tom waits

Real Gone

Posted on by Matt

real_gone

Album: Real Gone

Artist: Tom Waits

Released: October 3rd, 2004

Highlights: Hoist That Rag, Don’t Go into That Barn, Dead and Lovely, Make It Rain, Day After Tomorrow

As Tom Waits transitioned from the inebriated, gloomy, and raspy-voiced man who sang late at night in a bar full of desperate souls looking for consolation in a drink to the mad junkyard prowler who seemed to make music with recycled spare parts, one element of his art stood as a solid rock unaffected by the massive changes going on around it: his trusty piano. Whether as the leading heart of gut-wrenching ballads or as the backbone of an orchestra of circus musicians and back-alley beggars, it was by using the instrument that Waits channeled the soul, jazz, and – especially – blues traditions into the alcohol-soaked misery of his early years as well as into the cursed cabaret music found in the later half of his career.

In “Real Gone”, though, probably looking for a brand new approach to composition and arrangements, Waits drops his piano by the same dump in which he likely picked up the tools his band had been working with since “Swordfishtrombones”, from 1983. And for the first time ever, in his fifteenth studio album, the singer-songwriter spends a whole record without sitting on a stool to either pour his sadness onto the keys or bang them wildly. As a consequence, in a career that carries a great deal of musical variety in spite of its aesthetic constancy, the 2004 release threatens to rank as Waits’ most uniquely sounding effort. Such major break, however, cannot be solely attributed to the absence of the piano.

Spiritually, “Real Gone” features a strong connection with both 1993’s “Bone Machine” and 1999’s “Mule Variations”. From the latter, it boasts the quite distinctive feeling that, with the exception of a few techniques that give it a more modern coating, the music it contains is coming from almost a century ago: its instruments creak, its production is dry, and as if transmitted by an old radio that has trouble grasping its signal, it sounds distant and corroded by static. Meanwhile, from the former, it borrows a demeanor that is simultaneously ferocious, loud, and dark; “Real Gone”, like “Bone Machine”, feels like it was recorded in one of the waiting rooms leading to hell, and it is so proud of its rowdy ways that, not satisfied with producing one vicious racket, it also opts to spit it all right in the face of its listeners.

The method “Real Gone” uses to reach those qualities is, however, distinct from the ones employed by those other classics of the singer’s catalog. Its grainy and aged aura emerges from the fact its pair of producers, Kathleen Brennan and Tom Waits himself, have opted to take a visibly lo-fi route here: none of the pieces that make up the music of “Real Gone” sound as they should in normal conditions, with the voice of Waits and the guitar work of the always masterful Marc Ribot coming off incredibly distorted and the percussion clanging like big metal trash cans. Even more unique, though, is how the record achieves its moments of aggressive racket: in these, “Real Gone” gains a nigh industrial core that is neatly summarized by the title of the brief interlude “Clang Boom Steam”, as these tunes move forward as if musically propelled by a noisy machine that is leaking gas and oil all over the place.

Amusingly, much of the sonic lunacy in these wilder songs is reached in outrageous ways: more specifically, through the usage of turntables and beatboxing. The first tool is not that ubiquitous, only showing up in opener “Top of the Hill” as well as in “Metropolitan Glide”, but it leaves a considerable mark thanks to how unexpected it is, adding an urban, funky, and modernized luster that rather than diminishing the value of Waits’ usually idiosyncratic performances only ends up augmenting it thanks to the dissonance between his organic traditional musical sources and the delightfully out of place disc scratching that accompanies these two tracks. The beatboxing, on the other hand, is more pervasive, as Waits explores the application of his mouth (and the wonderfully disturbing sounds it can make) as a percussive instrument; he spits, scats, growls, blows, gargles, and clears his throat through almost half of the album, and the result is a symphony of human horror that suits the menacing soul of his blues and folk-based compositions quite well, especially in the tale of slave-trade told in “Don’t Go into That Barn”.

