He didn't believe a word of it.

Pissed Off

Passengers outraged after actor urinates on plane

Wed Aug 17 04:59PM
 by Kimberley Smith

One of France's best-known actors, Gerard Depardieu, has enraged fellow plane passengers after relieving himself in the middle of the aisle on an Air France flight.

A passenger on the flight told French radio station Europe 1: "You could see that he had been drinking, but there were no comments. The hostess was shocked but there was no argument, nothing."

The plane was preparing for take-off when Depardieu  reportedly tried to get out of his seat to go to the toilet. When he was refused access to the bathroom and told to sit down, he urinated in the aisle in front of shocked passengers.

A spokesperson for Air France and CityJet, the subsidiary air carrier, confirmed the incident occurred and that the passenger was removed from the plane delaying the flight by over an hour while the team cleaned the carpet. They refused to confirm the identity of the passenger.

http://uk.movies.yahoo.com/blog/article/237978/passengers-outraged-after-actor-urinates-on-plane.html

Last night's set list

At The Habit, York:

So Close
Falling
Too Far Gone
Pushed It Over The End
Flying On The Ground Is Wrong

A bizarre mixture of musos and horse-racing types (drunk as skunks) made for an interesting evening. Nice to play So Close again, it's been in the vaults for far too long.

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #118

Vaudeville Lives.

 

The sun shines on the Righteous One.

Robert Robinson RIP

Robert Robinson
Robert Robinson, who died on August 12 aged 83, was a broadcaster and writer best known as the wordy and erudite chairman of such popular television parlour games as Call My Bluff and Ask the Family and of the long-running radio quiz Brain of Britain; in the early 1970s he co-presented Radio 4's flagship Today programme until he fell out with the BBC over the show's increasingly political agenda.

Robinson was a performer about whom opinion was sharply divided. His air of aloofness, his oracular and anachronistic verbal style, and taste for polished epigrams irritated many. One journalist voiced the suspicion that he once arranged for weak tea to be served during an interview so that he could pronounce: "You could spear a shark in sixteen fathoms of it", and he had, indeed, been quoted as saying just that on an earlier occasion. (Of strong tea, incidentally, he would say: "It's thick enough for a mouse to trot on".)

His detractors were driven to apoplexy by his habit of finishing the genteel quiz shows he presented with the words: "I bid you goodbye". To them, Robinson's pale, stolid face signified smugness and complacency. They found his hair annoying too, even though there was not much of it – or possibly there was too much, for Robinson concealed his essential baldness by having the two hanks that grew out of the area above his ears wound around his head and ferociously plastered down.

Yet Robinson took criticism in good part, simply stating that he found the single word "goodbye" lacking in moment, and never dissembling on the subject of his hairstyle. Indeed, he admitted that the man who came to his house to arrange his coiffure would despairingly mutter: "I have created a monster" as he packed away his implements.

Robinson had tremendous self-confidence, and with justification. He was well-paid for what he did, and there were those who found his asperity and carefulness with words very welcome in an ingratiating, slang-ridden era. A reviewer once praised one of his programmes by saying that "it was a place where words were measured by the ounce rather than the job lot". This could have been said of any Robinson project, and he was not merely elegant in his speech, he was frequently very funny too.

In 1971 Robinson was persuaded to join Radio 4's early morning Today programme. In hiring him, the BBC took a gamble. Robinson had never been heard regularly on radio before. Neither, as it turned out, had he ever actually heard the programme himself, being an habitual slugabed who always slept through it. His co-presenter John Timpson had his doubts. "Nobody could know whether listeners would tolerate the company at breakfast-time of an intellect so lively and at times exhausting," he recalled.

Robinson, who once listed his favourite place as "bed", had grave qualms about a 4.30am reveille, confessing that he had never been up earlier than 9.30am since his National Service days. His predecessor, Jack de Manio, wired advice: "Don't, repeat don't, give up booze or go to bed early unless absolutely worthwhile, otherwise life becomes hell." Nevertheless, Robinson found his first programme nerve-racking. "You've no idea how brutally spontaneous it all is," he told a journalist afterwards. "I was fluttering like a lavendered old lady."

But Robinson quickly hit his stride, striking up a winning on-air camaraderie with the avuncular Timpson. In Robinson's hands, the 30-second cue (introduction) to an item became an art form. "Bob learned to use words to fashion lexicological objets d'art," Timpson observed. Visiting pundits were invited not to speculate but to "cast the runes"; a dull discussion on the economy would be embellished with a homily from Horace or a Balzacian bon mot.

One critic spoke of Robinson's "battering ram personality", describing him as the hare of the programme compared with Timpson's tortoise. But even Robinson's verbal pyrotechnics sometimes failed to make the programme sparkle. On dreary news days, the programme team dubbed Robinson and Timpson the Brothers Grimm as they waded through a gloomy 1970s swampland of strikes, a decaying economy and plummeting pound.

On one particularly threadbare morning, the programme devoted a full minute and a half to a woman whose knickers had fallen off in Selfridges. "If that's news," mused Robinson aloud at the end of the item, "on what principle is anything ever left out?" The BBC director-general Ian Trethowan fired off a testy memo about this and other examples of Robinson's perceived Maoist tendencies.

One that mired him in much deeper trouble was an item he had introduced about the torture of IRA prisoners, abuse which had been dressed up by an official committee as "sensory deprivation". Robinson felt he had been censored when he tried to complain on air about such Orwellian distortion of the language and, although voted Radio Personality of the Year shortly afterwards, continued to resent unwarranted editorial interference.

