Rufus to the Rescue

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.”