Like any Tom Waits album, “Real Gone” has plenty of quieter tunes to build a more comfortable – yet not so welcoming either – counterpart to the cuts in which it flat out bangs. In the tracks of the sort that are found here, Waits appears like the old and weary bandleader of a rural outfit that travels around in a rickety chariot spreading some darkness through already gloomy pieces of the land. Songs such as “Sins of My Father”, “How’s It Going to End”, “Dead and Lovely”, “Trampled Rose”, and “Green Grass” are tales of death, despair, and crime told through incredibly well-formed and scrambled imagery. And without exception, they are backed up with basic, steady, and sparse acoustic instrumentation. Surely, every once in a while, the electric guitar of Marc Ribot pops up to deliver a fantastic lick, but mostly they are led by banjos and acoustic guitars that sound so old it feels like they could fall apart at any moment, while Waits sings like he could meet the same fate.

As a statement to the good taste and talent of Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, there is little to nitpick about the seventy minutes of music held by “Real Gone”. One could attack the unnecessary nature of the instrumental-only beatboxing of “Clang Boom Steam” and “Chick a Boom”, but they are so brief it hardly matters. Furthermore, it is possible to point at the length of “Sins of the Father”, which goes on for ten minutes, as excessive; but although the song does not have enough instrumental muscle to go such distance, it certainly makes up for it in the story it tells. And in a way, the same applies to “Circus”, which can be accused of being the dullest shot Waits has ever taken at spoken-word, but that exudes one alluring vibe nonetheless.

“Real Gone” is, when it is all said and done, one string of successes, and they come in many flavors. Whether he is emulating a death-metal-singing pirate to the sway of Caribbean rhythms in “Hoist that Rag”; scaring everyone in the neighborhood with the dancing lo-fi word-association of “Shake It”; screaming at the top of his lungs from heartbreak over the nasty blues groove of “Make It Rain”; or tackling, with surprising candidness, sweetness, and straightforwardness the horrors of the Iraq War through the acoustic-folk take on the sad journey of a soldier in “Day After Tomorrow”, the Tom Waits of “Real Gone” is not just a master of his craft, but also a man that shows an uncanny ability to innovate within the tight confines of the mad musical universe he built for himself to exist in.

Franks Wild Years

Posted on by Matt

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Album: Franks Wild Years

Artist: Tom Waits

Released: August 17th, 1987

Highlights: Hang on St. Christopher, Innocent When You Dream (Barroom), I’ll Be Gone, Yesterday Is Here

“Franks Wild Years” is the final piece of a trilogy that saw Tom Waits transform from a late-night bar crooner who played sorrowful ballads for drunkards and losers into a musical madman who sang like Captain Beefheart and whose band used an assortment of instruments acquired at the nearest landfill. Rather than feeling like a culmination of what preceded it, though, it comes off as comedown; such quality, however, is more closely tied to the excellence of the two legs that came before it than to the tracks it contains. “Swordfishtrombones”, from 1983, was a revelatory explosion of wild and insane ideas that were frantically splattered over the wall of a dark dirty alley located by a shady harbor where drunken sailors, abundant prostitutes, and violent mafia henchmen lurked. “Rain Dogs”, released two years later, was the consolidated masterpiece created in a colorful carnival that had the joy sucked out of it by a downpour, which led its attendees to go from happy families to bums and beggars looking for shelter inside the rides and tents.

“Franks Wild Years” is, therefore, the hangover: the sailors are back to the ocean, the prostitutes have receded into the brothels, the mafia henchmen have been killed, and the beggars and bums are lying unconscious over piles of garbage. Nevertheless, even if the scene is neither as refreshing and alluring as the one from “Swordfishtrombones” nor as inspired as the one from “Rain Dogs”, “Franks Wild Years” is quite fruitful, frantic, and varied. All the usual suspects from Waits’ rackety orchestra of lunatics are here: there are enough horns to assemble a big band, there is a melancholic accordion over which Tom sings at his most intoxicated, there is a piano for when sadness seeps in, there are keyboards and electric organs that are employed to create a foggy atmosphere, there are more kinds of percussive instruments than one can find in a calypso ensemble, and there is even a rooster, whose playing (done by undisclosed means) is credited to Tom Waits himself. With that army of instruments, which are most certainly in precarious states, Tom tackles – and finds success – in numerous genres, giving his restless spin to each one of them and somehow bringing it all together under an idiosyncratic umbrella.