He also deplored the programme's growing obsession with politicians, their "never-ending effrontery" and "sonorous drivel", whose every word, he believed, was spoken for advantage. In 1974, despairing of the ritualised political interviews he was called on to conduct each morning, he quit.

"At least with Call My Bluff," he commented later, "you knew it was a game."

Robert Henry Robinson was born on December 17 1927 in Liverpool. His accountant father soon moved the family to the Surrey suburbs however, and Robinson grew up in Malden, or "Wimbledon", as he sometimes called it, "if I was feeling posh". He was a bright but diffident child. In his autobiography Skip All That (1996), which is more relaxed and funnier than his rococo novels, he blamed his transformation into a junior smart aleck on the highly competitive atmosphere at Raynes Park Grammar School, which he found suited him.

He identified Oxford University as "the original source of the high anxiety I had become hooked on", and applied to read English, which he referred to as "Literae Humaniores" when filling in the application form. He went up to Exeter College, became the editor of Isis and moved in a bookish, liberal set, getting to know Shirley Catlin (later Williams), Peter Parker and Robin Day, all of whom he would later – stoking the ire of his detractors – refer to as his "chums".

After National Service in Africa with the West African Army Corps, and dressing, as he later admitted, "like a prat" (bowler hat, fancy waistcoats), Robinson got his start in journalism with The Weekly Telegraph, a satellite of the Sheffield Telegraph, published in London. His job involved making up readers' letters which he signed "with a variety of distinguished names humanised by more humble addresses: George Moore, Chingford … JE Flecker, Scunthorpe".

After the Weekly Telegraph imploded, Robinson brought his insouciance and elephant hide to the writing of showbiz columns. He asked Rita Hayworth to jog his memory as to which husband belonged to which child, and was dragged away by a minder. Diana Dors walked out on him when he said he preferred her real name: Fluck.

In 1960 Robinson became editor of the Atticus gossip column on The Sunday Times. By now he was also established in broadcasting and he gradually became a presenter first, a print journalist second. Although he had made his first radio broadcast in 1955, it was BBC Television's early 1960s film review programme Picture Parade that first brought him to the public eye. This led to an even more popular programme, Points of View. Originally a five-minute gap filler before the news, Robinson briskly and amusingly conducted the presentation of viewers' letters about BBC programmes.

On November 13 1965 he was hosting the satirical show BBC3 when Kenneth Tynan spoke the word "f-ck" on television for the first time, but even this did little to disturb his sangfroid; as thousands of elderly female viewers presumably reached for the smelling-salts, Robinson disdainfully remarked to Tynan that it was a very easy way of making history.

He became best-known for much less incendiary stuff – as the host of three long-running quiz shows. On television, from 1967, there was Call My Bluff and Ask the Family. (The first, a wordy parlour game for mid-league celebrities, he satirically renamed Call My Agent.) On radio, from 1973, he hosted Brain of Britain, which he referred to as Brian of Britain because so many of the contestants were middle-management, Brian-ish people.

Robinson would often be quite rude to them on air. One contestant, asked to name the special property of a certain liquid used in industrial processes, hazarded that, if poured into a machine, it would flow into every nook and cranny. "No, no, no," chuckled Robinson, "I mean, you could say that of Tizer."

As his observational talents became recognised, Robinson applied his educated, articulate, lofty (if sometimes disdainful) persona to numerous television programmes; The Book Programme did for literature what Picture Parade and later Cinema did for films, while in 1977 he conducted an extraordinarily successful literary investigation in B Traven – A Mystery Solved, produced by Will Wyatt. He also presented The Fifties, Word for Word, The Book Game, and was proud of his two series Robinson's Travels and Robinson Country. In 1984 he co-devised and presented Our House, about families who had lived in the same house for more than 50 years.

On radio Robinson's satirical side was given freer reign in his role as chairman of the incestuous but acerbically droll Radio 4 programme Stop the Week, which ran from 1974 until 1992. Here Robinson and friends such as Professor Laurie Taylor, the theatre critic Milton Shulman and the journalist Anne Leslie, discussed "minuscule" subjects such as "Does it matter if people say: 'Different to... '?" or "How do you know when you're grown up?", or attempted to name six famous people called Stan, while other, more irregular panel members attempted to get a word in edgeways.

Robinson was invariably speaking as the programme ended, and the producers would be required to fade him out in mid-flow. The show attracted a good deal of flak, but, to Robinson fans, everything else on radio sounded worthy and witless by comparison.

All this broadcasting attracted to Robinson two sorts of criticism. Firstly he was accused of being simply too full of himself, but he was also charged with failing to live up to his potential, which was a sort of backhanded compliment. In 1956 he had published a detective novel called Landscape With Dead Dons, on the typically cerebral ground that, once you had started with these plot-driven stories "you had to go on". It was a success, and was given the lead review in The New York Times. "I was glad, but naive as ever, I was expecting it; Mummy never says No."

Alongside collections of essays, Inside Robert Robinson (1965), The Dog Chairman (1982) and Prescriptions of a Pox Doctor's Clerk (1990), two further, more introspective novels, The Conspiracy and Bad Dreams, followed in 1968 and 1989. Robinson conceded that writing novels was a "magical" vocation, and averred that the thought of, say, Graham Greene as a quizmaster was grotesque. But, with apparent sanguinity, he would offer the defence that he had written as many novels as he wanted; he also said of his television and radio work: "I used the medium rather than the other way around – that's my story and I'm sticking to it."

