WED., NOVEMBER 29, 2006
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Tom Waits for No Man
by Douglas Wolk
It took me a very long time to get into Tom Waits. It's not that his stuff wasn't always at hand: I saw his name on the cassettes hipster employees played at the bookstore where I worked in the late '80s, heard his impression of a deathbed wheeze when I hung out at coffee shops, noted his songwriting byline on records by other artists I liked, knew he was famous for finding terrific collaborators, even appreciated his sandpaper-throated cover of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's "What Keeps Mankind Alive," which he intoned like a treatise on morals from Satan himself.
But I figured I had Waits pegged, this chuckling rasper with his three-day stubble, cheap-liquor buff's suit and half-crushed hat. He seemed like somebody who'd invented a character and had moved into it 24/7, or at least always acted the part when he was in the public eye: a sort of Charles Bukowski with a megaphone in his hand, a sentimentalist who thought it was funny to sing like he'd just crawled out of his own grave to sweet-talk some rube into staking him to a little hair of the dog. His talent was obvious, but he seemed a little one-dimensional.
Writing him off was a bonehead move on my part, but I was right about the character — you can hear the performer without the persona on eMusic, courtesy of Waits' two-volume Early Years set. It's a batch of songwriting demos that he recorded in 1971, before anyone had any idea who he was. Listening to them next to his recent music, it's almost impossible to recognize them as the work of the same person. He was already vaguely drawn to the maudlin tone of smoky piano bars, but he hadn't quite figured out his watch-me-in-the-gutter mythology or his musical aesthetic.
The part that took a while to dawn on me was that his wastrel persona goes so deep it extends to his entire approach to sound, and is so deliberately constructed that it hasn't touched the precision of his songwriting. Over the last 20 years or so — roughly the span of his creative collaboration with his wife Kathleen Brennan — Waits's records haven't just sounded like a ground-up old carny with a piano whose ashtray is fuller than its tip jar, they've sounded like a ground-up old carny reigning over a junkyard full of flaming, clanking debris. Sometimes the debris still sounds pretty (although he tends to make up for that with exceptionally guttural singing); sometimes it just happens to be collapsing on the beat and making high-pitched snapping-noises in tune. He's also delved into the connection between his kind of persona and music; where there's a soup-line, there's usually a Bible, and his 2004 album Real Gone (also on eMusic) is essentially gospel music for people who are absolutely sure that God has abandoned them.
Waits' new triple album Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards is a collection of miscellany, some of it dating back as far as 23 years (including compilation tracks, songs he wrote for theatrical productions and songs he's sung on other people's records) and about half of it newly recorded. Even so, it flows like a single enormous album by a music fanatic with very broad tastes and a very strange sense of humor. "The moon's the color of a coffee stain," Waits moans on "Bottom of the World" — it's a totally in-character line for him, but it's also a great one. Orphans is a trash-picking exercise, and some of it wouldn't wash on a "real" album — a couple of breathing-and-sputtering loops in search of a song, a handful of spoken word pieces that are amusing once, a reading from the Encyclopedia Brittanica ("Army Ants") that's funny more like three times — but in its three-plus hours there's only one real misstep, a rambling seven-minute meditation on the Israeli-Palestinian war called "Road to Peace," on which Waits's barfly groan sounds bizarrely inappropriate mumbling lines like "Israel says he's a Hamas senior militant."
Waits is still capable of tugging at the heartstrings, too — the "Bawlers" disc of Orphans, true to its name, is one long string of desperate, red-eyed pleas for emotional mercy. Some of them would come off as a little bit sappy if he still had his youthful voice, but the torn-up instrument he's got now makes them brutally poignant instead. ("Bawlers" is so heartwrenching that Waits's swaggering rendition of Leadbelly's emo-seven-decades-before-emo death-letter "Goodnight Irene" practically counts as comedy relief.) The pick of its litter-strewn litter is "Little Man," a penitent's lullaby, salvaged from a 1991 album by saxophonist Teddy Edwards.
The rest of Orphans is loaded with grubby little gems of a more boisterous stripe. There's a sort of cowboy ballad, "Lucinda," backed up by a human-beat-box loop that sounds like a malfunctioning steam press; a pair of inspired covers of obscure Ramones songs; a stomper called "Lowdown" that borrows the guitar tone from the Wire song of the same name, with Waits coughing up lyrics about "clover honey and Jimson weed" in a voice that sounds like he's been smoking both of them; a version of "Heigh-Ho" (yes, the "Snow White" one) that makes it sound like a cry from the sulfur mines. Maybe best of all is a slow, passionate, mud-caked rendition of the traditional ballad "Two Sisters" (also known as "Twa Sisters"), accompanied only by an asthmatic fiddle, that honors the shredded glory of half-decayed field recordings. And there's even that version of "What Keeps Mankind Alive?" that first caught my ear more than twenty years ago — although I didn't appreciate the devilish wit of Waits' performance back then as much as I do now. Maybe, like a fine bottle of Thunderbird, it just needed time to steep.
