The Garland / Wainwright saga actually goes back two generations. I think when Rufus does it, he introduces all of that to a new generation. What you can do is you can pay homage to it, you can pay tribute to it, you can love it so much that this is basically saying ‘thank you.’ My mother’s Carnegie Hall is still selling, and people are still discovering it. “It’s like saying, ‘I want to recreate this part of history.’ Well, that’s sort of impossible. The original show can’t be recreated, Luft clarified. Whatever qualms Minnelli may have had with Wainwright’s tribute - she declined to be interviewed for this article - Luft supported it and even joined him on stage for a surprise duet, which she continued to do as he took the concert to Paris and London and, finally, the Hollywood Bowl. Add to that the newly raging Iraq War, and “the Judy Garland album was sort of this thread that kept my hope alive, in terms of what the United States can represent,” he said. It was also noteworthy that this openly gay performer was paying tribute to a gay icon. So I did have this kind of torch to carry, for people who are in that similar struggle.” I’m not saying she was drunk when she did the show, but she was definitely embroiled in that world. He felt this was an opportunity to do the show clean, “because Judy wasn’t.

“And then all of a sudden, at the eleventh hour, everything just collapsed, and I had to go to rehab and take care of business,” he said. The Canadian indie darling, whose songs including “ Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk” were operatic in their lushness and sophistication, had been living a rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle of drugs and hard partying for more than a decade. It was about the song.”īack in 2006, Wainwright had just experienced “a real fall from grace” before he first mounted the Carnegie show. It was never about the glitz or the money or the fame. Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle were both folk singers who “ended up at a place in their careers where they had to go out alone, mostly, and play little clubs every night,” he said, “and just the song itself, like, elevating the room into the heavens. It revealed the inner strength of each song, as it did with the Judy Garland standards (with their famous Nelson Riddle and Conrad Salinger charts), which is something he learned from his parents. Wainwright did the home concerts, initially, out of economic necessity - his tours to promote “Unfollow the Rules” were canceled by the pandemic - and it forced him to strip his often lavishly orchestral arrangements down to piano and guitar.

Liza minelli song