With the spoils of broadcasting he bought a succession of big cars, a 16th century cottage in Somerset, and an exquisite and conspicuously grand main house in Cheyne Row, Chelsea. ("People say: 'I suppose you got it for a song' but not so. Not at all. Blood came out of my ears.")

He was once asked whether his ready wit would ever dry up. "Not really," he phlegmatically replied, "one is constantly renewing oneself, but all things come to an end, and one day I will be down to the canvas, the silence rolling like thunder."

He admitted to no particular interests beyond his work and family, considered watching television "a conscious decision to waste time" and resorted mainly to sport, especially horse racing, having a love-hate relationship with his bookmaker.

Robert Robinson married, in 1958, Josee Richard. They had one son and two daughters.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/books-obituaries/8700576/Robert-Robinson.html

THE YOUNG FORMBY: A forthcoming Friday Boys production.

View Across a City: Filmmakers Relax

Paul Simon and Toots Thielemans

Listen To Me (Peace and Love...)

Bob Dylan and Philip Larkin go antiquing - John Cuneo

http://www.drawger.com/johncuneo/

Adios amigo

Billy Grammer 1925 - 2011

Last night's set list

At the Big Jug, Durham: -

I'm Just A Loser
Is It Only The Moonlight?
Love Song
Falling
Baby What You Want Me To Do?
Only Love Can Break Your Heart

A fun night despite the rain.

Shake

FRIDAY BOYS MEETING AT LADY GREYS - FORMERLY THE ADELPHI. FOR THE FIRST TIME THIS WEEK DA WILL NOT BE TAKING HIS AXE TO A BOOZER.

Last night's set lists

At the Fulford Arms, York: -

Out On The Weekend
Mellow My Mind
Roll Another Number (For The Road)
Only Love Can Break Your Heart
Heart Of Gold

And the after hours set: -

Don't Let It Bring You Down
On The Beach
Motion Pictures
Ambulance Blues
Tell Me Why
Birds
Old Man

Last night's set list

At The Habit, York: -

Falling
I'm Just A Loser
Let It Be
Love

There will be a private party tomorrow, so the open mic was moved to Tuesday this week. A very enjoyable evening too.

Da drives a choo-choo

Cleaning the drawhook

Cleaning the footplate

Restart at Dolgoch Falls

Sojourn at Abergynolwyn

Bob, Elvis and Andy

The Great Man speaks (and sings) - again!

Loudon Wainwright III Opens Up About Kate McGarrigle, His Famous Children and Being a Grandparent With Leonard Cohen

Posted on Jul 29th 2011 3:00PM by Dan Reilly

Cramming a four-decade career into one package is no easy task. For Loudon Wainwright III, curating the box set '40 Odd Years' was such a painstaking experience that he compared it to "drowning kittens."

But a few months after the May release from Shout Factory, Wainwright is as upbeat as ever. In a lengthy chat with Spinner, the singer-songwriter was candid about the tense times with his children, renowned artists Rufus and Martha, his late wife, Kate McGarrigle, how his friend Judd Apatow helped him get the box set together and what it's like to be a grandparent alongside Leonard Cohen.

You said that putting this box set together was "like drowning kittens." Have you guys calmed down since it's been out?

I've mourned over the kittens that have been put in the sack, that didn't make it into the box. That was an aspect that was difficult at that stage -- choosing what could be included and what couldn't be included because there were digital space requirements.

You've worked with Judd Apatow on 'Undeclared' and 'Knocked Up,' but how did he get involved in this project?

Well, I would see him and he would say, "You gotta have a box!" And I'd say, "Yeah, sure, I agree." But because of his interest and his influence, he was able get together with the people at Shout Factory and encouraged them to make it happen. And he was also quite involved from the creative side of things. I sent him my choices, and the DVD was pretty much created by him and his team. So, he's a very big part.

In another interview, you said that one of your songs made you "wince," and that it was a good thing. How many moments of wincing did you have while putting together the set?

Not a lot. I took one song off because it made my wife wince too much. I cut her some slack. It takes a lot to make me wince; as far as I'm concerned, bad taste is timeless. I like to wince. I like to think that people are going "Eeeghegh!" I put one song on there that I never had the guts to put on a record -- which was this song called 'Laid' -- so I thought, "What the hell? I'm almost dead. I'll put it out there."

Was there a point where you weren't so honest in your songwriting? A lot of singers portray themselves as better people in their autobiographical songs.

If you go back, as I did with this box set, and I listen to my earliest songs, the very first song on my very first record -- it's this song called 'School Days' -- it's very autobiographical and confessional. So, I suppose, the propensity and tendency is something that I've always had. And just honestly, I don't think about "Now I'm going to be honest." I just think about describing things. Maybe that's a kind of honesty, I don't know. I suppose I'm more of a realist painter as opposed to a surrealist? I don't know.

How many times has that honesty gotten you in trouble?

Oh, you know, there's been a couple of tense Thanksgiving dinners along the line. But I think that people that I know, people in my family, the community at large, expects me to write about myself and the people that are in my life, the people that I care about. They're the most interesting people to me. Now we're just talking about personal songs -- there are other categories of songs that I write, but I think in terms of those songs, people know what to expect.

Is songwriting a means of therapy for you?

I suppose so. A friend of mine once said if I hadn't picked up a guitar, I may have been an axe murderer. That's a little bit dramatic I think, but "therapeutic" implies a cure. Of course, people stay in therapy their whole lives ... I dwell on these subjects, I don't know if it is a therapeutic exercise. It could be argued that it could make things worse. But I don't know. Again, I'm writing about the stuff that interests me. When I'm writing the song, it makes me feel better, so I guess in that sense it's therapeutic.

