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| This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen magazine #98 (February / March 2002). The magazine is available on newsstands and by subscription. |
In the middle of a sunny mid-Atlantic September, when the unthinkable happens, an interview with Loudon Wainwright III is one of many small things that goes awry. It's scheduled, then rescheduled, then abbreviated, to be continued a month later, when things are somewhat saner.
"Like everybody else, I'm just trying to process what's happened," said Wainwright on September 18, shortly before leaving for some U.K. tour dates. He was at his home in Brooklyn Heights, New York, across the East River from Manhattan, talking by phone to an interviewer a few miles from the Pentagon, and he noted that we both had "plumes" to look at. "I'm not even thinking about how it relates to my job. I'm just trying to process it as a person who happens, in fact, to live incredibly close to where the World Trade towers were, and have people in New York who essentially are all okay. But I haven't even thought about what it means to me as a songwriter. And it's going to take awhile to process it, like everybody else."
A week later, the man who has been called a New Dylan (by any number of critics), "one of the great lyricists of the age" (by Q magazine), and a "crapulous, self-pitying, philandering prick" (or at least wont to play that role, said music critic Robert Christgau) stood onstage at London's Bloomsbury Theatre and sang about taking the subway into New York City a few days before:
When you are underwater
Sometimes the mind plays tricks
And there beneath the East River
It felt like the River Styx…
They say heaven's high above us
And hell is far below
But in that subway tunnel
There was no sure way to know
— "No Sure Way"
After telling people that he wasn't going to write a song about the terrorist attack, "because it was so immense," he was surprised "to get an idea and actually write the song," he told Terry Gross on NPR's "Fresh Air" in October. The song, "No Sure Way," was met with warm acclaim at a show at New York's Bottom Line on October 13, paired with his 1985 song "Hard Day on the Planet," in which he complains: "I want to go on vacation till the pressure lets up/ But they keep hijacking planes and blowing them up." A roomful of New Yorkers, many on their first outing since the catastrophe one month earlier and two miles south, joined in the "Planet" chorus. It wasn't quite escapist entertainment; like the best of Wainwright's work, it blended humor, pathos, and the uncomfortable recognition of our own spiritual blemishes.
"The best of Wainwright's work" came to the forefront last September. First there was his recurring role in the new Fox sitcom "Undeclared," in which he plays a lonely, somewhat pathetic father who follows his son to college. Within days of the TV premiere, Red House released his new album, Last Man on Earth. On this cohesive, often mournful work, Wainwright admits to middle-aged crankiness, gets all Freudian on Mom and Dad, reveals his plans for donating his organs, and laments enormous losses in the starkest of terms. Not for him the grand gesture, the massed choruses and operatic tableaux; he sits on a back porch, walks on a beach, gets up at 3 a.m. when nature calls.
"My mother died in 1997," wrote Wainwright in the album's liner notes, "and naturally my world fell apart. I was living in London... trying (sort of) to keep a sinking romantic relationship afloat." Returning to Westchester County, New York, he moved into his mother's cottage in Katonah and, for the next 18 months, "slept in her bed... used her lamps, linens, plates, mugs, pots and pans." The album consists of snapshots of a man in mourning. The lost love is chronicled in "Bridge" ("in England a valentine is signed with a question mark") and "Out of Reach" ("Today I'm gonna call you/ Just to prove that I still care/ But I'm so afraid you'll answer/ That I hope you won't be there.") His late parents and living family are given a clear-eyed assessment in "Surviving Twin," "White Winos," and "Graveyard."
Still, Last Man on Earth is far from gloomy. (Who but Wainwright, in the title song, would use estrangement from humanity as a pickup line?) Perhaps an artist with Wainwright's curiosity and self-satisfied wit could have turned out some sort of noose-worthy killer of a disc, but he took care — and time — to create a fully realized vision, not merely a pity party.
This is an excerpt from an article in Dirty Linen #98 (Feb/Mar. '02). Read the full text in the magazine, available via subscription or on newsstands and in bookstores.
