Morrissey Central "LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN" (January 26, 2025)

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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.



Title likely to be from here.
Loudon Wainwright III featured in early Morrissey letters.
He was also at Morrissey's curated Meltdown, 2004.
FWD.
 
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Beautifully written - this is the Morrissey I miss. He sounds resigned and reflective, yet defiant at the same time - all things pass and turn to dust but I'm still me. Very nice. Although Phil Ochs most definitely was not a sleeping-pill accident.
 
I think i'd live in the past to get away from the present. whether his career or the world at large in 2025.
 
This is refreshing. I always wondered what a Morrissey/Rufus Wainwright duet would turn out like.

He could write a book about 70s music a la Quentin Tarantino’s “Cinema Speculation”. It would probably be great.
 
Although Phil Ochs most definitely was not a sleeping-pill accident.
Quite. Although no doubt prescribed psychotropic drugs played a part in the tragedy of his suicide by hanging. Back then Ochs would have been prescribed all sorts of nastiness, including barbiturates. A coroner in the UK only very recently issued a 'prevention of future deaths' report about the newer antidepressants and increased suicide risk. The pharmaceutical industry do their very best to suppress evidence like this.
 
Beautiful and direct, and rather starkly evocative. And true. His eyes and ears are like lasers, but it’s the way in which he processes the world around him, and his completely natural abilities in the way he articulates and shares the things that move him, that is effortlessly executed and always a joy to read. His sensitivity shines whenever he is talking about anything that resonates with him, or that he cares deeply about.

What I love most as a reader, is that I can see and follow the thread very clearly - of the way in which his spirit inhabits his work, his creativity, and his expression. It shows everything of him, and everything he is.

Always a unique voice. And he is always completely magnetic.

Need more of this. Need so very much more of him in 2025, in every conceivable way. Truly. ❤️
 
Such a beautiful surprise from Morrissey! I'm excited to jump in and explore this album tonight as I've never heard much of Loudon Wainwright's music. ❤️
 
I do hope people realise I was being ironic in my first post!
Directed at the suggestion by Johnnie Ray in another thread that Morrissey has lost any sense of the poetic...
I think we can see this is not the case.
 
There’s much to love about this piece. You can feel how a young Loudon Wainwright resonated with a young Morrissey.
It also shows to what extent the heroes of his youth still serve as a blueprint for wvhat an artistic career should be like. Some might say that our Mozzer is firmly (and happily) stuck in the past.
 
I wonder when Morrissey 'discovered' this album? He was 10 or 11 when it was released. It no doubt hit the mark at some point when he was a teenager, full of hormones, yearning and longing?

The meeting of the sexual zones is the beginning of everything...
 
i feel like im into the children of the singers he likes. jeff bucklyey, rufus wainright, sean lennon, hank the whatever. my first introduction to this guy was on that tv show about the kids in college (top of the class?) where they said wicked a lot. then i realized he was rufus's father who i think didnt react to his comming out in the best way soi t wasnt a great first impression. hes an intense and passionate person though and makes interesting music
 
This is refreshing. I always wondered what a Morrissey/Rufus Wainwright duet would turn out like.

He could write a book about 70s music a la Quentin Tarantino’s “Cinema Speculation”. It would probably be great.
With a little bit of effort there are so many directions you could take Morrissey's career. But yeah if 'Marr's Guitars' could sell well a beautiful coffee table book with a list of essays from Morrissey on his favourite artists/albums would probably do even better.

With his voice deepening with richness in his older years the opportunity to position Morrissey as 'The Sinatra of Indie' would probably work. The limitless self-sabotage remains an indefatigable mountain to climb.
 

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