You really dwell on the object of fatherhood. Now that you're a grandfather, do you have a different perspective on it?

I got a couple of songs about it [laughs]! The main difference is that there's quite a remove when you're a grandfather. You can kind of hand them back off and say, "So long! See you in two weeks!" [Laughs] I used to do that anyway when I was a father, but that can lead to some problems at home. It's great. Being a grandfather so far has been a ball. I suspect I will down the line, but so far I haven't had to change one diaper.

Has that changed your relationship with Rufus and Martha?

It's the only context with which to hang out with them. Martha was here just a couple of days ago with her son Arcangelo and we had a lovely couple of days. I have a new song called 'All in a Family' and it kind of talks about this idea of the new baby and what it can do. And the same is with Rufus's daughter Viva who I've spent some time with. I saw her about two weeks ago. It's a ball.

How aware were you of Rufus' plan to have a baby with Leonard Cohen's daughter?

They've been friends for a long time and this is something they've been talking about for some years. It didn't come totally out of the left field.

Have you and Leonard come together as grandparents?

We've ooh-ed and aah-ed at the baby a few times in the same room. I had met him a couple of times before and now we have a new context in which to hang out.

Maybe she'll be the next generation of singer-songwriters in the family.

We'll see. Maybe she'll be a nuclear physicist.

What kind of emotions did you go through when including 'Weave Room Blues,' the song you recorded with Kate, on the box set?

Well, you know Kate McGarrigle was a big person my life when we were married and when we were hanging out and young -- and obviously because we had two kids and stuff. In addition to all that, she was a great musician and somebody that I used to really love to play music with. It seemed important to include something with the two of us. 'Weave Room blues' was the choice.

We like how you can hear her laughing between the verses.

Yeah, we were having a lot of fun. And that was what I wanted to convey with that choice, that we did have fun.

That's why it got picked over some other tracks?

There were some other tracks. There was a version that she and I did of a Bob Dylan song, which was great, 'You Ain't Going Nowhere.' It's just like 'Weave Room Blues,' it's an old song and I like that she cracks up a couple of times.

How often do you reflect on your life and where you are now?

Every time I open up the obituaries page I think about my own life and where I am now [laughs]. I'm at of the age now -- more and more people are passing away. It's on my mind, I suppose. It's an interesting subject. I've been writing songs about it because it's what's going on.

Did you consult with your kids at all about what was going on the box set?

No, not really. I was the decider. I picked what I like.

And now Rufus has his own box set coming out with about a dozen discs, right?

I hear that it's 19 discs.

Is he trying to one-up you?

It's more like 15-up me! But don't worry -- I don't suffer from box-set envy.

What's next for you? Are you going to work on something similar to 'High Wide and Handsome: The Charlie Poole Project'?

I'm focused right on my next record, which I'm going to start making soon. It's songs from my swinging life. That's my focus now. Down the line, I don't know if I'm going to do any more concept records like the 'Charlie Poole' thing. That was a really fun exercise; I got to work with some of my favorite musicians on the East Coast. Who knows?

Do you have a title yet?

We're playing around with a couple of ideas. There's a lot of death and decay material, so we thought we'd call it 'Death n' Decay' -- kind of make it sound like it's a candy bar.

http://www.spinnermusic.co.uk/2011/07/29/loudon-wainwright-box-set/

Loudon Wainwright - The Great Man interviewed

Forty Odd Years: The Unpredictable Career of Loudon Wainwright III
By: j. poet
published on July 8, 2011

Loudon Wainwright III was a young singer/songwriter in the late ‘60s, and one of several talented performers that were tagged by critics as “the new Bob Dylan.” That epithet was more a curse than a blessing; nobody’s ever lived up to the challenge of being the new Dylan. Happily, Wainwright’s music has remained vital, timely, and with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, timeless as well. Many people know Wainwright best for his novelty hit “Dead Skunk”, or possibly as the father of pop chameleon Rufus Wainwright and the singer/songwriters Martha Wainwright and Lucy Roche Wainwright. While he’s justifiably proud of his talented offspring, Wainwright’s contributed more to the American song bag than his musical and intellectual genes. He’s been making good—and great albums—for more than 40 years, a fact that’s underlined by the title of his recent career retrospective on Shout Factory, Loudon Wainwright III: 40 Odd Years.

Despite having penned hundreds of love songs, protest songs, ballads, and sharply etched personal tunes, he’s often been labeled as a funny songwriter, but he’s got more to offer than laugh-out-loud tunes like “School Days” and “Swimming Song.”*

“Being funny didn’t hurt my career,” Wainwright said, via phone from his home on Long Island. “There are those people who may think writing novelty songs, or funny songs, is not as elevated as songs that address more serious subjects, but some of my favorite songs were written by Tom Lehrer, Alan Sherman, and Ray Stevens. I love to laugh and I like to make people laugh. It looks easy when I’m on stage, but it’s not easy to be funny. It was the funny songs that first gave people a reason to come and see me perform, and most of them are still coming to see me, so it’s a good thing. As it says in the old blues song, ‘You may be thinkin’ that I’m laughing, but I’m just tryna keep from cryin’.’ Laughing is an emotional release that you can’t control and it’s an important thing to keep doing.”

