Kirk Lake - There Will Be Rainbows: A Biography of Rufus Wainwright

THE HOLLYWOOD BOWL, 23 SEPTEMBER 2007

The guy across the cramped little picnic table is wearing a T-shirt with Rufus Wainwrights head printed on it. Rufus face and features are whited out like in late Andy Warhol portraits and hes wearing a fedora and a smear of red lipstick. Arcing across the top of his image are multi-coloured balloon-shaped letters that spell out There Will be Rainbows. The guy next to him is wearing a sky-blue T-shirt with a naked Rufus on the front. Later they tell me that nude Rufus is a Marc Jacobs limited edition and Rainbow Rufus has been home-made (and later still I discover it is a misquote, but with its implication of triumph over adversity and sunshine after the rain, its so much more apposite than the actual lyric).

Rufus Wainwright is a few hundred feet away from us on stage at the Hollywood Bowl, bidding a relieved farewell to the Judy Garland show he has been performing intermittently over the previous year and a half. His voice deserts him every now and then, and he croaks at the end of a line, gasping after notes he cannot reach. On occasion he looks defeated and downcast, as if he cant wait to hang up his ruby slippers.

His sister Martha Wainwright has already received a standing ovation for her coruscating rendition of Stormy Weather. The following night at a tiny club show at the Hotel Caf, shell know how it feels for a family member to pull the rug from under the main attraction when mother Kate McGarrigle slips some Jerry Lee Lewis-like glissandi into the usually restrained piano accompaniment of her song Factory, leaving Martha to gently curse, Oh, Mother. Youre always trying to one-up me

But on this night Kate teeters across the vast stage and sits demurely at the piano. The Hollywood Bowls concentric concrete circles ring subdued blue light over the stage and Rufus is spotlit alone on the runway that cuts into the garden terrace seating. For such an established and experienced performer, he looks like a little boy lost. Eyes closed, the glass brooch on his waistcoat sparkling, he starts to singSomewhere over the rainbow way up high

Hollywood is a great place to go to become somebody else. Norma Jeane Baker came to Hollywood and transformed herself from factory worker into the most famous movie actress there will ever be because she dreamed harder than every other aspiring star. Halfway through the nights signature song something extraordinary happens: what had threatened to remain a disappointingly anti-climatic evening, in which Rufus failed to raise his head above the parapet of Garlands recreated ruins, is transformed by a transcendent Hollywood moment. Through the artifice, through the bloated conceit of the entire enterprise, Rufus suddenly connects with the 13,000-strong crowd. By the end of the song, the blue lights are changing into reds and yellows and greens. We are all dreaming harder. There will be rainbows indeed.

1.1

In 1968 everybody was looking for a new Bob Dylan and every aspiring East Coast folk singer was making their way to Greenwich Village in New York City, hoping that they might be the ones to squeeze into Dylans discarded motorcycle boots. In an area long favoured by musicians, artists, bohemians and poets, and as louche as it was intellectual, to play your songs in the clubs and coffee bars of MacDougal Street meant putting yourself up against legends. In every corner lurked an audience of hip, knowing ghosts

Imagine James Dean hanging out at Rienzis, James Baldwin waiting tables at the Calypso, the spirits of Jackson Pollock and Dylan Thomas drunk and swaying on the chequerboard floor of the San Remo. John Cage throwing the I Ching in one of the booths. On MacDougal Street, Tallulah Bankhead had appeared at the Provincetown Playhouse, where Bette Davis had made her stage debut. It was a street that embraced strong women. Eve Addams ran Eves Hangout, a lesbian bar (Men admitted but not welcome said the sign), before being deported in 1926 for publishing pornography. Later Anas Nin self-published her own early books by way of a printer further along the road and, years before that, Louisa May Alcott wrote at least a little of Little Women in a house belonging to her uncle.

Bob Dylan loved the street. He had played his earliest New York shows at the Cafe Wha? and the Village Gaslight, but it was his extended stay at the latter club in 1962 that saw him begin his transition from talented interpreter of traditional music to mercurial folk poet and reconfirm the clubs position as the hippest baron the block. Recordings of these shows, known simply as The Gaslight Tapes, would become among the most famous bootlegs in rock history.

The Gaslight had been founded in 1958 by John Mitchell. He opened it as a coffeehouse in an undeveloped cellar with a low ceiling, so low that Mitchell had had to lower the floor in order to create enough space to enable patrons to stand up. Trouble was, he was going against planning rules so hed had to dig out the cellar floor himself and distribute the bags of soil along the Greenwich Village streets like the penguins did for the escaping POWs in The Wooden Horse .

The club soon became the most important place for poetry readings and a focal point for the East Coast beat movement. Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti all read at the Gaslight. Theres a famous Fred McDarrah photograph of Diane DiPrima reading there in 1959, perched on top of a piano next to an oil lamp and a mantle clock. The place looks cramped and smoky. The walls are wooden panels, like a reinforced escape tunnel from straightsville. Indeed, the police were always trying to close them down, citing the club for hygiene violation or excessive noise. When applause drifted up from the pavement grating and caused the neighbours to complain, the audience took to snapping their fingers in quiet appreciation instead.

Under new ownership in 1960, the poets had been gradually overcome by a gentle folk wave that saw more and more acoustic guitars carried down the steps until Dylans breakout success led to a stampede of hopeful troubadours. With Dylans sales leading the way, the folk movement, despite its simple roots in protest singing, working-mens blues and provincial story-telling, had become ripe for exploitation by the record labels. By the mid-Sixties, even though Dylan had long since moved on, gone electric and become a star, record-label bosses still scouring the New York folk circuit looking for somebody to follow him into the charts would always be sure to check on whoever was playing at the Gaslight. As with Dylan, the other early Sixties regulars like Phil Ochs, Richie Havens, Mississippi John Hurt and Joan Baez had quickly outgrown the tiny venue but every night there were always a dozen other hopefuls waiting at the top of the stairs with their weathered six strings.

In 1968, one of these aspiring Dylans was Loudon Wainwright III, 22 years old, raised mostly in the affluent New York suburb of Westchester County after itinerant childhood stints in places including North Carolina, Los Angeles and Long Island, courtesy of his father, Loudon Wainwright Jrs, work as a columnist and editor at Life magazine. He had a set of songs that he had written himself and that he would deliver in a style quite unlike the other performers on the circuit. Later Rolling Stone would liken him to Charlie Chaplin through the eyes of Antonin Artaud, an acoustic comedy of cruelty, but for now his nervous tics and flitting tongue had the Gaslight crowd enthralled.