Still content at his table for one
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A talent scout with even the slightest bit of foresight might well start drawing up a couple of recording contracts now, one for Lucy Roche, another for Alexandra Kelly.
No, neither is generating a big buzz around town. In fact, neither has made a record yet.
But any exec with a knowledge of pop history would sign them anyway given that both have been the focal points of songs by Loudon Wainwright III, who also happens to be their father.
Big deal, you say?
Consider: In 1983, Wainwright recorded “Five Years Old” for his oldest daughter’s birthday. Now 30, Martha Wainwright last month released her debut solo album to critical acclaim after wowing audiences for the last half-dozen years with her own shows as well as in performances with her older brother.
That would be Rufus Wainwright, critically lauded singer-songwriter and first-born to Loudon and his first wife, singer-songwriter Kate McGarrigle. Rufus was even younger than Martha when he turned up as the central figure in a 1975 Loudon song humorously grappling with a new dad’s jealousy over the bond between mother and son.
“Yes, it’s kind of nice to see the kids getting into the family business,” Wainwright, 58, said recently with the mock bravado of a financial tycoon, between bites of red beans and rice at a New Orleans food stand at Farmers Market, while discussing his own new album, “Here Come the Choppers.” It’s the 21st album of his 35-year career, another strong collection of songs -- some humorous, some serious and some blending both.
With Rufus and now Martha generating attention akin to that heaped on their mother and father when they were recording for major labels in the 1970s, the extended Wainwright clan is shaping up as a pop-music dynasty.
Lucy Roche, 23, is Loudon’s daughter with Suzzy Roche of the harmonizing Roches, while at 11, Alexandra is the youngest addition to his brood, his daughter with actress Ritamarie Kelly.
Unlike many entertainers who try to warn their offspring away from the hazards of show business, Wainwright has no problems with his kids latching onto the “singer-songwriter” tag.
“This is an honorable profession,” he says. It’s also, he notes soberly, frequently a solitary profession.
He’s not the only one who feels that way. In a separate interview recently, Martha said she’s determined to form a band so she doesn’t get pigeonholed as a solo acoustic performer. “It’s a lonely life,” she said. “I’ve seen my dad do it for 35 years. You’re sitting in restaurants by yourself. You’re alone a lot on the road.”
In any event, Loudon is far from ready to hand off the torch and cruise quietly into the sunset aboard the sailboat that’s become one of his passions in recent years.
Acting up
The casual pop fan may still think of Loudon Wainwright as that guy who wrote “Dead Skunk,” the 1973 quasi-novelty tune that was his only hit single.
But over his career he’s carved out a niche as perhaps pop’s greatest authority on the family dynamic, particularly the dysfunctional side of relationships.
He addresses family relations in the new album as he always has, but he also surveys his new surroundings in Los Angeles, where he moved two years ago to pursue acting opportunities.
He became a TV dad four years ago in the Fox network’s short-lived series “Undeclared,” which is resurfacing shortly on DVD. Loudon, Rufus and Martha had cameo roles as singers in “The Aviator,” and he has a part in Cameron Crowe’s next film, “Elizabethtown.” He plays Orlando Bloom’s father in “The 40 Year Old Virgin,” a film from “Undeclared” and “Freaks and Geeks” creator Judd Apatow.
Having majored in acting at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon University) around the time that Albert Brooks, Steve Bochco, Ted Danson and others were there, Wainwright quips that if acting doesn’t pan out, he can always fall back on his career in folk music.
The new album’s title song takes a hysterical view of the Los Angeles Police Department’s stepped-up airborne nighttime patrols, wittily weaving in geographical reference points to bring home the sense of fear and vulnerability that’s mushroomed since 9/11.
So many sorties, look out below
Staples, Blockbuster and Office Depot
Their sights set on Sav-on
Surveying Rite-Aid
At Mo’ Better Meatty Meat Burger
Be very afraid
The album also includes his reaction to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, “No Sure Way,” looking at the incomprehensible through the prism of a habitual subway ride from Brooklyn Heights into Manhattan shortly after the destruction of the World Trade Center.
Arguably even more poignant is “Hank and Fred,” another left-field tune he wrote while in Montgomery, Ala., in 2003 filming a small role in Tim Burton’s “Big Fish.” The Fred in the title is Fred Rogers of PBS’ “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” fame, whom Wainwright unexpectedly links with a legendary musician who was buried in Montgomery half a century earlier, Hank Williams.
Nat King Cole was born here
Rosa Parks stayed sitting down
Black and white, death, booze and music
Genius, courage, kindness, pride
Oh I felt them all around me there
The day Fred Rogers died
“I really was driving back from the Y and heard on NPR that Fred Rogers had died. As the song says -- we mocked King Friday XIII on ‘Saturday Night Live’ -- I had been one of those who kind of ridiculed the way he looked, the sweaters and the sneakers, and the odd way he talked, the effeminate manner about him.
“But when my older kids were younger kids, I became kind of a fan too,” he says. “So much so that when I heard he’d died, it actually did become very difficult to drive. Steve Buscemi [who also was in “Big Fish”] and I drove out to visit Hank Williams’ grave that day, and I said to him, ‘Well, we visited Hank Williams’ grave the day Fred Rogers died.’
“And I kind of liked the sound of that. Sometimes that’s how a song will start, with a line you like, then you dive into it and see what you can pull out of it.”
The fondness for Mister Rogers might sound strange coming from the man who wrote “Unrequited to the Nth Degree,” a ditty about getting even with a lover who jilted him by reveling in thoughts of her grief after his death. But Wainwright’s ability to wed the light with the dark, the sardonic with the unflinchingly honest, has been the hallmark of his best work.
“I think when you can combine the two, that’s really the most interesting,” he says. “You’re trying to engage the listener, and that’s a way of messing with their heads.”
That’s not how he started out. When he got his first record contract in 1971, he was part of the wave of folk-rooted singer-songwriters tabbed as “the new Dylans.”
Wainwright, however, may be the only one who wrote a song about that dubious honor, 1991’s “Talking New Bob Dylan”:
Yeah, I got a deal, and so did John Prine
Steve Forbert and Springsteen, all in a line
They were lookin’ for you, signin’ up others,
We were “new Bob Dylans” -- your dumb-ass kid brothers
The reference to “kid brothers” subtly lends the song an aspect of family, which has typically been at the heart of his music. He once said that the surprising thing to him isn’t that he writes as much about parents, siblings, spouses and children as he does but that other musicians don’t write about those relationships more.
On “Here Come the Choppers” he reaches further back in his family lineage with songs about his paternal grandfather (“Half Fist”) and grandmother (“Nanny”).
“Maybe it’s the fact that the end is looming or something,” says Wainwright, who was born in North Carolina and raised in upper-class neighborhoods of Westchester County, N.Y., the privileged offspring of longtime Life magazine columnist Loudon Wainwright II.
“At this point in life, I find myself looking back to the ancestors, not just to parents, who of course are the biggest giants in anyone’s life, but to their parents,” he says. “Who formed them? That’s why you hear about people going off to Scotland and looking up family trees and coats of arms. You’re trying to figure out who these people were.”
“It’s not going to change anything,” he adds in a typically fatalistic afterthought. “You’re still going to die. But it becomes really important as you get a little older. Maybe the impulse is because we know we’re soon going to join our ancestors.”
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