Wainwright’s catalog is hard to classify, and its range and emotional depth is one of the joys of Loudon Wainwright III: 40 Odd Years, a collection that presents 91 tunes on four CDs, including an obligatory disc of outtakes and rarities, as well as a DVD of mostly recent live performances. Wainwright is proud of his work, and along with his co-producer director Judd Apatow (Undeclared, Knocked Up), was involved with the production of the box from day one.

“I know some artists let other people do the driving when it comes to these kinds of projects, but I wanted to be the one to pick the songs and the bonus tracks. I became ‘the decider’ for the music on the CDs. It was an agonizing and difficult process, like watching an episode of Dancing with the Stars. Some songs I love didn’t make it on to the album because of the space constraints, but I’m over the pain. My co-producer, Judd Apatow, did the DVD. As far as the other things to do with the set, I was in control, or maybe out of control, of the entire process. I had no idea how to do a box set when we started. I’d been considering a retrospective, but Judd has a relationship with Shout Factory because they put out his TV shows Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared on DVD. We had a couple of meetings and said, ‘Lets do it.’”

With 24 albums of tunes in his catalog so far, the process of organizing the material took up a large chunk of Wainwright’s time. “It was a long process of elimination. I did various culls to whittle it down to the 60-plus tracks that would fit on the three discs of studio material. Everything had to be re-mastered in the end, but we didn’t go in and remix anything. It’s all the original material. I decided to have everything arranged chronologically. I wanted to have songs from every record and picked what I thought were the best ones, but that was a subjective call. I used what I wanted and listened to them and decided if they worked together or not. The criterion was very vague, but somehow it happened.”

As to whether or not he had any flashbacks when he listened to the older songs, Wainwright says, “I can remember certain things about certain recording sessions that took place years ago. I also noted how different my voice was when I was younger. I used [a higher register] and I was a different singer. I was 40 years younger in the beginning, trying to become a singer. Now I am a singer. I was aware that the performer was me and noticed that the way I write a song was right there from the beginning.

“For the Rare and Unreleased disc, I went through my home demos. I have an archive of demos, but not as big an archive as some. Someone sent me a CD of bootlegged performances that included a song called ‘The Miles’ that I’d forgotten I’d written until I head the bootleg recording. We also included one original track that we cut just for the album. ‘At the End of a Long Lonely Day’ is a Marty Robbins song and I sing it with Suzzy and Lucy Wainwright Roche. It’s a song I really love. I heard it on a Greenbriar Boys record in the ‘60s. [Greenbriar Boys lead singer] John Herald just sang the hell out of it in an up-tempo way. I’ve never heard the Marty Robbins recording, but I’ve been singing it a long time.”

The 40 Odd Years box set is not Wainwright’s first retrospective work. With his friend and producer Joe Henry, he made Recovery, revisiting some of the songs from his first four albums. He rerecorded them with Henry and a backing band, which gave the tracks a darker, more ironic feel than when they were first recorded. “I worked with Joe and picked some of the very earliest songs I did with just me and my guitar. Then we played them with a band he put together with all these great musicians he knows. Everybody at the session had input into how we played the songs.”

“Motel Blues”, a song about having sex with a groupie after a show, now sounds more like an act of desperation than seduction. “That was one of the ideas of recording the older tunes. When a kid tells a girl, ‘Come up to my motel room and save my life,’ it just sounds like a throwaway line. When it comes out of the mouth of a 62-year-old guy, you know he really means it.”

Despite a career of some 40 odd years, Loudon Wainwright never intended to be a singer, much less a songwriter. He was born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and his father, Loudon Wainwright II, was the editor of Life magazine. His family was wealthy, and he grew up in Westchester County, New York City, and Beverly Hills. One of his grammar school classmates was Liza Minnelli. “Loudon Wainwright is the name of a white kid, not the name of a folk or blues singer. I always liked music and there was music around the house, so I don’t remember the particular moment when I thought I’d like to play guitar. When we lived in LA, my father had a friend named Terry Gilkyson. [Gilkyson was a songwriter and a part of the Easy Riders, the only acoustic group to make folk popular between the time the Weavers were blacklisted in the ‘50s and the beginning of the ‘60s folk revival.]

“They were drinking buddies. My dad had written a few songs on piano and Terry was a songwriter too. At one point, Terry gave my dad a nylon sting guitar and taught him a few chords, but it didn’t work out. I got the guitar, probably wresting it away from my brothers and sister because I was the oldest. Today I know Terry’s kids, Eliza is a singer/songwriter and Tony is a guitar player. [He played with X, Lone Justice, and fronts his own band.] I’ve done a couple of shows with Eliza over the years.

“So, I played guitar, but I didn’t start writing songs until 1968. I played blues and folk songs. I learned the five chords I still use to write songs when I was 14. I may know a few more by now, but I just played and sang because it was fun. I thought I was going to be an actor. I didn’t want to be a musician. When I went to Carnegie Tech in the late’60s, I took acting classes.

“I went to the same boarding school my father went to and listened to folk music. I loved the Greenbriar Boys and Ramblin’ Jack Elliot. I started imitating Jack Elliot’s style, and my playing is still reminiscent of his. He got me interested in Doc Watson and Clarence Ashley, the guys from the little towns in the South, the real deal. There was also a smattering of Beatles and Stones, and records I’d picked up from my dad’s collection. Louis Prima, Kid Ory, Louis Armstrong, and Alan Sherman. My dad was one of the first guys to buy a Joan Baez album. I know that was influential.

