Loudon Wainwright III
GUILTEDGED
Confessor, humorist, genius. By Andrew Male.
For the past 47 years, singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III has bared his soul in a manner that has simultaneously charmed and provoked. He has written about love, hate, families, relationships, marriage, booze, drugs, sex, death and his own divided self in a disarmingly conversational and poetic manner that is funny, tragic, romantic, heartfelt and cold, often in the same verse. But he also has no ‘off’ switch, little acumen for self-editing, and a sense of humour that is often broad and below-thebelt (in both senses), with a misanthropy that can easily run into misogyny. He is also a songwriting genius. Raised in the affluent New York suburb of Westchester County, Wainwright had his head turned by seeing Dylan, Pete Seeger, and Richard Fariña at the Newport Folk Festival. But, itching to be an actor, he had a bigger hero, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. “He was funny and theatrical,” Wainwright told MOJO’s Phil Sutcliffe, in 2011. “I think of myself in that old-fashioned sense of being an entertainer.” Hailed as a “new Dylan”, he was apolitical
“GUILT… MAYBE I’M PROUD OF IT.”
at best, but his winning stage presence earned him a record deal with Atlantic. He met his first wife, Kate McGarrigle, at the Gaslight in 1969 and they had two children, Rufus and Martha. But the marriage was fiery. It’s all there in those early songs: the drinking, fights, unfaithfulness, anger, and hate. “Maybe I’m trying to expiate some guilt,” Wainwright told Sutcliffe. “Or maybe I’m proud of it and showing off.” That mix of self-hatred, pride, guilt and insight continued through further marriages, divorces, benders, blackouts, births and deaths, all catalogued in song. He remains, at heart, an entertainer, but, like Shakespeare’s fools, he is also here to confront his audience with the inevitable dark truths of life, namely, our own weakness, infirmity and mortality.