Loudon Wainwright, Beck and Spinal Tap’s Michael McKean and Christopher Guest Team Up With Judd Apatow for Benefit
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It wasn’t quite a proper Spinal Tap reunion, but there was some implicit history happening Tuesday night at Largo in Los Angeles as Michael McKean and Christopher Guest sat in with Loudon Wainwright III, the headliner for the latest in a series of Judd Apatow-hosted “Juddapalooza” benefit concerts. They’d never performed together in this exact trio configuration before, but there’d been a lot of commingling over the last five-plus decades. Aside from the fact that all three are universally acknowledged masters of musical-comedy, serious trivia buffs may know that Wainwright was seen in a cameo as a keyboard-playing member of Spinal Tap in the short that first introduced the faux group in the late ’70s, so having them join up as a one-time performing trio all this time later felt like some kind of destiny fulfilled.
Tuesday’s show featured a healthy intermingling of Wainwright performing songs from his new album, “Lifetime Achievement,” and Guest and McKean reviving some of the very earliest Spinal Tap “hits,” along with some folk-scare collaborations. Also on tap as unadvertised guests at the Largo hootenanny (which, like the Apatow shows that preceded it, was a benefit for Children’s Hospital Los Angeles): Beck, who sang a few of his own songs — along with his NFL-commissioned Neil Young “Old Man” cover — and famed producer Greg Kurstin, who provided mostly unrehearsed but reliably piano contributions at intervals throughout the two hours.
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“We have come here from the 1960s,” said McKean. “Or as we call them, the 19-fucking-60s.” “Best decade!” added Wainwright, as Guest murmured something possibly not in earnest about the greatest generation joke. The chatter could have referred to the three songs Guest and McKean played during the evening as a duo, which were supposed to be the three songs Spinal Tap allegedly had hits with in the ’60s before transitioning to hard rock — “Listen to What the Flower People Say” (see video below), “Gimme Some Money” and “All the Way Home.” On a more literal level, it referenced how long these three have been around and been friends. Guest noted that he’d been playing with McKean since 1967; McKean and Wainwright first met up as part of the drama scene at Carnegie in 1965.
The passage of time was a running theme throughout many of Wainwright’s newly minted songs, which mix whimsy with winsomeness as they examine the state of his art and heart at 76. That the subject of aging would hardly be avoided was evident from the moment the acclaimed singer-songwriter first came on stage and realized that, roadie-less, he would have to stoop to pick up the cord to plug into his guitar. “Every time I have to get down and pick something up,” he said, “whether it’s a cord or a guitar pick, there’s this moment now where I say, ‘Do I really need this?'”
Apatow kicked off the night with a healthy amount of stand-up. As ever, he did not leave family out of it, riffing on being the sole male “troll” of a family with a wife and two daughters.
Talking about his daughter Maude’s stint on “Euphoria,” Apatow said, “You know, you want your kids to surpass you, but not that fast. I’m hoping she has a weak third season so I can catch up. I’d like it to jump the shark, but I don’t think it will.” Noting that he was being “a Jewish dad” in pushing for her to start having children already, Apatow said, “She’s in her twenties, and why not? … She’s like, ‘Dad, I play a 16-year-old high school student on television. I can’t have a baby.’ I’m like, ‘I’ve seen that show. I don’t think it’d be that weird, to have a little crack baby.'”
Kurstin, a member of the duo the Bird and the Bee as well as Grammy-winning producer for Adele and, among others, Beck, kicked off his surprise appearance with an accomplished jazz instrumental, a side of him few have seen in public, despite his proclivity for talking about his background in the genre in conversation. He returned to the stage to help out Beck as they performed “Dear Life” from 2017’s Kurstin-produced “Colors” album. “Greg and I wrote this song together, and we haven’t rehearsed it. We’ve played this once,” Beck announced. After a quiet consultation with the pianist-producer, he corrected himself: “No, never. Let’s see what happens.”
Seeing what would happen was also the m.o. for Beck’s cover of Tom Waits’ “Time,” which he said he’d only learned the first verse of, despite his Waits veneration, leading him to improvise a second and third verse that included lines like “Well, I just got back from Coachella, I’ve got dust in my throat and this glowstick is starting to fade” and “A nightclub on Sunset at a boutique hotel with a guest list as long as the 405.” “You have to update it a little bit, right? There’s no more carnivals and invisible fiancees,” he added, suggesting maybe he recalls more of the song than he claimed, “and it kind of sucks, but we just have to embrace the time we’re in.”
Introduced by Apatow as “my favorite artist in the world,” Wainwright played several of his new songs about getting older before being joined by McKean and Guest for the early-1900s serious folk oldie “Baltimore Fire.” A second joint number dated back only to 1972, “Roll Me Over, Jehovah,” by their friend, George Gerdes, a cult artist who had two albums on United Artists in the early ’70s before finding more reliable work as an actor. Noting that Gerdes has died on New Year’s Eve 2020, McKean said that in the past few years, “we’ve lost a lot of terrific people. And we’ve picked up a lot of really shitty ones.”
Wainwright announced that he was “gonna take a little walk around the block” — or, as McKean declared, “rock ‘n’ roll nap!” — as the two Spinal Tappers took over for “a little bit of psychedelia.” Some jokes never get old, as Guest, who tends to be the most reliably poker-faced comic performer in the world, couldn’t help but break out into a slight smile the first time he added a “shhhh” while McKean sang the lead on “Listen to the Flower People.”
Wainwright’s return from his brisk stroll and/or siesta mostly involved new material but also brought up a classic when he allowed room for a one-song requests segment. He seemed startled when a Largo patron shouted out the infamous “Rufus Is a Tit Man” — written for his then-infant son, future non-tit-man Rufus Wainwright — then played it anyway. “It’s more like pecs,” he explained, bringing the family history up to date. “How does it go? There it is,” he smiled, finding the correct chords for the perennial that includes lyrics like “Sucking on his mama’s glands, sucking on a nipple, sweeter than the Ripple wine / You can tell by the way the boy burps, it’s gotta taste fine.”
The new songs from “Lifetime Achievement” may not go quite so far toward naughty slapstick but do find reasons to smile about mortality and finding simpler pleasures — like taking up lawnmowing again, after avoiding it since age 14 — along the way. “Oh, yes, I laughed and certainly I have cried / Quite a few that I have loved have up and died / But I’m eternal you could say / I’m immortal, maybe for today,” he sang. “I’ve got pieces of me strewn around the globe / There’s not much left, I’m lightening up my load / I leave a dollop here and a particle there…” The Largo crowd was happy for whatever stray molecules he could shed as he performed the new songs, with a box of CDs in the lobby, “to, ah, stimulate record sales,” almost as if that were a priority.
Wainwright was compelled to take an on-stage request at the end of the night from Apatow, who asked for “Daughter,” as made famous in the latter’s movie “Knocked Up.” Said the singer, “I was a little upset, because Judd was putting the movie together and it was looking like a song of mine would be the song that was gonna go during the rolling of the credits. And then he had to say, ‘You know, that Peter Blegvad song “Daughter” is pretty cool.’ So I said, ‘Shit, man.’ But he was right because it’s a beautiful song and finishes up that wonderful movie.” Added Wainwright, “A lot of people think I wrote it because I recorded it. I get a lot of dads coming up and saying… ‘I danced with my daughter at her wedding [to that song].’ And then I say, ‘Thanks very much, you owe me money.'”
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