“The first record I bought was ‘All Shook Up’ by Elvis Presley. I suppose it was a seminal moment… but I was more moved by the folk stuff from the early ‘60s. When the folk boom was happening, the Newport Folk Festival was a big deal. I was there with my sleeping bag and my Martin D28, listening to Mississippi John Hurt and Richard Fariña and the New Lost City Ramblers. I was a fan of that stuff, but I wasn’t writing songs yet. Seeing Dylan made me think it was possible to be a songwriter even though I was a white kid from suburbia.”

In the mid ‘60s, Wainwright dropped out of college and headed for San Francisco, just like everybody else his age. On his way west, but got busted for pot in Oklahoma. His father bailed him out and he returned to Cambridge, MA to work “real jobs” to pay his dad back for getting him out of jail. While working as a movie house janitor, boatyard barnacle scraper, and cashier/cook/dishwasher at a macrobiotic restaurant, he started writing songs and performing in Boston and New York folk clubs. It has been reported that his pot bust directly led to his becoming a singer and songwriter. “Getting arrested did shake me up and made me focus a little bit. I wrote a song about the bust (on Loudon Wainwright Album II) called ‘Samson and the Warden.’ I was one of a generation of kids who were trying to find themselves. Getting in real hot water woke me up a little bit.”

Wainwright’s sharp songwriting, humor, and engaging stage presence soon landed him a contract with Atlantic Records. They released his first two albums, Loudon Wainwright III, Album I, and Album II. What people didn’t know was that the spastic stage moves and grimaces that were part of his performance were a result of stage fright. “It was mostly pre-show stage fright, which is excitement really,” he explains. “You’re about to go in front of a bunch of people you don’t know and try to engage them. It’s exciting and a little bit nerve-wracking. Most of the performers I know have some kind of stage fright, but most of us have figured out ways to deal with it. You hear about Liza Minnelli vomiting before she gets on stage, but once you’re on stage, you usually have a good time. At least I know that I do.”

Early on, Wainwright scored his one and only hit, “Dead Skunk”, from the imaginatively titled Columbia record Album III, the first album he made using a backing band. “As I said, I like writing novelty songs and enjoy amusing people. I’d been doing ‘Dead Skunk’ onstage and people really seemed to like it. I made that album with a lot of great musicians, and it was recorded in one take. Then it was played on the radio. I didn’t think I was writing a hit song when I wrote it. How could you think a song about a dead skunk would be a hit? I sure didn’t. I know the label would have liked another hit, perhaps a dead aardvark in the middle of the road, but that’s not the way I work.”

Wainwright also went electric briefly around the time he hit the charts with “Dead Skunk.” “Having a folk/rock band didn’t make the music any better, and it was a lot more expensive; I had to pay all those guys myself. It was a foray, but it didn’t work out that well. I’ve made a few records with bands, but I like performing solo, with a guitar and my voice.”

Some unfamiliar with Wainwright’s catalog may think that he’s a stand-up comedian with a guitar in hand. While he’s always used his own experiences for subject material, Wainwright is brutally honest about his emotional life in his songs. It’s a combination of humor and irony that makes his music resonate with people. “In the ‘60s, everything was more personal. I wasn’t interested in generic boy meets girl songs. From the first line of the first song on the first record [‘In Delaware when I was younger… I was Keats. I was Bake,’ he sang on ‘School Days’] I’ve been writing about my life as it goes along. I wrote about going to boarding school, working in a macrobiotic restaurant, falling in love, getting married, and having kids. My life seems to be a rich subject to me. The trick is to make my life match up to your life, be it on the subject of airline travel or a break-up. People ask why I’m so autobiographical, but it surprises me that more people don’t do it. I’m more interested in me than anything else, although I do use exaggeration, poetry, and even hyperbole when I write personal songs.”

Wainwright still writes his share of humorous and topical songs, but as he’s aged, he’s also gotten more serious. He wrote the songs on History after his father died, while Last Man on Earth dealt with the death of his mother and the tragedy of 9/11. He took a hard look at mortality, the love and hate that brings a family together and pulls it apart, to write the songs. The albums are not without humor, but also he addresses life’s tragedies with a rare honesty. “I resisted being any kind of writer for years. Like most people, when I was in my teens, I didn’t want to have anything to do with my parents. My father was a very good writer, and as the years went on, I began to think that some of that talent runs in my veins. Today I feel a connection with him in a lot of different ways and he’s been dead for 23 years. My mother was my biggest fan and she nurtured me and looked after me and loved me, which was really helpful. We were close, not that we had an ideal relationship, and the tunes on [Last Man on Earth] hint at the strings attached. When she died, I felt lost and hopeless and shut down. I knew it was going to have a big effect on me, but it was even bigger [than I’d imagined].”
In the ‘90s, Wainwright became a writer for hire for National Public Radio, turning out topical songs that were aired mostly on the show Morning Edition and collected on the album Social Studies. “There’s a kind of pressure when they call up and say, ‘Write a song about Tonya Harding or a Beatles reunion and have it to us in two days.’ Maybe it’s the journalistic genes I got from my father. He always talked about deadlines and was always nervous, but managed to do the story on time. He had more problems when he was writing books, and having a deadline seemed to help. If you’re sitting around and waiting for the music to come, you can wait a long time. I need a kick in the ass now and then to get something going. There was often complete panic, and then I just started writing. I’d find myself wondering why I agreed to [write for a deadline], but it seemed like a good idea at the time. In fact, that’s been my rationale for my whole career, if not my life.”

