Morrissey Central "LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN" (January 26, 2025)

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Loudon Wainwright’s first LP: 1970 by Morrissey.

Only the best singing voices can become the very sound and image of geographical places. In Delaware when he was younger, Loudon Wainwright imagined his first ever LP, and unzipped it in 1970 to a narrowed public taste that left it chartless forever. On the sleeve he stood with no importance against a brick wall, in the way that classic art avoids fashion. He needed nothing but his solo acoustic and his impressive palette of words. Whoever else was offering musical dynamics in 1970 did not concern him. The voice was almost hayseed in its yearning, fully in the “now” of 1969/70, saying everything whilst looking nothing, and how ridiculous it is to be afraid:

In Delaware when I was younger
I would live the life obscene
in the Spring I had great hunger
I was Brando, I was Dean
blaspheming booted blue-jeaned baby boy
oh how I made them turn their heads
the townie brownie girls, they jumped for joy
and begged me bless them in their beds


This ordinary process of living yelps out repeatedly from someone who is trying to discover in himself some bearable identity, yet there is also the teenage shock of self-recognition: ‘watch me, baby, hail a taxi cab/you ‘n me are going uptown’ he boasts - probably tugging at his upturned collar. His plan for a hot date would be to take her to a basketball game or a boxing match. He had been born in 1946, in the Chapel Hill of North Carolina in circumstances that at least smelled money (his father an editor, of sorts, for LIFE magazine), and he daydreamed his way to New York City, not at all dispossessed, onto the mental maze of the live stage - acting first, then singing. Atlantic allowed him in, and then out came this album full of self-investigation. The jokes are actually confessions:

I’m glad to see you’ve got religion
I’m glad to see you’ve gone to God
I’m glad to see you’ve straightened all your lines
and you’ve evened out your odds
I’m glad to know your psychic power
is being put to proper use
I’m glad to know you don’t discharge a drop
of your procreative juice


Singing always with a thread of pity, he is very much a boy new to manhood - longing to love and be loved. He is a greyhound eager to dash, and females shall willingly consent. The libido is restless, and we are meant to laugh even when alone in the dark. The meeting of the sexual zones is the beginning of everything, and, if it isn’t, then it doesn’t matter because someone else will fall from a tree any second now. His is the pep and readiness of someone who knows we will all soon be skeletons … so why wait? Irresponsible romance is the ideal way to pass time, especially when you are young and willing to father children and art at precisely the same hour:

The braid is held in with a bobby pin
she’s a woman, she wears a pink hat
The rouge on the face
the baubles, the lace
once a young girl
please don’t forget that

The pretty red top
has just about stopped
it wobbles, it don’t spin anymore
reach for the sky
against gravity try
stay away from the cold wooden floor
There was a time not so long ago
she was dancing with her favorite beau
who died in 1953

Consider her chart
there is dust on the heart
a thorn bush grows inside the spleen
clouds on the eyes hide Al Jolson blue skies
the lungs have turned bright Kelly green
old lady blues, wears old lady shoes
her new lover is old daddy death.


This fashionable pessimism worked perfectly. The tardy attire and the voice with a tenderly drawn sailor’s roll struck me so deeply. What he can give he gives in song, and the lyrics are reckless enough to be true. Shouting them out marks the end of savage ignorance, and miraculously that charcoal 42nd Street pretzel smell rises from vinyl. He wants to impress the ladies because by doing so he hopes he will, by 1:AM, turn into a cannibal. It’s over-excited, and it’s accidentally unique.

All political careers end in failure. All musical careers eventually go soft. Loudon Wainwright refused to become a sleeping-pill accident like similar dreamboats Phil Ochs, Tim Hardin, Tim Buckley. By the year 2000, singers are given awards for songs that weren’t worth writing in the first place; Loudon Wainwright missed all of that and stood clear of the three-ringed circus. It wasn’t the case that he followed 1970 with failure, but the scholastic pride of life is caught in a thought-smashing way on this irradiant debut, and like an old hang-dog hound it stays beside me - dolefully looking up occasionally to make sure that I’m still here and I’m still me. I am.

Finally, victory. Sometimes it takes the rest of the world fifty years to catch up. But they do.



Title likely to be from here.
Loudon Wainwright III featured in early Morrissey letters.
He was also at Morrissey's curated Meltdown, 2004.
FWD.
 
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I don't know much about Loudon but his son's music on the other hand I am very, very familiar with and have most of his albums. I saw this performance of I Don't Know What It Is in 2003 on Letterman and I've been a fan ever since. The Album Want One is beautiful.

