There was Juanita, a librarian in Oregon somewhere. Tom was one of those eighth-year juniors that happen at big colleges, which is where he’d been for about a third of his life. Some guy called himself Hank Sosnowski – it’s a Charles Bukowski reference – and showed up sometimes to act tough; I always imagined him as an IT guy with teenage kids who didn’t respect him, sneaking brews in a gloomy basement. Some Scottish or Welsh dude ran the whole thing. This was the Rain Dogs listserv, circa 1998. The Internet was fairly young, and I was fairly young, and all I had in common with this crew of oddballs – a couple hundred deep, though not everyone posted – was that I loved Tom Waits’ music.
At the time, Waits was in seclusion in Northern California, living North-of-but-near the town where Hitchcock shot The Birds. He showed up in Los Angeles to play a benefit show for Tim Robbins’ Dead Man Walking Foundation; it was his first show in years. People from the listserv came from far and wide. These were people who had read bleary drunken emails from me, with whom I had debated the fine points of many dull issues – Communism: appealing on paper?; what’s up with The Black Rider album? – yet I didn’t seek them out. I had started to sour on the listserv. Later, to a smaller degree, I’d sour on Waits.
I’d throw his records on sometimes, but when the record we’d all waited for – 1999’s Mule Variations, his first proper studio album in seven years – finally arrived, I was unmoved. This, I thought, was a guy who’d been out of the city for too long. Someone who’d spent too much time inventing his own instruments and listening to his own music. But this was where the Waits I loved – the artist behind the brilliantly individual and eccentric stretch of albums running between 1983’s Swordfishtrombones and 1993’s Black Rider – was heading. He’d been troubled by drugs and drink in Los Angeles, and after he cleaned out his music went crazy in the best way: blasting off into some sort of Brechtian stratosphere, and trying to (and somehow managing to) sound like some never-recorded race-record 78 you’d buy at a garage sale in some alternate universe’s version of 1933.
After years in a city, it’s easier for me to understand what sent Waits running to the wilds of Northern California. And I’ve been pleased to see him become more prolific in recent years: he did another one of his weird song-cycle/opera/musical things in 2002 with Alice, which was released at the same time as the underwhelming studio effort Blood Money. Then, at the end of 2004, he released Real Gone. It’s a better record than… well, anything since Bone Machine, I guess. Which covers a period of about 12 years, and which is also rather faint praise: his recent work hasn’t been that great. Real Gone is a pretty good album, and has several devastatingly good moments, but by and large the Tom Waits I loved – and the I who loved Tom Waits – is gone.
As on most of his recent records, there’s a lot of found percussion here: his signature piano has disappeared entirely, and the percussion is less likely to be traditional drums than it is to be Waits (or avant-percussionist Brain) banging on an old cabinet or his son Casey on the 1s and 2s (yeah, scratching) or Waits doing some scat-beatbox routine. His fuzzed-out, scratchy and filtered recording sound is a stylistic constant, and when it works here, it really works. Most of that, though, is due to the fact that Waits, when he puts his mind to it, is about as good a songwriter as we (we being people who listen to music) have. “Don’t Go Into The Barn” has a rough weirdness to it that’s awfully mannered – Waits, like Nick Cave, seems to set all his songs inside the gothic, imaginary South of a Flannery O’Connor story – but ultimately works on the strength of heavy percussion and a great vocal. Equally impressive are “Make It Rain” and “Day After Tomorrow.” The former is a passionate plea to God – or the voting populace, or whatever – for change, for something or anything good. It’s a suggestion that Waits the eccentric – the man behind Mule Variations’ autobiographical-sounding spoken word track “What’s He Building In There?” – is ultimately another character: that he’s still in the world. And “Day After Tomorrow” is proof. “Day After Tomorrow,” which is a lovely, spare near-folk song, appeared on an antiwar benefit album put together by MoveOn.org, and it’s the best antiwar song I’ve heard. It walks the line of mawkishness at times, but it is also humanistic, compassionate, and finally ferocious: a soldier’s-eye view of being lonely, afraid and confused.
There’s nothing but bass, banjo and vocals on “How’s It Gonna End?” That song is a stylistic partner to Bone Machine’s “A Little Rain” in being a lament for a lost child, but here with a few chilling twists, terrific almost-spoken vocal performance and the most wildly, wonderfully literate lyrics Waits has managed yet. It’s brilliant, in the way the best short stories can be brilliant. Differently brilliant is the totally, uh, different “Hoist That Rag,” which picks up where the stuttering, clattery album-opening “Top of the Hill” stumbles and just rocks. Longtime Waits collaborator Marc Ribot contributes some scorching Latin-accented guitar-work that recalls, oddly, Buena Vista Social Club; it’s one of Waits’ most enjoyable songs in a long time.
But a lot of the record is muddly abstraction. Too much of it, frankly. I know what he wants to do with the stripped-down soul attempt “Metropolitan Glide” (yes, it’s a dance); I know he’s just doing his overstated-gothic-picaresque thing on songs like “Shake It” (sample lyric: “I feel like a preacher waving a gun around”) and the raspy spoken-word “Circus” (lots of dwarves here, folks). Of course, there was a time when I loved that, too.
So this is a good record, but not a great record. I wonder how great his great records were, thinking back: there are no new mistakes here, overstatement has always been his problem. But it’s frustrating to know that this is, for better or worse, the Tom Waits we have now. I don’t know that I realized I missed the guy until now… and, no, I don’t mean Hank Sosnowski. Real Gone is a reminder of something I’d forgotten: Tom Waits is still very much here. |