Tom Waits

I love Tom Waits. I own none of his albums and can’t stand to listen to more than a couple of songs at a time, but I still love him. His championing of the lonely losers, the seedy underbelly, his unmistakably shredded vocals and, above all, his unerringly sense for a beautiful melody plus his absolute insistence to follow his own muse where she may go make him something of a hero to me. So what if I can’t listen to him, I still think he’s great. I can’t listen to the Ramones, either, but I still think they’re swell. Okay, let’s say I appreciate Tom Waits more than I like him, patronizing though that may be.

While most young boys itch with an impatience to get older, their usual goal is late teens or early twenties, when they can finally do what they want to do when they want to do it and drink deep from the various dark wells their parents have been warning them about for years. The young Tom Waits was also impatient to get older, but he wanted to skip through early adulthood and get right to middle age. The story – and you can never put too much stock in Tom Waits’ stories – is that he’d be encouraged to go outside and play with the other boys, and he’d end up in some dad’s shady study, listening to big band music with somebody thirty years his senior while the other boys – his supposed peers – played in the sun. True or not, it does give a good sense of Tom Waits.

For Tom Waits is a man out of time (you know what they say, Tom Waits for no man – har, har, har). Starting professional life as an exceptional songwriter, especially gifted at writing heart-wrenching ballads (that’s his Jersey Girl that The Boss flogs so often), he released his own albums but had more success getting other musicians to cover his material – everybody from Manhattan Transfer to Johnny Cash to The Eagles and the aforementioned Bruce Springsteen. Somewhere along the line, just about the time I got interested in him, he ditched the traditional accompaniments to his songs and started experimenting with a much broader, much stranger palette. He started inventing instruments and his later albums are full of strange clangs and bangs and things that go bump in the night. But they are still married to his gorgeous melodic sense which, together with his rubbed-raw voice, creates a delicious friction.

This track, my favorite short track ever, is from the turning point album, Swordfishtrombones, where a lot of his neo-noise was first fleshed out. This song breaks my heart every time I hear it. I love the extremely sparse, late-night at a closing club vibe of the combo and the yearning lyrics, with the wonderful suspended rhyme

This song sounds like nothing so much as a sad, sorry, lonely drunk, rambling about his baby in some two-bit rundown saloon. I love his gruff and wavering voice, and the gentle dissonance and, most especially, the way it all winds down to a single piano note at the end. If brevity is the soul of wit, it is also the heart of darkness, and this sliver of boozy emotion holds a world of pain in its shaking hands.

Waits likes to tell the story of how he frequently volunteers to be one of the chaperones for his kid’s class, ferrying around a bunch of elementary school kids in his giant boat of a car. “I’m down with field trips,” as he puts it. One day, the class took a field trip to a music store, and Tom, rightfully so, figured he’d get recognized. So, he hung out over by the guitars, striking casual poses and waiting for the adoration. Which never came. Nothing, not a peep. He went home depressed. The next field trip took the kids to the dump, and he wasn’t out of the car before the dump guys had come running over excitedly, “hey, you’re Tom Waits”. So, they may not know Tom Waits at the conservatory, but he’s famous down at the dump. Which, really, is just as it should be.