But I figured I had Waits pegged, this chuckling rasper with his three-day stubble, cheap-liquor buff's suit and half-crushed hat. He seemed like somebody who'd invented a character and had moved into it 24/7, or at least always acted the part when he was in the public eye: a sort of Charles Bukowski with a megaphone in his hand, a sentimentalist who thought it was funny to sing like he'd just crawled out of his own grave to sweet-talk some rube into staking him to a little hair of the dog. His talent was obvious, but he seemed a little one-dimensional.
Writing him off was a bonehead move on my part, but I was right about the character — you can hear the performer without the persona on eMusic, courtesy of Waits' two-volume Early Years set. It's a batch of songwriting demos that he recorded in 1971, before anyone had any idea who he was. Listening to them next to his recent music, it's almost impossible to recognize them as the work of the same person. He was already vaguely drawn to the maudlin tone of smoky piano bars, but he hadn't quite figured out his watch-me-in-the-gutter mythology or his musical aesthetic.
The part that took a while to dawn on me was that his wastrel persona goes so deep it extends to his entire approach to sound, and is so deliberately constructed that it hasn't touched the precision of his songwriting. Over the last 20 years or so — roughly the span of his creative collaboration with his wife Kathleen Brennan — Waits's records haven't just sounded like a ground-up old carny with a piano whose ashtray is fuller than its tip jar, they've sounded like a ground-up old carny reigning over a junkyard full of flaming, clanking debris. Sometimes the debris still sounds pretty (although he tends to make up for that with exceptionally guttural singing); sometimes it just happens to be collapsing on the beat and making high-pitched snapping-noises in tune. He's also delved into the connection between his kind of persona and music; where there's a soup-line, there's usually a Bible, and his 2004 album Real Gone (also on eMusic) is essentially gospel music for people who are absolutely sure that God has abandoned them.
Waits' new triple album Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards is a collection of miscellany, some of it dating back as far as 23 years (including compilation tracks, songs he wrote for theatrical productions and songs he's sung on other people's records) and about half of it newly recorded. Even so, it flows like a single enormous album by a music fanatic with very broad tastes and a very strange sense of humor. "The moon's the color of a coffee stain," Waits moans on "Bottom of the World" — it's a totally in-character line for him, but it's also a great one. Orphans is a trash-picking exercise, and some of it wouldn't wash on a "real" album — a couple of breathing-and-sputtering loops in search of a song, a handful of spoken word pieces that are amusing once, a reading from the Encyclopedia Brittanica ("Army Ants") that's funny more like three times — but in its three-plus hours there's only one real misstep, a rambling seven-minute meditation on the Israeli-Palestinian war called "Road to Peace," on which Waits's barfly groan sounds bizarrely inappropriate mumbling lines like "Israel says he's a Hamas senior militant."
Waits is still capable of tugging at the heartstrings, too — the "Bawlers" disc of Orphans, true to its name, is one long string of desperate, red-eyed pleas for emotional mercy. Some of them would come off as a little bit sappy if he still had his youthful voice, but the torn-up instrument he's got now makes them brutally poignant instead. ("Bawlers" is so heartwrenching that Waits's swaggering rendition of Leadbelly's emo-seven-decades-before-emo death-letter "Goodnight Irene" practically counts as comedy relief.) The pick of its litter-strewn litter is "Little Man," a penitent's lullaby, salvaged from a 1991 album by saxophonist Teddy Edwards.
The rest of Orphans is loaded with grubby little gems of a more boisterous stripe. There's a sort of cowboy ballad, "Lucinda," backed up by a human-beat-box loop that sounds like a malfunctioning steam press; a pair of inspired covers of obscure Ramones songs; a stomper called "Lowdown" that borrows the guitar tone from the Wire song of the same name, with Waits coughing up lyrics about "clover honey and Jimson weed" in a voice that sounds like he's been smoking both of them; a version of "Heigh-Ho" (yes, the "Snow White" one) that makes it sound like a cry from the sulfur mines. Maybe best of all is a slow, passionate, mud-caked rendition of the traditional ballad "Two Sisters" (also known as "Twa Sisters"), accompanied only by an asthmatic fiddle, that honors the shredded glory of half-decayed field recordings. And there's even that version of "What Keeps Mankind Alive?" that first caught my ear more than twenty years ago — although I didn't appreciate the devilish wit of Waits' performance back then as much as I do now. Maybe, like a fine bottle of Thunderbird, it just needed time to steep.
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