Our favorite
troubadour is staging a green initiative that’s
mysteriously cool -- just like him.
On the rainy eve
of the spring equinox on the Lower East Side in a
decrepit former synagogue, it was very dark and tea candles
were lit everywhere and it smelled like a dusty
beehive. Wainwright had just changed out of one of
those comfy Christmasy sweaters he favors and into an
extremely loud plaid jacket and an ascot. In that outfit he
led a crew of singers and trombonists and harmonium
pumpers onto the stage before the adoring audience.
“Stop
clapping, I can’t hear myself!” he said by way
of introduction to the capacity crowd. “We have
no idea if any of you will hear this.”
The show used no
electricity at all. Sans lights and amplification, it
was like a blackout house party, an eco-friendly, acoustic
jam session -- and a teaser for Wainwright’s
new green initiative, Blackout Sabbath. For this new
-- Holiday? Observance? Ritual? -- he has proposed the
following, as he explains at the website
BlackoutSabbath.org: “On a Saturday around the
summer solstice (June 21) for a 12-hour period (noon
to midnight), wherever you are, let’s all turn off
the power at the same time.” Then at the end,
the plan goes, we will make a list of things we may or
may not do in the coming year for the planet.
It’s grid
failure as civil disobedience. It’s a serious idea --
he means it -- but it’s also a playful endeavor
on his part. He’s giving us all a chance to do
nothing for a good cause. And he totally gets that you were
probably doing nothing anyway.
At the show that
night, the legendary documentary-maker Albert Maysles
was filming (he’s working on a documentary about
Rufus). Sister Martha Wainwright sang Leonard
Cohen’s “Tower of Song.” (Why is she
not the most famous person in the world?) The lovely
Beth Orton could not always make herself heard, nor
could Harper (son of Paul) Simon. Rufus himself was
like a walking foghorn. He is accustomed to singing
unamplified. He has some of the performance mannerisms
of Céline Dion.
Midway through,
two young people got up and talked about doing little
things for the environment, such as taking reusable bags to
the grocery store. The girl gestured with a plastic
bottle of water as she talked, and closed with
“Namaste to you all.”
She got nods on
the greeting. This was a crowd of the yoga-doing
converted, after all. But nobody name-checked the bottle.
(Toxic! Everlasting!) That’s how it is. Saving
the planet is something you think about ruefully and
often too late -- maybe while filling the gas tank or
double-bagging your groceries. After you’ve drunk the
water.
After, outside,
someone wondered what to do with the show’s cute
canvas goody bag and its contents. “Give it to
a needy child in Africa?” suggested another. A
group wondered: Should everyone go to Schiller’s
Liquor Bar or to the Stanton Social club?
No one rushed off
to save any whales -- but they weren’t really
supposed to, were they?
The idea of doing
nothing for a day stems from a day a few years back
when there was nothing to do.
“I loved
the blackout, personally,” Wainwright says the day
after the concert. The blackout to which he refers is
not the most recent Britney Spears album but the
crazy-ass power outage that blackened Michigan to New
York up to Canada in high summer of 2003.
“I’m sure if it’d gone on for a couple
more days things could have shifted
sinisterly,” he says. “But for the two days
that it was happening, it was, you know, Alice in
Wonderland meets The Dark Crystal.
“I felt
far more seduced by the kind of virile mystery of humanity
when it’s all happening in shades of
gray,” he continues. “And there was this
sort of pungency of life which reemerged -- and a hint of
danger that was just so exhilarating and thrilling,
especially for New York, which has been so homogenized
and exorcised. It was nice! I felt like I was in the
’70s for a minute.”
Though he
doesn’t want to get too nostalgic for that decade.
“I know for me, if it was the ’70s,
I’d definitely be dead -- dead as a doornail
today.”
“Before he
was a good boy he was a very bad boy,” says his
friend Christopher Bollen, the magazine editor who
just took over Interview this spring, alluding
to, at least, the singer’s famous excursion
into the land of crystal meth. “There were a lot of
crazy days and nights with Rufus.”
Follow us on Twitter. 
Follow us on Facebook.
Page 1 of 3