Friday, Jul 25, 2008
Tom Waits released two proper records in a decade. Then he dropped two crusted with rust and riotous cacophony in one day.
May 30, 2002 | For a musician who spent the first decade of his career sounding (and looking) like he might hang around pay phones scrounging for returned nickels, Tom Waits has done nicely for himself. There's the acting -- from small parts in several Francis Ford Coppola films to a meaty role alongside Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep in "Ironweed" -- which sometimes threatens to overtake his main gig. There are the royalties from bigger stars' covers of his songs: "Jersey Girl" was a live Springsteen staple for years, Rod Stewart scored a latter-day hit with "Downtown Train" and the early "Ol' 55" appears on the Eagles' "On the Border." And then there's the $2.375 million Waits was awarded in 1993 in a suit against Frito-Lay, whose admen unwisely lifted his distinctive carnival-pitchman delivery from 1977's "Step Right Up" for a Doritos spot. Not chump change for an artist who once quipped that he gets less airplay than Marcel Marceau.
With this security, the '90s and oughts have found Waits free to make such career moves as not releasing a new studio album between 1992's "Bone Machine" and 1999's "Mule Variations." Or, at present, releasing two on the same day: the brand-new "Alice" and "Blood Money" (originally titled, perhaps too Stephen-Kingishly, "Red Drum"). This apparent creative spurt is a touch deceptive. Though the recordings are recent, "Alice" is based on Waits' and wife Kathleen Brennan's score for a Hamburg production of Paul Schmidt's play of the same name (based in turn on the works of Lewis Carroll), mounted in 1992 by avant-theater giant Robert Wilson. Waits' belated decision to officially record this material may be related to the recent circulation of bootlegs of his original demos. "Blood Money" is the fruit of a more recent Waits-Brennan-Wilson collaboration: a new staging of George Buchner's "Woyzeck," one of the cornerstones of German modernist theater. ("Alice" also played the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1995; "Wozzeck" is slated for New York and Los Angeles later this year.)
Both discs appear to have been recorded in an extended set of sessions in the same Northern California studio, with the same cast of musicians: Longtime Waits bassist Larry Taylor, formerly of Canned Heat, violist Bebe Reisenfors and multireed player Colin Stetson are among the stalwarts, while ex-Police drummer Steward Copeland guests on one track of each. Beyond that, they're as distinct as the works they're drawn from: a genteel fantasy with pedophilic undertones by a Victorian logician and a fragmentary revenge tragedy by a German political radical who died of typhus at 26.
The albums' opening tracks outline the difference starkly. "Alice" is a last-call rumination on vanished love à la "The Man Who Got Away" or "The Wee Small Hours of the Morning," with a melody and arrangement worthy of its models. Backed by muted trumpet and Dexter Gordon-inspired sax, Waits gives a thoughtful (though gravelly as always) piano and vocal performance: "I must be insane/ To go skating on your name/ And by tracing it twice/ I fell through the ice/ Of Alice." (Of course, knowing that the song is addressed to Rev. Dodgson's pinafored nymphet muse twists the sentiment somewhat.)
"Blood Money's" "Misery Is the River of the World" is at the opposite end of Waits' range. Over a welter of gongs, marimba and calliope, he scrapes the bottom of his voice to deliver a grim anti-sermon: "You can drive nature out with a pitchfork, but it always comes roaring back again." The song has a clear forerunner in "What Keeps Mankind Alive?" from "The Threepenny Opera," which Waits performed on the Kurt Weill tribute album "Lost in the Stars." Even so, his rewrite captures Buchner's materialism perfectly; by the end, the singer is barking "Everybody Row!" like the captain of a slave ship with the whole human race in the hold.
Buchner, Carroll, Brecht and Weill, Robert Wilson: Waits' didn't always have friends (or sources) in such high-toned places. Emerging in Los Angeles in the early '70s, he couldn't have been less in step with prevailing musical trends. His observational lyrics, drunk on hipster slang and blearily focused on urban life's has-beens and never-weres, were a far cry from the quasi-mystical introspection of most singer-songwriters, while his obvious love of jazz and Tin Pan Alley made him (like Randy Newman) an odd man out in a decade that saw rock decisively displace older forms of pop. On seven albums bookended by 1973's "Closing Time" and 1980's "Heartattack and Vine," Waits perfected this Last Beatnik persona, perhaps too well. All these records contain gems -- 1977's "Small Change" may be the most consistent -- but their self-mythologizing and air of pastiche takes away from the quality of the songwriting.
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