 
Even though he was early to mid-twenties when the album cover pic was taken, there is something about the pic that reminds me of a young Arthur Rimbaud. It's a face that says he has 'seen' things. Lyrically there are similarities too.

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If record reviews generally read like that, I’d still be buying those music magazines currently on life support.
 
Even though he was early to mid-twenties when the album cover pic was taken, there is something about the pic that reminds me of a young Arthur Rimbaud. It's a face that says he has 'seen' things. Lyrically there are similarities too.

To me, he resembles more of a young George W. Bush. I don't care for either one. Spoiled scions of the landed gentry. Loudon Wainwright's biggest hit was about a dead skunk in the middle of the road. I enjoyed singing it when I was young, but that's about it. Boomer dreck.

George-W-Bush-With-His-Wife-Laura.jpg
 
To me, he resembles more of a young George W. Bush. I don't care for either one. Spoiled scions of the landed gentry. Loudon Wainwright's biggest hit was about a dead skunk in the middle of the road. I enjoyed singing it when I was young, but that's about it. Boomer dreck.

George-W-Bush-With-His-Wife-Laura.jpg
Oh, you are cruel, Aubs!
 
Quite. Although no doubt prescribed psychotropic drugs played a part in the tragedy of his suicide by hanging. Back then Ochs would have been prescribed all sorts of nastiness, including barbiturates. A coroner in the UK only very recently issued a 'prevention of future deaths' report about the newer antidepressants and increased suicide risk. The pharmaceutical industry do their very best to suppress evidence like this.
Phil had stopped taking meds in the months before his death. They used to prescribe Lithium in higher dosages than they do now, and it turned him into a drooling vegetable, unable to coherently think.
 
I don't know much about Loudon but his son's music on the other hand I am very, very familiar with and have most of his albums. I saw this performance of I Don't Know What It Is in 2003 on Letterman and I've been a fan ever since. The Album Want One is beautiful.


rufus was amazing up to "release the stars" ...
want 1 / want 2 are just gorgeous and of course "dinner at eight" is the song about his dad that is like a dagger to the heart
 
i saw martha play a small coffee shop in easton usa and rufus playing with cindy lauper both great. im still a poses fan. i think toby Maguire is on the disk pic. poses cigarettes and choc milk one man guy and his cover of across the universe. california is alo a nice one
 
Boomer dreck.
:LOL: Yeah, pass. Stick to Gen X music with me Roman! "Dream Requiem", for instance, contains lyrics about burnt stuff, but not by a droning boomer. :thumb:
 
Really nice essay. My wife and I are big fans of Loudon’s son, Rufus. RW cited Morrissey as a big influence of his own several times over the years. My favorite Moz-centric quote from Rufus was from a radio interview he did while first making it on the music scene in the late 90s…
“But what I really love the most about Morrissey’s lyrics are those bizarre little worlds he creates. Like in songs such as "Girl Afraid”, or “Boxers” or “Jack the Ripper” or “Picadilly Palare”, or my favorite, “Maladjusted”. You can just escape into those places and really get to know these strange twisted little characters. They actually take you somewhere. He’s like a novelist in many ways, how he turns a phrase and wrangles the most he can out of the English language.“
Rufus Wainwright, on Morrissey.

Radio Interview, 1998.
 
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Beautifully written - this is the Morrissey I miss. He sounds resigned and reflective, yet defiant at the same time - all things pass and turn to dust but I'm still me. Very nice. Although Phil Ochs most definitely was not a sleeping-pill accident.
I agree, this is what some of us have been saying the fecking annoying thing about M is you can tell the old version of him is still there somewhere. It just gets lost under loads of fecking bitterness, ego and BS
But like he said “ Im still the same underneath “
, I think he just uses this stuff to try to say why he is so special . Bit like when He tries to big up single Gay men , to make hinself feel better .
I do with he would Go more of this
I like it when he reviews
He should do a book on music like Tarantino did on film. I cant stand Tarantino but the book was a good idea .

Edit -
My work mate ( also on here ) said one of solo already mentioned Tarantinos book . Sorry I often dont read comments . Lol
 
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Great album review!

Has he ever mentioned or referenced him before?
Before How Soon Is Now, I think at the reading festival or somesuch. He said "It was Loudon Wainwright III who said 'the good old days are good and gone... That's why they're good, because they're gone'".
 
Really nice essay. My wife and I are big fans of Loudon’s son, Rufus. RW cited Morrissey as a big influence of his own several times over the years. My favorite Moz-centric quote from Rufus was from a radio interview he did while first making it on the music scene in the late 90s…

Rufus Wainwright, on Morrissey.

