•
Rating:
At this point, I couldn't help but write about Tom Waits.
I wanted to review Rain Dogs or Real Gone, but it's already been done excellently.
Much has already been said and written about this multifaceted and unique artist.
But what is his "genre"? He's been called a post-modern songwriter, the last of the beat poets, a chamber music composer, "one of the greatest and most distinctive musical geniuses of the twentieth century" (Scaruffa got it right this time). One thing is for sure: Tom Waits was born, grew up, and will die out of fashion.
He started making music in the late '60s and had nothing to do with the hippie movement, nor acid rock, nor politically active singer-songwriters, nor the bohemian rock of the Velvet Underground and the Stooges. And he is one of the few musicians who escaped the collective madness of the '80s.
His musical suitcase is enormous, barely closed with string. If you open it, the most diverse things will pop out, including Blues, Underground counterculture, Jazz, a drum (in the percussive sense) of pots, Rap beats, Captain Beefheart, saloon Ragtime, Jack Kerouac, vaudeville, Dark atmospheres, Miles Davis, miles and miles of film reels, Post-Rock avant-garde, a black hooker (why "of color"? they call me "white" and I call them "black"), Frank Sinatra, Lenny Bruce, a felt hat, and a town band. Yes, the whole lot.
His voice is "a '56 ford mercury with a broken exhaust pipe, the muffler blown off while fording a brook somewhere" (P. Humphries). Or, according to Waits' preferred definition, "Louis Armstrong and Ethel Merman meeting in hell"...
Tom Waits plays for himself, for the pure and simple joy of making music. Nothing else. You can feel it. It's something intimate, subliminal. Judging a record like this is presumptuous, a waste of time. It's like going to someone who just had sex with their woman and saying something like: "Look, overall I liked you, you put in the effort. Of course, you could have lasted a bit longer..."
What the hell do you want?
"You know, your performance is of the 'nu-horny', 'post-animalistic' genre..."
WHAM! Punch. Goodbye cheekbone.
Even the matter of musical genres becomes irrelevant. It can be useful, sure, but what's the point of criticizing a musician for being outside the stylistic boundaries of this or that genre?
Criticism, excessive analysis, can make you hate a musician like your literature professor made you hate Dante.
"If musicians publish their work, they should expect to be judged." But if certain musicians didn't record, how would they make a living, support a family?
In my opinion, anyone who has let their Unconscious sing or play (listen to Shore Leave) deserves to be listened to in silence, not cut down by a gray and conceited "critic" brain-masturbator who at forty hasn't yet had a taste of life.
This isn't a review; it's a tribute to a difficult and genius work. One of the best sequences of sounds conceived by the mind of Tom Waits (even "Mule Variations" isn't bad, not at all. And neither is "Heartattack And Vine". Neither is "Frank's Wild Years". Now that I think about it, "Small Change" also deserves mention...)
But tracks like the title track or Gin Soaked Boy speak for themselves. I listen to them in the car when I'm driving home at night, with Rome flowing past outside the window and the alcohol (don't worry, mom, I drive slowly..) caressing my head.
And the pulsating and powerful 16 Shells..?
Johnsburg, Illinois. The hometown of his wife. I dare not and have no interest in analyzing a piece like this. It's poetry, you must (you can't) do anything else but listen to it.
Tracklist Lyrics and Samples
01 Underground (02:01)
Rattle big black bones
in the danger zone
there's a rumblin' groan
down below
there's a big dark town
it's a place I've found
there's a world going on
Underground
they're alive, they're awake
while the rest of the world is asleep
below the mine shaft roads
it will all unfold
there's a world going on
Underground
all the roots hang down
swing from town to town
they are marching around
down under your boots
all the trucks unload
beyond the gopher holes
there's a world going on
Underground
04 Johnsburg, Illinois (01:33)
She's my
Only true love
She's all that I think of
Look here
In my wallet that's her.
She grew up
On a farm there
There's a place on my arm
Where I've written her name
Next to mine.
You see I just can't
Live without her
And I'm her only boy
She grew up
Outside McHenry
In Johnsburg, Illinois.
