MUSIC

Star-siring singer-songwriter, sharp-penned satirist, former angry young man… Loudon Wainwright III, discovers Nige Tassell, is finally at ease with the world

It’s been a long, strange trip, as The Grateful Dead might say. But I’ve learned next to nothing. I’ve continued to make the same ridiculous mistakes over and over, year in and year out.”

Loudon Wainwright III is mulling over the last four decades as guitar-toting troubadour, wry humorist and occasional actor. In recent years, his achievements have been somewhat overshadowed by his status as father of those effortlessly successful siblings Rufus and Martha – an oversight redressed by the release of a new four-disc career salute. But how would his twentysomething self have regarded being anointed with the box-set treatment? “The young Loudon, the handsome wag that he was, was a very poetic and romantic young man who was sure he was going to be dead by the dramatic age of 25. The very fact that he might wind up to be 64 years old would have shocked – and probably disappointed – him. Speaking now as the older Loudon, that whippersnapper didn’t know shit! The best is yet to come!”

Having studied to be an actor, the young Wainwright took up the life of the folk singer in the late 60s, fuelled by multiple grievances against his world. “It was age-appropriate to be angry. I was angry at my parents and angry at the boarding school I went to and angry at the establishment. But I was amused by a lot of it, too. I wrote songs and people started to laugh a bit at them. And I enjoyed that so I wrote silly songs, whether they were about a dead skunk being squashed in the road or about nice Jewish girls that I wanted to sleep with. All of a sudden I had a career entertaining people, which was my dream as a little kid. I knew I wanted to be an entertainer and I got lucky. It happened.”

Four decades, 25 albums and innumerable live performances later, he’s now mellower (“the anger has subsided into a general annoyance”), although source material for a sometimes satirical songwriter remains in plentiful supply. “The world and the people in it are as ridiculous as ever – and I would include myself among those people. I don’t know if I write any differently now. I like to think I have a better overview, but perhaps I don’t.”

It’s an overview he hasn’t felt necessary to pass on to his two oldest children, both of whose own careers have surpassed Pop’s in recent years. He may be the patriarch of the clan, but he’s “not dispensing too much wisdom. I’m just being sniggered at, mostly.” Second daughter Lucy also plies the troubadour trade, but Wainwright feels his kids’ shared career choice wasn’t down to genes; nurture outscored nature. “Rufus and Martha’s mother [Kate McGarrigle] was a great musician. Lucy’s mother [Suzzy Roche from The Roches] is a great musician. There have been guitar cases and pianos and banjos and folk festivals in these kids’ lives since they were little. It’s no wonder that three out of my four children are in show business. Lucy went through university and got a master’s degree in teaching, but all of a sudden she started to write songs. She fought it but she had to cave. Now she’s out there like the rest of us lunatics.”

While his occasionally difficult relationships with Rufus and Martha have been well-documented (and most publically aired in Martha’s not-entirely-complimentary song ‘Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole’), Wainwright often tours with Lucy. “We travel well together and have a lot of fun. We call it the Quality Time tour.” Lucy’s presence seems to enliven what can be a dispiriting endeavour. “Travelling and living out of a suitcase is not fun. The job itself – standing up on stage, singing for people and getting paid for it – is delightful. I love it and I’m grateful to have it. But to go to the airport, go through the X-ray machine and have my artificial hip looked at… All of that shit is a drag.”

That love of performing remains unconditional, though. You’d expect that a man who’s always committed his insecurities to song – whether anxieties over relationships, fame, fatherhood or mortality – would view performance as some sort of therapy, the stage as confessional or psychiatrist’s couch. But it’s the opposite. “It’s a natural place for me. Performers realise it’s a way of getting what we all need – love and attention. It’s exhilarating. The problem is what the hell do you do when you come off stage? That’s the trick. In 40 years, I still haven’t quite figured that out. I used to drink half a bottle of Scotch. Now it’s some hot milk and a sleeping pill…”

LOUDON WAINWRIGHT III, WITH SUPPORT FROM LUCY WAINWRIGHT ROCHE, PLAYED THE COLSTON HALL, BRISTOL, ON SAT 21 MAY. HIS ’40 ODD YEARS’ BOX SET IS OUT 2 MAY ON THE PROPER LABEL.

Copyright Nige Tassell 2011