Loudon Wainwright III / Album III / 1972
Drinking Song
wry, clinical, affectionately mocking
A catalogue of drunken behavior delivered with the detached tone of a naturalist's field guide, this song observes the common humanity of drunks across class lines while refusing to moralize or sentimentalize. Wainwright builds a list of contradictions -- weeping and sleeping, fighting and kissing, friendliness and hostility -- that resolve into a wry refrain about the impossibility of perfect sobriety or perfect anything.
alcoholism and its rituals class leveling bodily indignity contradiction and duality mortality underneath comedy
Who's speaking
An unnamed observer-narrator, detached and almost anthropological, cataloguing drunks in general rather than confessing personal experience, though the specificity suggests close firsthand knowledge.
What happens
The song doesn't tell a story so much as accumulate evidence: physical behaviors, social class indifference, emotional swings, and bodily decline, building toward the image of the drink itself evaporating and the man disappearing with it, before circling back to the street-level reality of flasks and jars.
How it's built
Built as a series of rhymed couplet-plus-refrain stanzas, almost like a folk ballad or nursery rhyme, with a recurring one-line chorus that anchors each verse's chaos to a single dry conclusion. The repetition of the refrain gives the song a circular, drink-fueled logic rather than forward momentum, ending in a fading repeated phrase that mimics intoxication trailing off.
Section by section
Opening verses
The song opens by itemizing physical behaviors with clinical detachment, comparing drunk men to animals and grieving widows in the same breath, which sets the comic-but-unsentimental tone for the rest of the piece.affascinante
Class-leveling verse
“broke bum or rich rake”
Here the song pivots from behavior to social position, insisting that wealth changes the quality of the drink but not its effects, a democratic observation delivered without judgment.
First refrain
“yet to be a perfectly straight line”
The refrain's geometric metaphor turns drunkenness into a stand-in for human imperfection generally -- nobody walks straight, literally or morally.
Middle verses on emotion and violence
The song catalogs emotional volatility -- false bravado, fighting, affection -- suggesting that alcohol doesn't create character traits so much as it amplifies whatever is latent.
Physical toll verse
A shift toward the body's decline -- broken vessels, bagged eyes -- introduces a quietly darker note beneath the humor, hinting at the long-term cost without dwelling on it.
Elephants and evaporation verse
“the drink evaporates the man is gone”
This is the song's most poetic and unsettling moment, where a cartoonish hallucination image (pink elephants) gives way to a genuinely eerie statement about erasure of self, suggesting addiction's endpoint is self-dissolution rather than mere silliness.
Closing verse and fading refrain
The return to ordinary settings like commuter life and hidden flasks grounds the song back in the mundane, and the refrain's repeated trailing-off at the end mimics a drunk's own repetitive, fading speech.
Craft
- anaphora
- Repeated sentence openings like listing what drunks do creates a litany effect, turning individual behaviors into a universal category.
- refrain
- The recurring couplet about extremes and a straight line functions as both punchline and thesis, reframing each verse's specifics as instances of a general human truth.
- juxtaposition
- Pairing rich and poor, broke and wealthy, yacht and subway car collapses social distinctions to argue drink is a great equalizer.
- zeugma-like listing
- Grouping disparate physical acts (urinating, weeping, crawling) in rapid succession flattens their emotional weight into comic inventory.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats this as a tenderly unsentimental portrait of alcoholism's absurdity and danger, using comic cataloguing to avoid both condemnation and glamorization -- the humor is a defense mechanism as much as an observation. An alternative reading sees it purely as comic genre entertainment, a drinking song in the literal party sense, with the darker undertones (broken vessels, the man evaporating) incidental rather than central; but the specificity of physical deterioration and the eerie disappearance image suggest the song knows more than it lets on.
Context
Wainwright has often written confessional, darkly comic songs about his own flaws and family dysfunction, and this track fits his early-career mode of using folk-song structure and vaudevillian humor to approach uncomfortable subjects sideways rather than head-on. I don't have specific biographical confirmation that this song draws on his own drinking history, so that connection should be read as plausible inference rather than established fact.
Listen for
- the shift in tone when the song moves from physical comedy to the image of a man evaporating
- how the refrain's meaning shifts slightly each time it recurs against different preceding behaviors
- the deadpan delivery that keeps the song from tipping into either slapstick or tragedy
- the way class markers (yachts vs. subway cars) get flattened by shared vice
- the trailing, repetitive ending that mimics drunken speech patterns
About Loudon Wainwright III
Loudon Snowden Wainwright III is an American singer-songwriter and occasional actor. He has released twenty-six studio albums, four live albums, and six compilations.
b. 1946 / United States
Full biography and catalogue