Loudon Wainwright III – Self-Titled / Album II
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Posted On May 1, 2006
When his first two virtually interchangeable albums were released in 1970 and ’71, Loudon Wainwright III was touted as one of the many Next Dylans of the era, which was hard to fathom even then. Sure, he was in his own (very different) way as caustic and misanthropic as the mid-’60s Dylan, and these albums are almost exclusively voice-and-acoustic-guitar efforts like the early-’60s Dylan. But after that the similarities ended.
Loudon, when you got right down to it, was much more the child of country club types, and that was the world he described with such rapier wit and vitriol. At the same time, his unadorned music and take-no-prisoners (including himself) songs set him apart from other singer-songwriters, with their soft-rock bands and sober-sided lyrics. More of them shared his background than would admit it, but he was what he was and his perspective was unique. He didn’t fit in anywhere, and he flaunted it.
But he could write songs that were interesting to people who wouldn’t normally be interested in his subjects — the haunting “School Days”, the simultaneously taunting and confessional “Nice Jewish Girls”, the chilling “Hospital Lady”. His idea of celebrating a newborn child (his son Rufus) is to emphasize the baby’s mysteries and his own fearfulness.
He mocks his own angst with “Suicide Song”, and in “Glad To See You’ve Got Religion” he mocks all the hipsters-in-retreat, true believers who mucked up the early ’70s. When he grovels to a groupie in “Motel Blues”, you can already feel the revulsion and self-loathing he’ll be feeling in the morning. His humor could be so cynical it forced nervous laughter that was somehow liberating, and his word-pictures could be so precise it was unnerving.
But the songs would never have come across without his dramatic, wide-ranging vocals; he spit words out like poison darts from a blow gun, and he soothed with real pathos. On the “I Know I’m Unhappy”/”Suicide Song”/”Glenville Reel” trilogy, he moves from morose to mocking to triumphant. Likewise, he gets more mileage than most on his acoustic guitar, his thrashing uptempo songs evoking his pent-up rage at least as convincingly as his voice did. With only a few slip-ups, he’s expanded on — and matured with — these themes for three-plus decades now, and he’s still compelling.
