Many years ago at Carnegie Hall, Rosanne Cash joined her father Johnny Cash for a duet on “I Still Miss Someone” during the encore. It was perhaps the single most moving thing I’ve heard at the famed Stern Auditorium. Till last night. Last night Martha Wainwright held her infant son Alexandra while she sang back up for her brother Rufus on “Poses” during the encore. With Wainwright III in the audience and the spirit of their late mother, Kate McGarrigle, hovering nearby, Rufus achieved the sense of family as musical permanence he has been attempting over and over again.
It took things to give his music this amount of depth, this degree of historic value, the importance, the emergence of a Crown Prince reaching for the thrown. A death and a birth.
That’s what the night was about: in the face of loss it was a vision of familial unity and forgiveness.
And this is what Rufus achieved on the purely excellent and desperately quiet memento mori All Days Are Nights: Songs For Lulu. Or perhaps that isn’t what it was at all. Before the first half of the concert, we had been asked not to clap between songs till after Rufus left the stage, during a song cycle meant to be played without interruption. An affectation I loath on principal.
Rufus entered the stage in a long black gown, the lights were dimmed and heperformed in shadows. On the wall there were pictures of darkened eyes (variations on the album cover) , tearing, blinking, they looked like a pachyderm’s eye and they were joined by other. Perhaps a Greek chorus, perhaps the Goddess Mnemosyne: the immediacy of memory. While the album sounded all of a piece, emotionally the sonnets were a bit of a distraction. Last night, the songs had a deadly intensity that built upon memories of the immediate past: it seemed to take place in the days preceding Kate McGarrigle’s death, as Rufus wandered through his life from hospital to home and back: fought with his sister, walked through the forest, mused over new love and all through it there is a drear haunting. The first four songs, “Who Are You New York”, “Sad With What I Have”, Martha”, “Give Me What I Want” remain amazing, but the sense of something not being said permeates the songs as you watch Wainwrights long slender fingers, pounding thru the latter song, like a classical Oscar Peterson: it is all movement and rhythm and… disquiet.
And the silence between songs are part of the song: it is where we fill in the horror he isn’t expressing till one of Rufus’s best songs ever, “Zebulon”. “My mother’s in hospital, my sister’s at the opera, I’m in love, but let’s not talk about it.There’s so much to tell you.” This is how you express the ineluctable, inexpressibly: through inference, through the mournful and beautiful music you are left to realize that this is indeed artistry. Rufus manages to share his grief while never needing to cheapen it through pathos. Throughout “Zebulon” Rufus repeats three notes and he ends the set with those three notes lingering like Church bells marking his mother’s death.
“I am glad that is over’ Rufus says as the second half begins. And we know what he means. It is as if in this, a concert Wainwright has claimed as the most important of his life, he had to express himself this way even if it hurt to do so. The second set we had been promised a greatest hits but we don’t really get it. We get some hits. A handful of Judy Garland songs naturally enough, “Dinner At Eight” dedicated to the mother fucking asshole himself, daddy Loudon, but no “Movies Of Myself” and no “Vibrate” and no “Barcelona”. He does a coupla Jeff Buckley covers, one good, one useless. He invites his sister Martha on stage for a couple of songs in French, one off Jean Renoir -one of my fave directors of all time, “French Cancan” but hardly a crowd pleaser. Rufus also announces his mixed reviewed opera “Prima Donna” will receive its New York premiere at Lincoln Center New York City Opera during the 2012. These are the same guys who after agreeing to produce its world opening, changed their mind because he wouldn’t switch from french to English. So consider them chastised. Rufus is also engaged to his long term boyfriend and sings “Together” to him.
The penultimate song, Kate’s “Walking”, ties the past to the present. It moves forward from “Zebulon” by looking back to his parents courtship. And finally, Rufus swings through “Zing! Went The String Of Hearts”. Somewhere Mnemosyne is smiling.