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the singing surgeon
I’m pretty sure the first time I ever saw Loudon Wainwright anywhere was in an episode of M*A*S*H; he was a sudden and brief expansion of the cast, a functional extra who occasionally reappeared when a little musicality was needed. The episode I remember, if I’m remembering correctly, closed with him — as Captain Spaulding, the singing surgeon — leading the nurses and doctors around like a pied piper, playing his guitar and singing something or other. I don’t think I thought about him again until his son began to make a name for himself, and my sister became a fan, and then all of a sudden Loudon Wainwright was everywhere — in Sandra Bullock movies, Cameron Crowe movies, in television shows and etc. Several months back I bought and consumed the first season of SNL, but before I watched it chronologically, I scoured the episodes and guest lists and scratched some itches. Hey, Madeleine Kahn — love that mother’s day song she sings, gotta watch that again. Oh, look, Lily Tomlin doing her cheer-up-New-York-you-could-be-Philadelphia snappy fingers jangly legs routine — let’s watch that. Somewhere in there, Wainwright was the musical guest, and I jumped ahead to watch him perform. I think I was under the mistaken impression that, back in those days, Wainwright was a more serious folk singer, and that he only turned to humor later in his career. I was wrong, of course, and the couple of songs he did on SNL were hilarious not just for their content but for his delivery. If you’ve ever seen him perform, he’s all about baring his teeth, and grimacing, and wobbling his head around like a dashboard dachsund. A few years ago I picked up his album Last Man on Earth. It’s the only one of his records I’ve ever bought — I’ve contemplated buying more but just can’t bring myself to own songs that are more or less disposable because they’re one-off novelties. That’s not a criticism; his songs are sharp and funny most of the time, but once you’ve gotten them and laughed and tapped your toes, it’s hard to work up any enthusiasm for doing it again. It would be like washing the dishes, and then bathing in the dishwater. You’d be picking scummy foodscraps from between your toes and out of your bellybutton for days. (I knew that analogy was going to collapse before I started it, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself.) Anyway: Last Man on Earth is something of an exception, because while it’s heavy on the humor, it’s a sort of detached, resigned humor. The running theme of the album is loneliness and displacement; the songs seem to be mostly autobiographical, and reflect much of Wainwright’s current place in life (well, current at the time): divorced, kids grown and long gone, turning fifty, looking inward, killing time, wondering what’s next or if it’s all in the shitter from here on. One of my favorite songs is the title track, which is mostly observations about the world from the point-of-view of a man who feels like he’s being left behind by it. It’s witty, sure, but it’s also a near-perfect portrait of a certain kind of man from a left-behind generation. It’s very easy to listen to this song and imagine that my father wrote it.
“Living Alone”, however, might be the song that best captures the album, and Wainwright’s sudden lack of direction or purpose. It’s an upbeat, folky tune, and you almost don’t notice how uncomfortable it is because you’re chuckling a little.
I’ve been rewatching Undeclared for the past few days (which unfortunately doesn’t take long; damn television and its preemptive cancellations), and in this show Wainwright plays the lead character’s recently divorced father. Oddly enough, he irritates the hell out of me in this show. I suppose it’s more of the character’s inherent flaws than Wainwright’s performance, or maybe it’s that he captures those flaws so well that they just grate. But every time he wanders onscreen I’m counting the seconds until he stumbles back off. I finished all of the episodes with a disc to spare, and thought there were still a few left. Instead the disc was filled with extras that I’d never watched. I skimmed the cast auditions — boring — and then found a series of live performances by Wainwright in some very dark, small club. It’s just him and the guitar, every bit the gawky old comic for a few minutes, and then all of a sudden he’s that same wobbly-headed, earnest young fellow again, singing lines like “the real you wafted through and your deodorant couldn’t stop it” — people laugh but he’s turned a line like that from a minor pun into something heavier somehow. He’s a storyteller, really, is the conclusion you can’t help but draw; his songs ramble and wander, without any real hooks, strung out over simple acoustic melodies. They’re narration, really, for lives that you don’t see. The crowd is quiet when he introduces his songs — “This is another old one” — because Loudon Wainwright doesn’t really write hits, and even when he’s playing one he’s played for thirty years, it’s new to almost everybody listening.
Random fact to wrap this up: With the song “Heaven”, written a bunch of years ago, Wainwright became a gospel superstar:
Well, ’superstar’ might be too strong a word. But still.
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