Now that he’s finished with the publicity for 40 Odd Years, Wainwright’s back to doing what he does best: Writing songs. “I usually have the words first, sometime the music first, and occasionally they come all at once. I consider it my job, but it’s still mysterious to me. I just don’t know where they come from. I have a style I’ve employed for years, and some tricks and methods of writing I use, but a lot of it is just luck. It’s like sex: You think about it a lot of the time, but it’s a mysterious and wonderful event when it happens. Sometimes you can go a long time without writing; sometimes it just comes naturally. I wrote ‘Dead Skunk’ in about eight minutes, and I’ve worked on [songs] for eight months. Usually, it takes a couple of hours, then a round of going out and performing it to see if it works and how people respond.

“Right now, I’ve started to gather the material I’ve been writing over the last chunk of time. I hope to finish a record in the next couple of months. As I said, I like to write about my own life, so the subject of these songs is death and decay. Yes sir, that’s what’s going on now. Never let it be said that I don’t know my own demographic.”
 
http://www.crawdaddyarchive.com/index.php/2011/07/08/forty-odd-years-the-unpredictable-career-of-loudon-wainwright-iii/

And the Great Man sings:


* I have to say, as I get older and the song ages almost as gracefully, it's taken on a Salingeresque feel rather than a humorous one.

Leopard and spots.

Eric Pickles. Why?

Sign of the Harp

http://www.boblinks.com/autograph-ryman.html

Swedish Madness

Miles Apart

The balloon's gone up

Men of Letters

It's Rough Out There

http://youtu.be/48jd7a0PEMM

HANK REBORN

Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams, a new collection of previously unheard songs by the country great recorded by artists such as Bob Dylan, Jack White, Norah Jones and Levon Helm, will be released on October 4th.
The set, which will be issued on Dylan's imprint Egyptian Records, was originally conceived by veteran A&R executive Mary Martin as a Dylan-centric project, but eventually evolved into a multi-artist tribute to the late singer-songwriter.
The songs featured in the set were rescued from notebooks left behind in a leather briefcase by Williams after he died in 1953 at the age of 29. The notes contained lyrics and song ideas that were finished by the 13 artists who contributed to the disc. The full story of Williams' notebooks will be told in the album's liner notes, which were penned by Michael McCall of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.

The full tracklisting for The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams is as follows:

Alan Jackson "You've Been Lonesome, Too"

Bob Dylan "The Love That Faded"

Norah Jones "How Many Times Have You Broken My Heart?"

Jack White "You Know That I Know"

Lucinda Williams "I'm So Happy I Found You"

Vince Gill and Rodney Crowell "I Hope You Shed a Million Tears"

Patty Loveless "You're Through Fooling Me"

Levon Helm "You'll Never Again Be Mine"

Holly Williams "Blue Is My Heart"

Jakob Dylan "Oh, Mama, Come Home"

Sheryl Crow "Angel Mine"

Merle Haggard "The Sermon on the Mount"

Tonight's set list

At The Habit, York: -

Love Song
Is It Only The Moonlight?
Birds
Human Highway

Much quieter than last week, but enjoyable all the same.

Lost Weekend in the Lit and Phil (His booze is always stashed within reach)

In an English Country Garden

A lesson . . . .

Please heed this safety message - drink can cause drowsiness - proof!

Last night's set list

At The Habit, York: -

Out On The Weekend (Neil Young)
Walk Right In (The Rooftop Singers)
Our Sgt. Major Jumped from 40,000ft (Trad. arr. Ravenscroft)

What a night! The best open mic I've ever attended. The place was packed when I went in at 9:30. There must have been 15 or 16 players and it wasn't even a full moon. Tom T came along but had to leave before my set.

The night finished wlth Mark Wynn & Dave Ward MacLean playing a set that just blew everyone away. Marvellous!

Free-running in the community urban environment...

Ealing Studios and postwar British film...

The troubled heart of Ealing and British postwar cinema
Decades of rainy-Sunday screenings have blinded us to the true nature of postwar British cinema – freedom, naughtiness and a very black humour indeed

Matthew Sweet
guardian.co.uk
Thursday 21 July 2011

It begins with a parrot and a gaucho band. We're in South America – or a tiny patch of it, conjured some 60 years ago on a sound stage in London. The customers wear fur wraps and hair cream. The Atlantic stands, suspiciously immobile, beyond the window. And here is Alec Guinness, a British robber in rich retirement, sitting at a table, grinning a complacent grin and declaring his attachment to the Latin high life in that thin, high, gurgling voice. He is a prototypical Ronnie Biggs – and he's prepared to put his money where his mouth is.

When a conspicuously privileged middle-aged woman stops to talk, Guinness presses a roll of banknotes into her outstretched hands – a donation for the "victims of the revolution". A waiter receives a similarly thick wad of beneficence. Another gift is bestowed upon an almond-eyed beauty in long black gloves. Chiquita nuzzles her benefactor's neck, murmuring her gratitude into his ear. Guinness's face becomes a mask of bliss.

These are the opening moments of the Ealing comedy The Lavender Hill Mob – restored and released into cinemas this week. It's a worthy exhibit A in any argument for the richness and vitality and sophistication of British film, but useful evidence, too, for those who argue that our native cinema is unambitiously parochial and too small to contain a talent of truly great magnitude. The reason? The film will not allow Guinness's thief to get away with it: though we won't realise it until the last reel, he is already handcuffed to the Scotland Yard officer charged to bring him back to Britain, rationing, and the fag end of the Attlee administration. And that woman pressing herself against Guinness, passing through the scene with a single line, is Audrey Hepburn – a future international superstar for whom British cinema failed to find a single interesting part.

