Years ago, Tom Waits told David Letterman that living in New York was like “being aboard a sinking ship and the ocean is on fire.” This month is the 40th anniversary of Swordfishtrombones, the first of his trilogy of albums that took an axe to the popular music template and with more of us at least aware now that the ship is sinking, what better time to celebrate the unique contribution of the great man.
OK, I concede there are reasons to be hesitant. Waits’ whole shtick is clearly affected. The clank and the clatter and the clomping and the yelps can go on a bit. Then there is his militant reluctance to talk at all about whatever magic it is he does, a suggestion perhaps that he may still be a little insecure in the whole ‘authenticity is what matters’ traditions of ‘rock’ music. Indeed, he has barely said a significant word in public for 30 years.
Tom Waits’ boho drunk carnival barker act
But does it matter? Other popular artists have made a life doing not dissimilar things. David Bowie cos-played an alien and, briefly, even a Nazi. Nice middle-class Jewish boy Bob Dylan pretended to be a circus runaway. So what if Waits’ boho drunk carnival barker act is all make believe?
Nonetheless, it is frustrating how hard it is to get a decent handle on the man. There is no watchable concert footage of his purple period and he hasn’t toured in 15 years and even when he did play, tickets were as rare (and expensive) as birds’ milk. His friends seem to be all sworn to silence and there is quite a line of former collaborators nursing bruises. His reputation as a giant is partly based on his enthusiastic embracing of a genuine avant-garde sensibility but many of the critics who write about him, and have elevated him to his special place on Mount Olympus, whisper that they prefer his early work with all its sentimentality and romantic orchestration.
Growling in a Waitsian voice
I was surprised in preparing this article how many people I spoke to knew and liked his stuff. I thought he was a minority taste, even just for dad rock aficionados, but a whole range of people told me they love ol’ Tom, even had a singular soft spot for him. Most of them could name a song or two – even if it was only the Wire theme tune – or growl in a Waitsian voice. To get deeper into it, I spent an afternoon in the heatwave watching Waits videos on YouTube. It was my best spent afternoon of 2023. It was hard to drag myself away but I knew I had gained just a little more of the resilience that I’m going to need to get through the difficult months ahead.
Explain, I hear you say, what is so special about him? It’s those songs for goodness sake! As one of his bandmates said, ‘You could throw the songs down the stairs and they would still stand up’. The point is, like Tom himself has remarked ‘I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things’.
Tom Waits has genuinely created a world and, however manufactured it may sometimes be, it is completely plausible and real. Nobody but nobody can carry off that kind of magic, on and on over the years, even half a patch on Tom. Throwing the sweet against the sour. He must have 20 songs at least which if they had been recorded only by, say, Lulu or Rod Stewart, or God forbid, Pinky and Perky on a xylophone, they would still be amongst the greatest pop songs ever written.
“…everything was sacred, nothing was profane…!
He’s got 20 couplets that Bob Dylan, or for that matter, Philip Larkin, would happily give a finger for. ‘They said everything was sacred, nothing was profane,
And money’s just something you throw off of the back of a train’. He’s surely got a song for every occasion: the saddest goodbye song (Ruby’s Arms), the saddest murder song (Georgia Lee), the funniest paranoia song (What’s He Building in There?), the most fearsome apocalypse song (Russian Dance), the bitterest protest song since whenever (Road to Peace), the sharpest political insight (Sins of my Father), the most unaffected love song (Johnsburg, Illinois).
I only saw Tom once. In the early days of internet ticketing, I took a punt on this ticket on eBay (see below) and managed to get into Amsterdam, and the gig. The cost is forgotten now and at least I was spared the 90-minute immigration queue we now must expect thanks to you know what. Halcyon times, a fabulous night. As you won’t be surprised to hear you can, in these days of miracle and wonder, relive it (athough I’ve got better tips below). Earlier, in the same year, I also saw Robert Wilson’s The Black Rider at the Barbican, a bloodcurdling Weimar-ish production with text by William Burroughs and music and lyrics by Waits, with Marianne Faithfull as some kind of devil. It was a one-off, not to be missed, cacophonous discord taken to the highest level but any hopes that Tom would show up were disappointed.
Some people say he is too grim but, really, be assured, dip in and there is nothing ahead but pleasure. In these autumnal days, as we struggle to make sense of the world, as some of us are sending our youngsters out in to the blue, as the nights draw in, there is no better guide to building up our spirit. It’s all there in the brutal heart-breaking melodies, the whole world of song, the very history of song, influences far beyond the norm: Kurt Weill, Harry Partch, Debussy, Strauss, Orff, William Burroughs, Sinatra, show tunes, carnival jingles, Ray Charles, klezmer, Sidney Bechet, gamelan, tarantella, Howling Wolf, Captain Beefheart.
A way in to Tom Waits
And here’s an entry point. Contrary to my carefully chosen words above, there are two startling performances, easily available, free at the click of a mouse. Tom had a history on the David Letterman show and he previewed his latest and last album (way back in 2012) with a performance of his song Chicago. It is straightforward, no studio trickery, no affectations, just a crack ensemble and a genius performer punching it out at the peak of his powers. It takes your breath away. The whole band is on fire, absolutely peerless. Equally extraordinary, in 2015, Tom appeared on the programme again, Letterman’s last ever show, to sing an almost acoustic, unrecorded new song, Take One Last Look, a kind of goodbye for Letterman himself, and, as it happens, so far at least, Tom’s last ever recorded song. It is simple, unadorned, played straight, absolutely on the money and Letterman and George Clooney, who is there on the studio couch, are clearly thunderstruck, even holding back tears. You will be too. Waits is 73 now and showing no sign of touring or recording or performing again (even if he can still knock out terrific acting cameos in the likes of Licorice Pizza last year). We should be very afraid that he won’t be adding anything more to his music catalogue.
As the whole ‘rock music’ generation now wends its way off stage we wonder, of course, if any of this matters a jot. Will the music of Dylan and James Brown and the Beatles and Joni and Prince and Tom and all the rest carry over on into the next generation and beyond? We won’t know until we get there but where once we seemed to assume the musicians of our seemingly significant time would have the long-term impact of Louis Armstrong or Gershwin or, say, Chuck Berry, now we perhaps have a longer perspective. There’s probably only room for two or three of these people on the podium. I would think Tom has a good chance of squeezing in there but who knows. Does he care? Nobody seems to know that either.
In the meantime, another handful of absolutely bulletproof songs on YouTube, picked from every corner of his catalogue, songs you simply can’t go wrong with. Enjoy: Shore Leave, Swordfishtrombone, Buzz Fledderjohn, Pony, Alice, Coney Island Baby, Gin-soaked Boy, and (of course) How’s it Gonna End?
