My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them

Wendy Waldman (1950): Seeds and Orphans

214 Wendy Waldman Seeds and Orphans Paul Lisicky If I played Wendy Waldman for you for the first time, I wouldn’t be wounded if you didn’t get her right away. I wouldn’t pick a fight if you made a crack about “’70s California SingerSongwriters ” and heard only the indulgences of the genre: the earnestness, the sunny harmonies. You might say, “Where’s the irony?” and I might say back, “What irony?” And I’d be just as likely to point out that she’s not a consistently assured singer, or say she’s written too many songs that don’t bear the stamp of personal signature, as if they’ve been intended for other voices. As for the whole earth-mother spirituality thing—well, where’s the edge? 215 The truth is that her contribution to songwriting is hard to articulate, and I’m wondering if that’s part of the reason she’s worked, for the better part of the last thirty-five years, on the margins . As far as I know, she’s never dressed in feathers at the Oscars. She’s never cast aspersions, at least publicly, on another female performer, or been voted “Old Lady of the Year” in Rolling Stone. When I look past the heap of frizzed-out hair, the gypsy skirts and bracelets on her early album photos, two things come to mind: sweet, quick to laugh. She’s the earthy, smart Jewish girl who might have been your high school best friend; she’d sit across from you in the cafeteria and do her best to cheer you up when some clown called you a fag. But she’d be careful not to take up too much space about it, and she’d certainly leave you alone if you wanted to mope. Someday she’d even ask you to play in her band. Maybe the most noteworthy extracurricular fact about her is that she was Linda Ronstadt’s opening act at the height of her stadium-era fame. Also, she’s the daughter of Fred Steiner, the film and TV composer best known for writing the theme to the old Perry Mason Show, with its kitschy associations of both testosterone and striptease. But none of that’s exactly fodder for the journalist. And it probably hasn’t helped that her music is difficult to categorize. There’s been a country Wendy Waldman, a hard rock Wendy Waldman, a symphonic Wendy Waldman. Early in her career she was known as the “West Coast Laura Nyro,” which makes a kind of half-sense: both share a knowledge of American songwriting tradition—whether it be blues or Broadway—and its metaphors. But other than that, Wendy’s her own animal—or many animals. In a song on her first album she’s the daughter of a vaudeville performer who’s learning the tricks of pleasing the crowd from her old ham of a father. In “The Walkacross” on her most recent, she’s the matriarch of a family running ahead of a flood. Where is the self behind these gestures? Who is Wendy Waldman? But that’s part of what’s engaging about this work: the disappearance into character, into the mask it’s trying on. It would probably be pushing it to say Wendy Waldman 216 that Waldman knows her queer theory, but I’m sure one of the reasons she matters to me has something to do with her fluidity, her refusal to be any one thing. Why wear one costume when you could be a blues guitarist one minute and a tarted-up girl on the town in the next? How else to keep yourself awake before the mirror? Of course, the modesty of this strategy has come at some cost. Unlike Joni Mitchell, she doesn’t have her “Help Me,” which hammers down the persona: the hunger for attachment alongside the need for sexual freedom. She doesn’t have PJ Harvey’s “Big Exit” with its exuberant pistol waved at anyone in her way. She’s finally more character actor than leading lady, and since her interest in inhabiting multiple voices isn’t the explicit subject of her work (as it is in, say, Dylan—or at least in Todd Haynes’s queering of Dylan), I suspect that her achievement has been hard to see and hear. What Wendy Waldman excels at is writing wised...