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.
LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN - MESSAGES FROM MORRISSEY - MORRISSEY CENTRAL - LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN
MESSAGES FROM MORRISSEY
www.morrisseycentral.com
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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