When Ealing studios was sold in 1955 and its personnel absorbed in the great maw of the Rank Organisation, a memorial plaque was bolted to the wall. "Here during a quarter of a century were made many films projecting Britain and the British character." Perhaps this tablet now commemorates a time when there was more agreement on what those terms might mean. During the war years and their immediate aftermath, Ealing studios helped to clarify Britain's sense of itself – or, at least, its sense of what it hoped to be. We were the postmistresses and vicar's daughters of Went the Day Well?, who used guns and axes to pick off the Nazi infiltrators in their midst. We were the motley gang of Spanish civil war veterans and sour middle-aged clerks who settled their differences to face the inferno of The Bells Go Down. We were the boys of Hue and Cry, who cornered Jack Warner's gang of spivs and racketeers on that bombsite by the Thames.

For the persuasive clarity of these images, Ealing paid the price. When its pictures fell from fashion, they were dismissed as insular, inward-looking, cosy. This was, according to historian Anne Massey, "a vision of a little England [that] detracted from the realities of living in ugly, bombed-out cities". The critic Alexander Walker derided these films as "comfort food for middle England that sat well with the national stomach". It was a profound critical misjudgment – what's comforting about being murdered with an axe in a rural post office? – but it stuck.

Among its enemies and its friends, our native cinema has a reputation for decency and good manners. The awards bestowed on Shakespeare in Love and on The King's Speech are evidence for the American academy's enthusiasm for literate, middlebrow British movies full of nicely dressed Rada graduates. It feels as if this has always been the case – but I suspect the passion only began in earnest when Colin Welland waved his Chariots of Fire Oscar in the air and started bellowing: "The British are coming!"

Before America acquired its Pavlovian response to received pronunciation, British cinema signified something very different to audiences on the other side of the Atlantic. Permissiveness. Smut. License. Amorality. British cinema meant a couple of hours in the dark enjoying an agreeably un-American form of freedom – one that Hollywood was not always capable of supplying. Korda's The Private Life of Henry VIII reigned in New York because the film deconstructed the stuffy romance of the costume drama with faintly filthy humour.

Audiences loved the sadomasochistic sturm und drang of the Gainsborough melodramas, in which James Mason, Jean Kent, Phyllis Calvert and Patricia Roc mounted horses and slapped each other about. They thrilled to the Eastmancolor blood sports of the Hammer horror pictures. They were pleasantly gobsmacked by the transcendental naughtiness of the Carry On series, which loosed a species of gag that would have made Doris Day jump on a chair and scream. If American cinemagoers had not been so delighted by the moment in Carry On Nurse when Hattie Jacques discovers Wilfrid Hyde-White, prone on the hospital linen with a daffodil inserted into his anus, then the Carry Ons might not have made it to the Wilson years.

In the 1950s, Roger Manvell, the first head of the British Film Academy, moaned that British pictures were like "faded leaves painted in exquisite detail by a lady in Cornwall". At the same time, American audiences were turning to our cinema for its vigour, its extremity, its willingness to find black humour in crime, atrocity and moral transgression. It's very hard to imagine a Hollywood studio countenancing the scene in Kind Hearts and Coronets in which Dennis Price assassinates a ballooning old lady with a bow, an arrow and a deft little gag. "I shot an arrow in the air," he purrs. "She fell to earth in Berkeley Square." (The line is a parody of Longfellow, one of the most revered figures in the American literary canon.) Hard, too, to imagine a contemporaneous US horror flick concocting the moment in Hammer's The Curse of Frankenstein when the film cuts from an image of the Creature slaying a housemaid to Peter Cushing asking Hazel Court to pass the marmalade. And Trainspotting and Shaun of the Dead prove that this is not a trick that was only possible to pull off half a century ago.

For many modern observers of the film business, globalisation has killed the idea of a national cinema – a form of film-making in which a picture can demonstrate its loyalty to a particular local cultural sensibility. There are, to my mind, two impressive counter-arguments to this idea: the emptiness of European films manufactured to please the American market, and the continued dominance of Hollywood, which has made American-ness one of the most attractive properties in the world. British film-makers have been negotiating Hollywood's power for nearly a century. There will always be Audrey Hepburns who escape their notice until they receive a coronation on the other side of the Atlantic – and there is scarcely much point in agonising over it.

In 1946, Michael Balcon, the head of Ealing studios, wrote an article in which he contended that the second world war had transformed the sensibility and the habits of the British people. "Films," he argued, "have come to mean in the lives of many communities what religion meant to such communities in other times." Ending the supply of indigenous pictures, he suggested, would be the cultural equivalent of cutting off the water supply. Balcon was the son of South African emigres; he was Jewish; he was a grammar school boy from Birmingham. Few were more qualified than him to anatomise the nature of the country in which he told his stories.

Nostalgia, overfamiliarity, decades of rainy-Sunday screenings: these have blinded us to the truthfulness of this vision. The Lavender Hill Mob is not a form of comfort food. Guinness and his gang are brought to justice, but that doesn't cancel out the giddy excitement of their spree. There is something raging inside the film's anti-hero, the lowly bank employee who makes it to the new world with a stash of bullion, and is then forced home again; something that spoke to an audience that had survived the traumas of the second world war, but knew that other, undeclared wars were already being fought. And if we could acknowledge this, and gaze into the troubled heart of Ealing, we might know ourselves better. Know Britain, and the British character.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/jul/21/ealing-british-postwar-cinema?INTCMP=SRCH

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #117