Marianne Faithfull, RIP

"This is the evening of the day … my very first purchased disc, Come And Stay With Me … years later, sitting on her bed in Brussels … hearing her version of Dear God, Please Help Me … she said 'Lou Reed told me to cover it' … her music brought us all closer … the girl to whom everything happened."

MORRISSEY.

Morrissey t-shirt $1,678

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/274297075893?

Loudon Wainwright’s first LP: 1970 by Morrissey.

Only the best singing voices can become the very sound and image of geographical places. In Delaware when he was younger, Loudon Wainwright imagined his first ever LP, and unzipped it in 1970 to a narrowed public taste that left it chartless forever. On the sleeve he stood with no importance against a brick wall, in the way that classic art avoids fashion. He needed nothing but his solo acoustic and his impressive palette of words. Whoever else was offering musical dynamics in 1970 did not concern him. The voice was almost hayseed in its yearning, fully in the “now” of 1969/70, saying everything whilst looking nothing, and how ridiculous it is to be afraid: 

In Delaware when I was younger

I would live the life obscene

in the Spring I had great hunger

I was Brando, I was Dean

blaspheming booted blue-jeaned baby boy

oh how I made them turn their heads

the townie brownie girls, they jumped for joy

and begged me bless them in their beds

This ordinary process of living yelps out repeatedly from someone who is trying to discover in himself some bearable identity, yet there is also the teenage shock of self-recognition: ‘watch me, baby, hail a taxi cab/you ‘n me are going uptown’  he boasts - probably tugging at his upturned collar. His plan for a hot date would be to take her to a basketball game or a boxing match. He had been born in 1946, in the Chapel Hill of North Carolina in circumstances that at least smelled money (his father an editor, of sorts, for LIFE magazine), and he daydreamed his way to New York City, not at all dispossessed, onto the mental maze of the live stage - acting first, then singing. Atlantic allowed him in, and then out came this album full of self-investigation. The jokes are actually confessions: 

I’m glad to see you’ve got religion

I’m glad to see you’ve gone to God

I’m glad to see you’ve straightened all your lines

and you’ve evened out your odds

I’m glad to know your psychic power

is being put to proper use

I’m glad to know you don’t discharge a drop

of your procreative juice

Singing always with a thread of pity, he is very much a boy new to manhood - longing to love and be loved. He is a greyhound eager to dash, and females shall willingly consent. The libido is restless, and we are meant to laugh even when alone in the dark. The meeting of the sexual zones is the beginning of everything, and, if it isn’t, then it doesn’t matter because someone else will fall from a tree any second now. His is the pep and readiness of someone who knows we will all soon be skeletons … so why wait?  Irresponsible romance is the ideal way to pass time, especially when you are young and willing to father children and art at precisely the same hour: 

The braid is held in with a bobby pin

she’s a woman, she wears a pink hat

The rouge on the face

the baubles, the lace

once a young girl

please don’t forget that

The pretty red top

has just about stopped

it wobbles, it don’t spin anymore

reach for the sky

against gravity try

stay away from the cold wooden floor

There was a time not so long ago

she was dancing with her favorite beau

who died in 1953

Consider her chart

there is dust on the heart

a thorn bush grows inside the spleen

clouds on the eyes hide Al Jolson blue skies

the lungs have turned bright Kelly green

old lady blues, wears old lady shoes

her new lover is old daddy death.

This fashionable pessimism worked perfectly. The tardy attire and the voice with a tenderly drawn sailor’s roll struck me so deeply. What he can give he gives in song, and the lyrics are reckless enough to be true. Shouting them out marks the end of savage ignorance, and miraculously that charcoal 42nd Street pretzel smell rises from vinyl. He wants to impress the ladies because by doing so he hopes he will, by 1:AM, turn into a cannibal. It’s over-excited, and it’s accidentally unique. 

All political careers end in failure. All musical careers eventually go soft. Loudon Wainwright refused to become a sleeping-pill accident like similar dreamboats Phil Ochs, Tim Hardin, Tim Buckley. By the year 2000, singers are given awards for songs that weren’t worth writing in the first place; Loudon Wainwright missed all of that and stood clear of the three-ringed circus. It wasn’t the case that he followed 1970 with failure, but the scholastic pride of life is caught in a thought-smashing way on this irradiant debut, and like an old hang-dog hound it stays beside me - dolefully looking up occasionally to make sure that I’m still here and I’m still me. I am. 

Finally, victory. Sometimes it takes the rest of the world fifty years to catch up. But they do.