After the War (II) my father Loudon (II) came
home with his bride Martha (I).1 My parents had sex and nine months
later I was born albeit almost backwards.
My youth was spent in Westchester County, New
York and Beverly Hills, California. I remember being particularly
happy when we lived in Southern California. However there was
romantic agony - I had a tremendous crush on Liza Minnelli who
happened to be a classmate of mine in the 3rd Grade.
In 1956 the family moved back East to
Westchester. That year I bought my first record - a 45 r.p.m. single
of "All Shook Up" by Elvis (I) and music suddenly seemed terribly
powerful and important. In 1961 I was sent away to a boarding school
in Middletown Delaware called St. Andrew's (seen on screen in Dead
Poets Society), where my father had gone 20 years earlier. It's not
such a great idea to go to the same boarding school as your old man
especially when you both have the same weird first name.
Incidentally, a few years later I wound up seeing my father's shrink
- another bad move.
I started playing the guitar around 1960 and
after seeing Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival in 1962 I
acquired a brand new musical role model. I was unhappy at St.
Andrews, but thank God for teenage rebellion - it can get you
through. I graduated in 1965, went on to drama school at Carnegie
Mellon in Pittsburgh, dropped out in 1967 and headed west to San
Francisco where all the other long-haired lemmings were bound at
that time.
Suddenly it occurs to me that some of these
biographical details may seem familiar to you, that you may have
already gleaned these tidbits from earlier bios. Well, let's just be
professional and go over it one more time, shall we? It makes the
record company happy.
Okay so now I'm about 20 years old and you'd
think all that rebellion stuff would be out of my system. But as
Belushi (I) used to say, "Nooooo...." I had to get busted for pot.
And not in a reasonable state like Vermont or Rhode Island, but
Oklahoma for God's sake. In jail I was given a free haircut. Good
old Dad flew in from London and bailed my ass out of jail, which of
course is not a safe place for any young man's ass to remain for any
length of time. Nevertheless my time in the slammer (5 days) changed
my life. I had short hair and had to get a job to pay the old man
back. I worked a variety of jobs - movie house janitor, boatyard
barnacle scraper, and cashier-cook-dishwasher at New York's first
macrobiotic restaurant, the Paradox on East 7th Street. This was
also the time I started to write my own songs. Male
singer-songwriters were a happening commodity back then and I was
signed to Atlantic Records in 1969. The first album came out in 1970
and the career's been up and down ever since.
I suppose if you were writing my obituary today
you'd refer to 1972's "Dead Skunk" (#1 in Little Rock Arkansas for
six weeks) and my 3 appearances on the M*A*S*H TV show in 1975 as
Capt. Calvin Spaulding, the singing surgeon. Hopefully you'd mention
my two Grammy nominations for the albums I'm Alright (1985) and More
Love Songs (1986). And you'd remember and include the fact that
Johnny Cash recorded my song "The Man Who Couldn't Cry" for his
highly acclaimed 1994 album American Recordings. Undoubtedly your
editor would remind you to say something about last summer's BBC II
TV show, Loudon And Co. and the topical songs I've been writing for
N.P.R. and Ted Koppel's Nightline on ABC. If and when you do write
the obituary I'm sure Virgin Records would be happy to supply you
with any photos you might require. You'll probably want to finish
off the piece with a quote from one of the fabulous songs which have
appeared on the 15 great albums I've made. How about this one from
the most recent album Grown Man?
"He died on Monday where he lived, it happens
to us all
Shot through the air expecting nets, flight and
then a fall."
