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There is this man under this sprawling umbrella, inside a faded photo that was once black and white, while now it is only light gray and dark gray. He is alone, there is no one on the dirt road, and he, in his black overcoat and hands in his pockets, looks to the left, beyond the horizon trapped by the photo. He looks beyond and seems serene, perhaps just thoughtful, but so thoughtful that it doesn't show..
"I didn't marry a man, I married a mule"
A mule with hot, vibrating tar in its throat, damn.
A mule that, somewhere in the vast American countryside, sits on a half-broken wooden chair and records an album; just because he feels like it. He has a couple of pieces ready, calls some old friends, and records, perhaps with chickens scurrying between his feet. Out come these grainy, shaky photographs, these negatives tortured by the sun, these memories that smell of Bourbon and cigarettes, excellent companions for some unspoken and melancholic regret.
He sits under a porch and tells stories.
Tells them as naturally as always.
He tells of roadside edges, of abandoned houses, where no one lives anymore, which seem inhabited by ghosts, with broken windows, peeling paint, and birds in the chimney. He tells of his travels around the world and the roads he has taken, hoping his pony knows how to bring him home; he drags us right under the circus tent to show us the child without a body and with only one eye that drives women crazy; he is moved by Georgia Lee, found dead in a grove, when the night was cold, the ground was hard, and she was too young to be on the street. He puzzles over his neighbor, wondering what the hell he's building in there, amid strange noises, gadgets, groans...
He tells us all this with his music, which, this time like never before, sways between distorted and shouted rock ("Big in Japan", "Filippino Box Spring Hog") drunken piano ballads ("House Where Nobody Lives", "Picture In A Frame") and crackling blues that seem to have been whispered to him by the gentle grain-gilded hills of old America ("Chocolate Jesus", "Cold Water", "Black Market Baby"). His voice bursts, jumps, hisses, shouts, whispers, sharpens, knows how to caress and at the same time frighten; his voice becomes the ultimate instrument in these songs, the thread of these thousand stories, the firecracker and the clarinet that are imbued in the verses of these pieces.
For these "Mule Variations," Waits goes back in time, returns to the America of huge valve radios, circuses, rural towns, black and white films, farmhouses, animals, the silence of a life lived quietly, to the rhythms of 40 years ago, if not more; he returns to the song of cotton plantations, the simplicity of things, the naivety, the oddities of small towns lost among the fields, returns to the harvests and scarecrows, the rickety, scattered road signs and dust, chewing tobacco, scorching summers, and frosty winters; he returns to the Blues, the wounded song of those who have nothing left and keep singing, he returns to his roots with a vigor and inspiration never seen before.
When "Come On Up To The House" ends and everything is over, he is there, with his hat in hand, among the fields, as everything darkens, like in those old films, when, at the end, the frame darkens, and the words "The End" appear. This time he looks straight ahead, but he is already ready to go, to leave once more, to leave everything again.
He leaves, if you want to follow him, fine, if you want to stay there, go ahead, he certainly hasn't sung for you.
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