Originally serving as songs for a play Waits wrote with his wife, Kathleen Brennan, “Franks Wild Years” follows the titular character through a sleazy trail that alternates hope and despair, which are always underscored by a destructive nature that appears right in the opener, “Hang on St. Christopher”, where Frank – who is driving recklessly – asks the patron saint of drivers for protection. As Frank takes his emotional turns upwards and downwards, the record zaps stylistically: “I’ll Be Gone” can bet better described as pirate music; “Straight to the Top” gets two wildly different versions, one in which Waits dabbles in rumba and another where he emulates Frank Sinatra; “Train Song” is a traditional Waits bawler where the piano takes center stage; “Temptation” is carried by the Cuban guitar of Marc Ribot; “Innocent When You Dream”, which earns two version as well, is an irresistible and tipsy sing-along; and “I’ll Take New York” is another shot at Frank Sinatra territory, only – in this case – Frank is too inebriated to care and his band has not rehearsed in a decade.

As such, even though the position of “Franks Wild Years” in Tom Waits discography has led many to qualify it as a lesser release – and it indeed is inferior to the two albums that came before it, such a drop does not stop it from being utterly remarkable. Due to the fact its tunes originated on the stage, as part of the same play, there is a thematic and atmospheric coherence that permeates the entire work, one that lends it a cinematic aura, as if it songs were meant to conjure – and perhaps be accompanied by – moving images. It is a trip through the back alleys of life guided by the always watchful, insightful, and romantic eye of Tom Waits, and he expresses what he sees and gives life to the characters that inhabit his mind in unashamed musical experimentation and rich lyrical imagery.

Bone Machine

Posted on by Matt

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Album: Bone Machine

Artist: Tom Waits

Released: September 8th, 1992

Highlights: Dirt in the Ground, Who Are You, Black Wings, That Feel

In “Swordfishtrombones”, Tom Waits transitioned from a mysterious young man who sat at the piano of a bar to touch his audience’s hearts with gorgeous lyrics and inspired melodies to a clinically insane bum who built a band with instruments found at the closest junkyard. It was a shift that breathed new life into a career that had grown somewhat stagnant while also paving the way towards some of the weirdest and wildest experimentation in the history of Western music. Coming almost one decade after “Swordfishtrombones”, and with two fantastic and odd albums separating them, “Bone Machine” does not abandon the image associated with its predecessors: it is still, in essence, music that sounds as if it were made by throwing a lot of disjointed pieces together in the midst of a mad stupor. With it, however, Waits moved his act from the filthy junkyard to the gates of hell.

That is to say “Bone Machine” is one dark record. It shuns the humor, carnival spirit, and drunk sadness of the trilogy that preceded it and it chooses to explore, in lyrics and music, subjects that are nothing short of depressive. There is horrifying apocalypse (“Earth Died Screaming”), the meaninglessness of life (“Dirt in the Ground”), resentment towards a lover who takes pleasure in breaking hearts (“Who Are You”), suicide (“The Ocean Doesn’t Want Me”), social degradation into brutality (“In the Colosseum”), the atmosphere surrounding a mysterious assassination (“Murder in the Red Bar”), the devil himself – possibly – expressing a sinister kind of pleasure upon witnessing the destruction of the moral fabric that holds humanity together (“Black Wings”), and the attempt to hide the pain one feels when leaving the sometimes deadly comfort of familiarity (“Whistle Down The Wind”).

The greatness of “Bone Machine”, though, is not just in how Tom Waits approaches these matters with lyrics that are nothing short of spectacular; after all, that is par for the course for an artist as gifted as he is. “Bone Machine” augments its darkness by sounding not like a funeral where everyone weeps for the misery of life, but by coming off as some twisted celebration of death and destruction. Stripped from the complex instrumentation that was born in “Swordfishtrombones”, the songs here sound almost primal: percussion, invariably, serves as the guiding thread that unites them all; and over these wicked drums Waits and his band deliver melodies, piano arrangements, and guitar lines that drink heavily from the saddest blues numbers, as if they were conducting a frantic séance that summoned the spirit of Robert Johnson himself. Like a twisted maniac, Waits is clearly having a blast in dissecting our tortured existence, turning “Bone Machine” into an album that basks under the life-sucking vortex of a gigantic black hole.