Radio Interview, 1998.
Year RW has mentioned M is the “ Gay Elvis” , he added quickly “ I dont know if He is Gay but hes still the Gay Elvis”
You can see the M influence in RWs really work
One of my work mates used to hang with RW when he hung out in Silver Lake , this is pre fame
 
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Loudon Wainwright’s first LP: 1970 by Morrissey.

Only the best singing voices can become the very sound and image of geographical places. In Delaware when he was younger, Loudon Wainwright imagined his first ever LP, and unzipped it in 1970 to a narrowed public taste that left it chartless forever. On the sleeve he stood with no importance against a brick wall, in the way that classic art avoids fashion. He needed nothing but his solo acoustic and his impressive palette of words. Whoever else was offering musical dynamics in 1970 did not concern him. The voice was almost hayseed in its yearning, fully in the “now” of 1969/70, saying everything whilst looking nothing, and how ridiculous it is to be afraid:

In Delaware when I was younger
I would live the life obscene
in the Spring I had great hunger
I was Brando, I was Dean
blaspheming booted blue-jeaned baby boy
oh how I made them turn their heads
the townie brownie girls, they jumped for joy
and begged me bless them in their beds


This ordinary process of living yelps out repeatedly from someone who is trying to discover in himself some bearable identity, yet there is also the teenage shock of self-recognition: ‘watch me, baby, hail a taxi cab/you ‘n me are going uptown’ he boasts - probably tugging at his upturned collar. His plan for a hot date would be to take her to a basketball game or a boxing match. He had been born in 1946, in the Chapel Hill of North Carolina in circumstances that at least smelled money (his father an editor, of sorts, for LIFE magazine), and he daydreamed his way to New York City, not at all dispossessed, onto the mental maze of the live stage - acting first, then singing. Atlantic allowed him in, and then out came this album full of self-investigation. The jokes are actually confessions:

I’m glad to see you’ve got religion
I’m glad to see you’ve gone to God
I’m glad to see you’ve straightened all your lines
and you’ve evened out your odds
I’m glad to know your psychic power
is being put to proper use
I’m glad to know you don’t discharge a drop
of your procreative juice


Singing always with a thread of pity, he is very much a boy new to manhood - longing to love and be loved. He is a greyhound eager to dash, and females shall willingly consent. The libido is restless, and we are meant to laugh even when alone in the dark. The meeting of the sexual zones is the beginning of everything, and, if it isn’t, then it doesn’t matter because someone else will fall from a tree any second now. His is the pep and readiness of someone who knows we will all soon be skeletons … so why wait? Irresponsible romance is the ideal way to pass time, especially when you are young and willing to father children and art at precisely the same hour:

The braid is held in with a bobby pin
she’s a woman, she wears a pink hat
The rouge on the face
the baubles, the lace
once a young girl
please don’t forget that

The pretty red top
has just about stopped
it wobbles, it don’t spin anymore
reach for the sky
against gravity try
stay away from the cold wooden floor
There was a time not so long ago
she was dancing with her favorite beau
who died in 1953

Consider her chart
there is dust on the heart
a thorn bush grows inside the spleen
clouds on the eyes hide Al Jolson blue skies
the lungs have turned bright Kelly green
old lady blues, wears old lady shoes
her new lover is old daddy death.


This fashionable pessimism worked perfectly. The tardy attire and the voice with a tenderly drawn sailor’s roll struck me so deeply. What he can give he gives in song, and the lyrics are reckless enough to be true. Shouting them out marks the end of savage ignorance, and miraculously that charcoal 42nd Street pretzel smell rises from vinyl. He wants to impress the ladies because by doing so he hopes he will, by 1:AM, turn into a cannibal. It’s over-excited, and it’s accidentally unique.

All political careers end in failure. All musical careers eventually go soft. Loudon Wainwright refused to become a sleeping-pill accident like similar dreamboats Phil Ochs, Tim Hardin, Tim Buckley. By the year 2000, singers are given awards for songs that weren’t worth writing in the first place; Loudon Wainwright missed all of that and stood clear of the three-ringed circus. It wasn’t the case that he followed 1970 with failure, but the scholastic pride of life is caught in a thought-smashing way on this irradiant debut, and like an old hang-dog hound it stays beside me - dolefully looking up occasionally to make sure that I’m still here and I’m still me. I am.

Finally, victory. Sometimes it takes the rest of the world fifty years to catch up. But they do.



Title likely to be from here.
Loudon Wainwright III featured in early Morrissey letters.
He was also at Morrissey's curated Meltdown, 2004.
FWD.
Has anyone ever collected Ms writing on other artists ?
From NME Review , to Sparls and Bolan book forwards to this ??
 


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