On his early albums Loudon Wainwright III was a master of the tangibility of wonder, sketching the humor and help-lessness of cosmic adolescence. His first words on record were: "In Delaware when I was younger/I would live the life obscene/In the spring I had great hunger/I was Bran-do, I was Dean."* But something has surely happened to him. The Wainwright who performed with energy and conviction such masterpieces as "School Days," "Central Square Song," "Motel Blues" and "Be Careful, There's a Baby in the House" on his first two LPs for Atlantic has fallen into hard times since joining Columbia. On Album III the slide downward is not overly apparent: Much of the writing
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and singing still works (especially "Red Guitar," "Needless to Say" and "New Paint"), but the urgency has waned slightly and the tone seems more pessimistic. There are some good songs on the fourth LP,
Attempted Mustache, but neither the singer nor the producer (Bob Johnston) can bring them off: "Clockwork Chartreuse" is as fine as anything Wainwright has ever written but the performance of it here is both wrongheaded and listless. Two more excellent children's songs are also poorly sung.
Now there is Unrequited and the turn for the worse continues. The singing has further weakened, the production (by the artist himself) is clumsy and inadequate and the material has started to deteriorate. For the most part, God's fool has become a rather uninteresting, Tom Lehrer-type, one-dimensional comedian, most at home on television's M*A*S*H*. In "Hospital Lady," a song from Wainwright's first album, he urged us to "Reach for the sky/Against gravity, try,"* but now there is dust in the heart, lead in the feet. True, some of the songs are funny ("The Lowly Tourist" in mock reggae and the first verse of "Mr. Guilty"), but many are not (the rest of "Mr. Guilty," "Guru," the tasteless and condescending "Unrequited to the Nth Degree") and almost invariably most are delivered with the kind of cute, elbow-nudging vulgarity that further cheapens them. Even the songs which start well soon fall apart through general aimlessness and lack of will.
*©1970, Frank Music Corp
*©1970, Frank Music Corp
Still, no LP by someone as talented as Loudon Wainwright could be a complete loss. On side one I like "Kick in the Head," "Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder" and especially the moving and graceful "Kings and Queens" (which pretty much borrows the tune of Dylan's "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere"), although nothing here begins to compare with earlier gems. Side two, recorded live at the Bottom Line in New York City, is, to my ears, a disaster; perhaps the singer's in-concert style simply does not transfer well onto records. Except for the older "Old Friend," however, most of the material is so inconsequential it hardly seems to be there at all.
"Rufus Is a Tit Man," a song about a newly bor
