Loudon Wainwright's third—his first for Columbia—almost completely lives up to my wildest expectations: which is saying a lot, since his two Atlantic albums presented a comic poet, if not a musician, of the very first rank. Though Wainwright is possessed of a marvelous sense of humor, both whimsical and earthy, the chief quality that came across on the early albums was his vulnerability, his willingness to deflate his own self-myth by exposing the reality of an exacerbated day-to-day emotional life with a bluntness so extraordinarily childlike it challenged the assumptions and illusions to which most of us cling in order to make our way. More amazing is that Wainwright is fully aware of this quality in himself and his work. "Be Careful, There's a Baby in the House" on Album II could just as well have been about Loudon as about an infant. If the identification weren't complete, the song would be insufferably cute. But it is complete, and the song is true.

This is the dangerous line Wainwright has chosen to take in most of his best songs. Such risk would be catastrophic for a lesser talent. Naked self-exposure that isn't self-destructive is uncommon among artists in any medium. To pull it off requires a suspension of ego but also a high degree of instinctive trust in one's self, not to mention one's audience. In the first two albums the risk was made greater by their poor production values; the sound was claustrophobic; Loudon strummed acoustically, with little or no backup. Often his voice strained uncomfortably above its normal register, and in singing songs like "Hospital Lady" he occasionally resorted to a style as cloying as Melanie's. Yet the records were wonderful. The crudeness of production, the extremely static nature of the music itself: these at least accentuated the poetry by making it inescapable.

Except perhaps for Lou Reed, Wainwright is alone among songwriters in being able to write on almost any subject and make it pertinent and funny, but more than that to communicate a perception of the world that rings a bell in your head and makes you realize that, like it or not, this is how it really is; this is the messy texture of life itself; this is how I feel, how we all feel, and isn't it great that here's someone who can give us back to our selves and our commonality.

In Album III, almost all the faults evident on the earlier albums have been corrected. The sound is excellent; so are Thomas Jefferson Kaye's arrangements. The backups by Loudon's band, White Cloud, are a model of unobtrusiveness—lean but tasty. And the songs themselves are musically stronger and lyrically as good or better than those on albums I and II. "Dead Skunk," the opener, is delightful good-time country rock with lots of plunking banjo. The perfect comic intro, quelches any expectation of pontification or deliberate display of "superior sensitivity." A dead skunk is, after all, a dead skunk. "Red Guitar" is a very short little tale about Loudon's loss of two guitars; the first he threw into the fireplace "as Peter Townshend might"; the second was stolen by a junkie; moral: "God works in wondrous ways."

"East Indian Princess" is Loudon's first and only attempt so far at singing pure hard rock. Though his singing is OK—he sounds like a cramped Jim Morrison—the chief strength of the cut is the witty lyric about an English East Indian woman who is more English than Indian. It's not a put-down; Wainwright can be perplexed, bewildered, and bemused, but he never moralizes. He is more at home with the zany "Muse Blues," a hilariously agonized song about not being able to write a song: "I'm a flattened out wave/I ain't got any curl/I'm an empty old oyster/I ain't got any pearl/Oh Muse, where are you?/You know I eat drink and I smoke stuff/I don't know what to do."

"Hometown Crowd" is even better. On this loose swinging rocker, in the spirit of "Subterranean Homesick Blues," Wainwright is a passionate sports enthusiast who gets right down to specific events about which you know he really cares: "When the Bruins beat the Rangers for the Stanley Cup/I got so drunk I could not stand up/When the Mets don't win I get upset/I got a bullet hole in my TV set." The first side closes with "B Side," a clever but too-cute imagining of life as a bee: "This hive of mine/I call it home/there is no place like comb sweet comb."

Side two opens with the album's masterpiece, "Needless to Say." The most sweepingly compassionate song he has ever recorded, its one-to-one spiritual message is expressed in dazzling word play almost Steinian in its compression and lucidity and attached to a tune that is simple and absolutely right.

Needless to say

Say it anyway

In any way that you need to

You know nothing at all

Nothing is all

And there's nothing to know

So accept you.

Please remember my song.

Welcoming change

Changes arrange your arrangement

Well they're supposed to

Believe it or not

Not withstanding your lot

The lot that you've got stands for you.

Please remember my song.

Wainwright's singing has never been more restrained and moving. "You know nothing at all" is uttered with such wonder and humility it takes your breath away. But from the heights we are swept to the depths, as he delivers a competent but not earthshaking rendition of the old hit "Smokey Joe's Cafe."

"New Paint," which follows, is classic Wainwright. A self-effacing narrative about courtship, filled with incident and atmosphere, it shows Loudon at the top of his form, creating dazzling rhymes and turns of phrase, all set to a lazy acoustic shuffle that is irresistibly catchy.

At the station you can meet her with that smile, you couldn't cheat her

A woman that kind is hard to find.

It's good to take a girl in the not-so-very-good world

And walk in the park until it gets dark

Sometimes I feel ugly and old

Excuse me baby if I'm acting bold

My head gets hot but my feet aren't cold

Excuse me, if you will.

Don't make a hullabaloo, I'm not the hoi polloi

I'll try any trick and I'll pull any ploy

I'm a used-up twentieth century boy

Excuse me, if you will.

"Trilogy (Circa 1967)" is an absurdist mini-drama in three acts dealing with such subjects as masturbation, vegetarianism, dire threats, hypes, and general mind-twisting. It's engaging but fairly incomprehensible. "Drinking Song" takes an affectionate, all-encompassing look at drunkenness. Characteristically, Loudon is both for and against booze; he sees it every which way. We're all fools when we're drunk, but maybe we're more human too. The album closes with "Say That You Love Me," a song about unrequited love that divests it of the sentimental pathos traditionally attached to it in pop music. Loudon comes on strong, begging, wheedling, whining, cajoling to hear those "three little words," all the time realizing the buffoonery of it all. It is the way most of us have said it at one time or another, whether or not we are willing to admit it. Loudon is willing to admit everything. He is a comic genius who has it in him to become the Chaplin of rock. (RS 120)

STEPHEN HOLDEN