Tom Waits
Swordfishtrombones

THE REVIEW

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.