Milt

By Loudon Wainwright III

10/13/2015

I was “discovered” by music publisher Milton Kramer in 1968 when he caught my act at the renowned New York folk music grotto The Village Gaslight. After seeing me perform there one night he decided I had all that it took to become a star and for almost 10 years he tirelessly worked at trying to make that happen, despite my own ambivalence about stardom, an ambivalence which at times resulted in outright resistance to Milt’s dreams for me and his machinations on my behalf. Initially Kramer signed me to a publishing contract with Frank Music, which was songwriter Frank Loesser’s company. That was an especially big deal for me because the original cast recording of “Guys And Dolls” was just about the most played LP in our household when I was growing up. In 1968 Loesser was dying of cancer but Milt kept saying we should pay him a visit in the hospital so the legendary songwriter would see that, despite all the long hair and electric guitars on the scene at that time, there were still kids out there who could write good songs. I had short hair and played an acoustic Gibson Hummingbird, but never mind. Sadly, Frank Loesser died in July of 1969 before I got my chance to meet him.

After the publishing deal Milt then procured for me a recording contract from a major label in what seemed like next to no time. It was the 1970s when male singer songwriters were in vogue and such a thing was still possible. In the offices of record company executives Kramer cut an imposing figure- stout and barrel chested, dressed in English tweeds, with a shaved head and, at that time, sporting a conspicuously large handle bar mustache which he waxed and combed and, on special occasions (as when extolling his new young client’s remarkable talents to Clive Davis or Neshui Ertegun) would go so far as to actually twirl. Underneath the elbow patched tweed jacket Milt packed his leather holstered heat, a 38 caliber snub nosed revolver. He was always more than happy to let people know that he had a license to carry a hand gun. Once or twice I tagged along with him to his indoor shooting range in Chelsea and watched him pepper and perforate the heads and torsos of the snarling armed and dangerous paper target bad guys. Pity any poor would be mugger or psychotic autograph hound because Milt was a hell of a shot. He also bred and raised Doberman Pinschers and at one point he drove around Putnam County in what had formerly been a New York State Trooper vehicle. I wouldn’t say my ex-manager was paranoid but he certainly believed in self-defense.

Milt Kramer grew up a chubby Jewish kid in Brooklyn. His father owned a mannequin factory in Manhattan but was also a big wig in the Yiddish Folksbiene Theatre and Milt trod those boards as a child actor. I think that might have been why and how he was initially bedazzled and then drawn into show business. When it came to performance and theatrical presentation Kramer fervently believed that he, more than anyone else, knew better. “I know what’s wrong” and “I can fix that” were 2 of his favorite sentences. It has to be said that sometimes he did and he could. If I pushed back against his suggestions his argument was always that he had worked with some of the very best – Mike Todd, Jule Styne, Meredith Wilson, Stan Daniels, and of course the greatest of all, Frank Loesser.

At the beginning of a career a young performer needs someone in his corner who believes in him, to imbue him with confidence, to convince him he’s great and better than all the rest. Colonel Tom Parker did it for Elvis, Albert Grossman did it for Dylan, and Milt Kramer did it for me. This person often serves as a father figure for the performer and that was certainly true in the case of Milt. My own dad somewhat grudgingly appreciated my talents and could be, as they say in therapy, “withholding”. Since he was trained as a journalist and editor my father avoided hyperbole, firmly resisting the use of superlative adjectives like “genius”, “huge”, and “brilliant”. Milt, enthusiastic, effusive, and larger than life guy that he was, heaped all that stuff on. Along with “I know what’s wrong” and “I Can fix that” was “you’re the best” and “you’re going be a star”. When he would excitedly tell my parents his predictions for their son’s success my mother ate it up but my old man would cringe. So in a certain but crucial sense, Milt Kramer served as a surrogate father to me. He doted on his daughter Jeanne, but Milt never had a son of his own and I’m sure that was one of the reasons why it was so painful for us both when we parted company in 1978.

The good news is he and I remained friends. In his last years he was wheel chair bound but Jeanne still managed to get him to my gigs in Annapolis and the Washington D.C. area. It seems to me now that Milt’s parting words on those happy but wistful occasions were always the same. After my show he would gently take my elbow and pulling me down to his level would whisper in my ear “You’re still the best”.