Thanks to such consistency in mood and a powerful display of songwriting, “Bone Machine” easily qualifies as Tom Waits’ most solid work. Its ups do not go as high as those of “Rain Dogs”, but it is steadily reaching high marks throughout its running time. Instead of sulking when faced with the horrors of living, Tom Waits opts to stare down whoever is throwing this amount of trash at us, bang on a drum as maniacally as possible, and prove that he is loving the act of swimming through all the sewage. When listening to “Bone Machine”, one cannot help but smile towards old, crazy, and wise Tom, and join him in making some noise inside a basement directly connected to the furnaces of Satan. The alternative, after all, is sinking to the bottom of a garbage-ridden river.

The Heart Of Saturday Night

Posted on by Matt

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Album: The Heart of Saturday Night

Artist: Tom Waits

Released: October 1st, 1974

Highlights: New Coat of Paint, San Diego Serenade, Fumblin’ With the Blues, Drunk On the Moon

Tom Waits’ debut, 1973’s “Closing Time”, was a trip to a charming poorly lit bar in the middle of a frantic metropolis. The journey, however, was one that took place a little bit too late: by then, the night was not young and full of promises; sunrise was already around the corner, and a miserable bartender was counting the minutes until he could escort the last few drunk patrons out of the establishment and call it a night. A young man sat by the piano singing of melancholy, nostalgia, and lost love to the ears of those who had nothing better to do than to be there. “The Heart of Saturday Night” does not get away from that setting: it is the same bar, the same bartender, the same metropolis, the same young man by the piano, and – maybe – even the same night. What it does do is move its starting time to a few hours earlier; to when promises and expectations still exist, and people are looking for the heart of the action rather than at the bottom of an empty glass.

“The Heart of Saturday Night”, then, in a way, follows the mold of its stellar predecessor. Tom Waits gives his small audience a glimpse of his talent as a singer-songwriter, which here is comparable to that of Neil Young and Bob Dylan, by – like those two men in their early days – dressing his melodies and lyrics in simplicity. The difference between them is that while Dylan and Young did it with folk and country, Waits aims for jazz and blues, with his piano-playing taking center stage in all but two of the record’s eleven tunes, usually accompanied by lush orchestration or by a full-blown jazz ensemble with horns, drums, and bass. Meanwhile, the similarity between them is their uncanny ability to unearth remarkable melodies with every passing song, something that transforms “The Heart of Saturday Night” into a work that is invariably moving.

Waits, perhaps due to his constant touring through small clubs and bars that suited his material, shows he is a skilled architect of nighttime exuberance both in music and lyrics. The former element, by itself, would be more than enough to evoke images of a bright moon shining high above dark streets populated with the noise and lights of all kinds of joints and their customers; however, it is the wishfulness and strength of Waits’ voice, joined by his beautiful lyrical imagery, that take “The Heart of Saturday Night” over the top. Lines like “And I’m blinded by the neon / Don’t try and change my tune / Cause I thought I heard a saxophone / I’m drunk on the moon” and “You know the bartenders / They all know my name / And they catch me when I’m pulling up lame / And I’m a pool-shooting-shimmy-shyster shaking my head / When I should be living clean instead” paint gorgeous pictures by themselves, and, when backed by music that is blissful and evocative, they form a synergy that is almost unmatched.

Given the delightfully odd detours he would take later in his career, “The Heart of Saturday Night” – along with “Closing Time” – are a showcase of Tom Waits at his most accessible and immediately likable state. Few albums out there are as cohesive in the thoughts and images they paint, and even fewer feature such an incredible level of songwriting prowess. Whether he is tackling more energetic numbers (“Diamonds on My Windshield”, “Fumblin’ With the Blues”, and “New Coat of Paint”) or dabbling in melancholy (“Please Call Me, Baby” and “San Diego Serenade”), Waits is always hitting his mark, and “The Heart of Saturday Night” is bound to fill with joy – even if it is of the contemplative kind – the most miserable drunkards, the greatest admirers of nighttime life, and all of those with a strong love for good music.