,
but I ain't got a tranny up to my ear all day. There are other, more
interesting types of music for me. There's the old music, like the
traditional music, it could be traditional American music, it depends
where I am at the time. But I've never really been to lots of rock
concerts." In 1974, talking to Karl Dallas (also for Melody Maker), he added, "What I do
is not really rooted in any kind of folk tradition apart from the fact
that I happen to play a guitar and write songs."
As on his first album, there was no shortage of
humor on Album II, often of
the bitingly wicked sort. There was also no shortage of offbeat
subjects to address, from the groupie one-night stand of "Motel Blues"
and mixed feelings about parenthood ("Be Careful There's a Baby in the
House") to a mundane airplane ride ("Plane, Too") and getting his hair
cut off by a cold-hearted jailer ("Samson and the Warden"). Some of the
song titles alone ("Nice Jewish Girls," "Suicide Song," "Me and My
Friend the Cat") were evidence enough that Wainwright wasn't singing
about the usual
rock'n'roll concerns. And as he had on songs from his first album like
"Glad to See You've Got Religion," Wainwright wasn't afraid to position
himself as a distasteful character expressing thoughts that most of us
(and certainly most songwriters) would like to remain hidden, like envy
("Saw Your Name in the Paper") and drunken depression ("I Know I'm
Unhappy"). Of course, Loudon was never one to offer self-righteous
moralistic calls to arms. "I was never much interested in the agit-prop
political aspect of folk music," he confessed to Jason Gross of the Perfect Sound Forever website in
1998. "I never found it as compelling as the love ballads, murder
ballads and novelty songs. Allan Sherman was more interesting to me in
a way than Phil Ochs. It's just my taste."
As to the peculiar romantic inclinations explored in
songs like "Nice Jewish Girls," "Cook That Dinner, Dora," and "Motel
Blues," Wainwright told Karl Dallas, "All I can say is, you know, my
relationships with women have always been good and bad and complex and
confusing and great and never clear and never one thing or another.
It's an amazingly complex difficult thing which I'm still trying to
figure out. I don't expect I'll really ever understand how it all
works. I suppose that's why I write about it. There's lots of
references to men and women in my songs, and sex -- not screwing so
much -- but it's just that the sex thing, the battle of the sexes or
whatever that cliche is, it's a good topic because there are always men
and women out there in the audience."
One such song from Album
II proved especially controversial. "I once sang 'Motel Blues',
the one about the lonely singer looking for a girl to take back to his
motel room, on a women's liberation program on a radio station in
Chicago," he reported to Dallas. "The moderator was a very angry woman
and she suggested that perhaps I ought to have my genitals removed. She
reacted to it very strongly, in a very hostile way. And other people
and other women have talked about that particular song and said that
it's good I can talk about it and...I don't know. When I wrote it I
wasn't thinking about women's liberation. I was thinking about motel
blues."
Continued Wainwright in the same piece, "I don't
write songs about Vietnam or impeaching the president or women's
liberation or the black situation, you know they're not protest songs
or social political songs. The ones that I usually end up dealing with
are the sort of things that are discussed at the breakfast table. For
instance, I've got songs about drinking, which is a very political
thing, I think. People drink, and it affects the way they treat other
people and treat themselves and decisions are made or are not made and
things are done or not done under the influence of alcohol and that
makes it political. That's the politics of being, of existing, almost."
His most direct early song about the matter, "Drinking Song," was
recorded for Atlantic and originally intended for Album II, but not released at the
time, only surfacing on a limited edition reissue about 30 years later.
What Wainwright certainly did have was a lot of
songs. According to Rolling Stone's
review of Album II,
"Wainwright's first record could have been a double album, for he was
singing many of the songs recorded here before even the first one was
recorded. His sets often opened with the first cut on this album, 'Me
and My Friend the Cat.'" Loudon's remembered writing two or three songs
a week in his early days, and as he revealed to Melody Maker in 1971, "I don't work
on writing songs, they just materialize. It's a waiting game. Sometimes
I do try and sit down to create to fabricate a song, but it doesn't
work. I just have to wait till it comes. The best songs I've written
come out within a period of 30 minutes to an hour."
But like his first album, Album II failed to make the charts,
though the critical reaction was again glowing. Rolling Stone's Karin Berg
certainly liked it, her 12-paragraph review comparing it favorably to
his debut: "On the first record, I wished there had been some
additional lightness and more display of Wainwright's abilities with
lyrical melodies (he has a good, clear voice), but those were my only
arguments. Its tone was a little heavy and didn't totally reflect the
performing Wainwright; of course few records capture the personality we
hear and see in performance, but the gentle, ironic sense of humor
slipped by to a marked degree. Wainwright's material is personal and
naked, comparable to the function
of poetry. There's a lot of pain there but Wainwright is fun
sometimes,, too, and more of that is on this record, with the
explications of loneliness...His forte is lyrics, but the melodies are
always excellent. As a guitarist, he can't be described as a fine
musician, but the structure, accents, arrangements are. It all fits into a total unit
and he does it alone. Remarkable." Concluded Berg (later to become a
vice-president of A&R at Warner Brothers), "It's obvious that Album II is one of the major
records of the year and this is one of our major talents."
Looking back on his stint at Atlantic in an
autobiographical summary of his career on the Rosebud Agency website,
Wainwright wryly observed, "My first two albums were positively retro,
unadorned, without a trace of the drums, bass, and tasteful pedal steel
guitar lickage that was going around at the time. My instincts paid off
as the critics, always looking for the next new thing, and desperate
then to fill the Dylan vacuum (Bob was out of commission at that time,
holed up in Woodstock, recovering from a motorcycle accident), decided
I was, to shamelessly quote one hyperbolic hack, 'A blinding new
talent.' All my work on packaging had paid off. I’d been noticed. The
songs I had written were also very good. That helped."
But it wasn't good enough for his label. "In 1972
after making two critically acclaimed but largely unpurchased LPs
(long-playing vinyl recordings for you young folk) Atlantic’s crush on
me was over and I was dropped," continued Wainwright in the same
autobiographical piece. "I was then picked up (yet another weird term,
this one connotative of prostitution) by Columbia Records." It wasn't
long before he'd chalked up his only hit single, "Dead Skunk" (which
made the Top Twenty in early 1973), going on to a decades-long
recording and performing career that's seen his talents showcased in
remarkably diverse settings. Aside from putting out about 20 more
albums, he's appeared on numerous television series and films; worked
as the original musician sidekick to David Letterman; and was
commissioned to write topical songs by both National Public Radio and
ABC television's Nightline.
One of his and Kate McGarrigle's children, Rufus Wainwright, is now an
acclaimed singer-songwriter himself.
Through it all, Wainwright has never been shy of
exposing, sometimes in painful if comic detail, his foibles in song.
"It's just my taste," he declared to Perfect
Sound Forever. "That's the way that I write. I do have a
tendency to write about my own life and explore some of the
difficulties and painful aspect of it. But it's not necessarily painful
to do it -- it's natural to do it, for me anyway." -- Richie Unterberger
HOME WHAT'S NEW MUSIC BOOKS MUSIC REVIEWS TRAVEL BOOKS