This won't mean much to anyone a few weeks from now, but the cricket match that my listening has been woven in between over the last four days finished just a few hours ago, and turned out to be a gladiatorial thriller.
Two sides with little hope of promotion stood toe-to-toe trading blows in a brutal, bruising contest, until the casualties were plentiful and almost everyone involved could be ranked among the walking wounded. In a truly bizarre finale, the dying overs saw an injured bowler limping in to bowl to a batsman with a suspected broken arm. That the bowler was eventually replaced by one with a broken finger probably tells you everything you need to know.
Surrey have been masters at letting winning positions evaporate this year. But for once, after 365 overs and as heavy rain threatened to end the game 10 overs early, they took the final wicket (the poor bloke with the broken arm!). A little local drama that no one much knows or cares about, but hooray all the same!
Many now will feel the same about the subject matter of the songs on Social Studies. To be fair, the issues and stories were once more widely known than the exploits of two second-vision county cricket teams. But they're nevertheless destined to be the next day's fish-and-chip wrappers. And how many fish-and-chip eaters ever knew who Jesse Helms was? We Bongwater fans heard about him. And if you followed other members of the New York downtown arts mafia (Laurie Anderson, Patti Smith etc), you might have heard them denouncing him. But 98% of the UK population? Never heard of him.
Mr Wainwright never even mentions Helms' surname, so the mystified listener doesn't even have recourse to Google or Wikipedia. He doesn't mention the surname of Bill in Our Boy Bill, either, though anyone alive in the nineties will recognise this portrait of Hillary's old man. But can you identify the Tonya in Tonya's Twirls? When I listened the first time, I didn't have the tracklisting in front of me, and — since Tonya is never mentioned by name — I heard the story as an anonymous universal rather than a specific biography. In the former context the final verse may be even more telling:
Ice used to be a nice thing
When you laced up figure skates
Now it's a thing to win a medal on
For the United States
But once there were no lutzes, axels,
pirouettes or twirls
Just giddy, slipping, sliding, laughing,
Happy little girls
The song came out in 1999, before Tonya turned from figure skating to boxing. I wonder what Wainwright would have made of that. His Y2K song also shows its age, making it sound like that little millennium bug might actually be a problem.
Loudon Wainwright himself never got much coverage in the news. The only media-friendly "story" I can remember was when one of his kids wrote a song which said some nasty things about him. Did he write a reply? I can't remember. I turn away when I hear things like that. My inner cynic sounds the alarm when people write songs which they know will make media-friendly "stories", especially ones involving their families or close relationships. It's a tactic that makes a claim for personal authenticity, but, since they've got one eye on the public reception, is almost bound to be inauthentic.
Anyway, one thing I do know much about Loudon Wainwright is that I like his music more than either of his children's. Possibly less than his recently-deceased ex-wife's, but I know even less about her.
I wouldn't have come across Loudon if it hadn't been for John Peel (who possibly also influenced Andy Kershaw to play him). Peel scattered the Wainwright songs through his shows over the years — much as he did with Ivor Cutler or Captain Beefheart — not restricting himself to whatever was the new release at the time. As a consequence I never built up a sense of arc of Wainwright's 40-year career.
I have no idea if Social Studies is considered a good LWIII album or a poor one. It's the only one I've ever heard, and I see it was produced by the dream team of Joe Boyd and John Wood — possibly one of their last jobs together. Boyd has since made much of how he and Wood are very much yesterday's men, in terms of the approach they took to producing.
MusicBrainz entry for this album
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