05 16 Shells From a Thirty-Ought-Six (04:33)
I plugged 16 shells from a thirty-ought-six
and a Black Crow snuck through
a hole in the sky
so I spent all my buttons on an
old pack mule
and I made me a ladder from
a pawn shop marimba
and I leaned it up against
a dandelion tree
And I filled me a sachel
full of old pig corn
and I beat me a billy
from an old French horn
and I kicked that mule
to the top of the tree
and I blew me a hole
'bout the size of a kickdrum
and I cut me a switch
from a long branch elbow
Chorus
I'm gonna whittle you into kindlin'
Black Crow 16 shells from a thirty-ought-six
whittle you into kindlin'
Black Crow 16 shells from a thirty-ought-six
Well I slept in the holler
of a dry creek bed
and I tore out the buckets
from a red Corvette, tore out the buckets from a red Corvette
Lionel and Dave and the Butcher made three
you got to meet me by the knuckles of the skinnybone tree
with the strings of a Washburn
stretched like a clothes line
you know me and that mule scrambled right through the hole
Repeat Chorus
Now I hold him prisoner
in a Washburn jail
that stapped on the back
of my old kick mule
strapped it on the back of my old kick mule
I bang on the strings just
to drive him crazy
I strum it loud just to rattle his cage
strum it loud just to rattle his cage
Repeat Chorus
07 In the Neighborhood (03:07)
In The Neighborhood
(Tom Waites: Swordfish Trombones)
Well the eggs chase the bacon round the frying pan
And the whining dog pigeons by the steeple bell rope
And the dogs tipped the garbage pails over last night
And there's always construction work bothering you
In the neighborhood, in the neighborhood, in the neighborhood
Well Friday's a funeral and Saturday's a bride
Seth's got a pistol on the registers side
And the goddamn delivery trucks they make too much noise
And we don't get our butter delivered no more
In the neighborhood, in the neighborhood, in the neighborhood
Well Big Mambo's kicking his old grey hound
And the kids can't get ice cream 'cause the market burned down
And the newspaper sleeping bags blow down the lane
And that goddamn flatbed's got me pinned in again
In the neighborhood, in the neighborhood, in the neighborhood
There's a couple Filipino girls giggling by the church
And the window is busted and the landlord ain't home
and Butch joined the army yeah that's where he's been
and the jackhammer's digging up the sidewalks again
In the neighborhood, in the neighborhood, in the neighborhood
In the neighborhood, in the neighborhood, in the neighborhood
10 Swordfishtrombone (03:08)
Well he came home from the war
with a party in his head
and modified Brougham DeVille
and a pair of legs that opened up
like butterfly wings
and a mad dog that wouldn't
sit still
he went and took up with a Salvation Ar
Band girl
who played dirty water
on a swordfishtrombone
he went to sleep at the bottom of
Tenkiller lake
and he said "gee, but it's
great to be home."
Well he came home from the war
with a party in his head
and an idea for a fireworks display
and he knew that he'd be ready with
a stainless steel machete
and a half a pint of Ballentine's
each day
and he holed up in room above a hardware store
cryin' nothing there but Hollywood tears
and he put a spell on some
poor little Crutchfield girl
and stayed like that for 27 years
Well he packed up all his
expectations he lit out for California
with a flyswatter banjo on his knee
with a lucky tiger in his angel hair
and benzedrine for getting there
they found him in a eucalyptus tree
lieutenant got him a canary bird
and shaked her head with every word
and Chesterfielded moonbeams in a song
and he got 20 years for lovin' her
from some Oklahoma governor
said everything this Doughboy
does is wrong
Now some say he's doing
the obituary mambo
and some say he's hanging on the wall
perhaps this yarn's the only thing
that holds this man together
some say he was never here at all
Some say they saw him down in
Birmingham, sleeping in a
boxcar going by
and if you think that you can tell a bigger tale
I swear to God you'd have to tell a lie...
Loading comments slowly
Other reviews
By piccolojedi1991
A very peculiar and beautiful voice, one that manages to be sweet and gritty, yet never boring or annoying.
This album is, in my opinion, the practical demonstration that a CD and the music it has recorded is immortal.
By Contemplazione
From the first seconds of music I started bobbing my head and tapping my feet, and a half-smile somewhere between pleased and sardonic spread across my face!
If you come across this crazy and brilliant CD... STEAL IT!!!
