![]() Hall's early students included the mercurial Hugh Ramsay, George Bell, Max Meldrum, Violet Teague and Rose MacPherson (Margaret Preston), all of whom ultimately moved away from his tradition of painting and arguably all of whom were to become finer painters than their teacher. His marital bliss was short-lived and less than seven years after their marriage, while in the late stages of pregnancy with their second child, both Elsie and the unborn child died. His arrival in Melbourne was far from plain sailing, because the local art community felt, with some justification, that the job should have gone to the acting director, Australian-born Frederick McCubbin, an artist of the Heidelberg School fame.ĭespite challenges to his authority and position, Hall hung on and, before the end of 1894, he married the woman who had caused his antipodean adventure, but his salary was severely cut because of the economic depression that was affecting all the colonies.įor much of his life, he was forced to exist on limited means. With his head in a whirl, he put in a late application for the directorship in Melbourne and got the job. ![]() Hall was an English-born, English-trained artist, who had no intention of travelling to Australia, until he met beautiful Australian Elismore (Elsie) Shuter. His books include Dylan on Dylan: Interviews and Encounters, Lennon on Lennon: Conversations with John Lennon, Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen: Interviews and Encounters, and Springsteen on Springsteen: Interviews, Speeches, and Encounters. Jeff Burger’s website,, contains more than four decades’ worth of music reviews and commentary. If you’re new to his world, though, you really ought to start at the beginning with this superlative twofer. In the more than half a century since he created such numbers, Wainwright has issued well over two dozen additional albums. “Do the monkey, do the pony, do the slop, do the boogaloo twist / Cut your throat, cut your throat, cut your wrist,” he sings before concluding: “When you get hung up, hang yourself up by the neck / What the hell, what the hell, what the heck.” And in “I Know I’m Unhappy / Suicide Song / Glenville Reel,” he demonstrates that he can craft humor even from a tale about taking one’s own life. On Songs like “Plane, Too,” in which he names everything he saw on the airliner he was flying on, Wainwright proves he can write a good song about virtually anything. More often than not, though, Wainwright will make you smile with his wry and often sarcastic humor, such as in “Be Careful, There’s a Baby in the House” and “Motel Blues,” which includes lines like “Chronologically I know you’re young / But when you kissed me in the club you bit my tongue.” Then there’s “The Drinking Song,” where Wainwright proclaims, “Drunk men stagger, drunk men fall / Drunk men swear and that’s not all / Quite often they will urinate outdoors.” Sometimes he’s dead serious, such as in the deftly written “School Days,” which opens the first LP with the lines “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.” There’s also “Hospital Lady,” which mingles images of a young girl with lines about the old dying lady she has become. His frequently autobiographical music is a whole lot more imaginative than the titles of his early albums. (The disc also includes a bonus track, “The Drinking Song,” a different version of which shows up on 1972’s Album III, which also featured Wainwright’s sole hit single, “Dead Skunk.”) If you missed them when they first appeared in 19, the good news is that they’ve been reissued on a single CD. Loudon’s own large talent was immediately obvious on his eponymous debut and its follow-up, Album II. ![]() Oh, one more thing: like ol’ man Zimmerman, who fathered the Wallflowers’ Jakob Dylan, Wainwright has parented talented next-generation musicians: with singer Kate McGarrigle, he fathered Rufus and Martha Wainwright, and with singer Suze Roche, he parented Lucy Wainwright Roche. Like most of the so-called new Dylans who emerged in the 1970s, folk singer/songwriter Loudon Wainwright III has little in common with Bob aside from an ability to write lyrics worth hearing and produce music that isn’t quite like anyone else’s.
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