Few artists can hold a 38 year career, and a 20-some album discography, but continue to instill the kind of maddening excitement that Tom Waits does whenever the crooked bone tree of his mind bears new fruit. There isn't any diminishing value of return whatsoever in what he utters. Sure, his broken glass and gravel voice, accompanied by his oft use of dusty and antiquated instruments - most commonly a deranged sounding Chamberlain, a musical saw, and occasionally a Stroh Violin (though none of them appear on this outing) - make it impossible to mistake a Tom Waits song when you hear one. Yet, each and every release Waits offers over the course of his illustrious career is its own individual gem. And his newest collection, Bad As Me is no exception. In fact, it's the most encompassing of his overall appeal than any before.
From the first track "Chicago", Waits drives a passenger train right through your rib cage, pulls you in, and tears on down the tracks. Sax and trombone are the wheels, guitar the rails, bass the trestles in between - and, of course, Waits the mad-as-a-hatter conductor barreling you headlong into his disjointed, yet somehow beautifully dilapidated world. You'll see heaven and you'll see hell, you'll see the bleakest despair, the most sinister of women and the most torrid of men. You'll pass sad leaves on trees, you'll pass soldiers screaming insane interjections as they're ripped to shreds in the midst of battle. Waits brings down the Rapture on this one, making Harold Camping's cryptic predictions closely accurate, but a mere 5 days off (the album is released October 25th). Waits is more Jesus than Jesus. He damns, he loves, he saves - and his music will either take you with him, or leave you stranded when he goes. Every one of his albums is a second coming.
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| photo courtesy Jesse Dylan |
In a mere 13 tracks, Bad As Me spans the breadth and width of Tom Waits' lengthy career, as he touches upon all the telltale elements of his songwriting from past to present. In "Talking At The Same Time" he removes nearly all the broken shale and rust from his voice, singing in a delicate upper octave, to tell of the desperation and dedications of all our shallow human wants and pursuits. "Pay Me" would have fit nicely on Rain Dogs, as Waits sings of being unwanted and unwelcome, and cleverly states: "the only way down from the gallows is to swing...". The recognitive astonishment of the album's title track "Bad As Me" hearkens back to the mood of 2002's Blood Money, with Waits pointing out his doppelganger's "tryin' to shift", that shared desire to change in a villain meets villain dialogue, and laughs "No good you say? Well that's good enough for me!" And the hands down most riveting engagement on the album, "Hell Broke Luce" is a profane wartime military death march, offering the scathing rhetorical: "How is it that the only ones responsible for making this mess / got their sorry asses stapled to a goddamn desk?!"
Waits has come a long a way. Anyone familiar will remember that in his humble beginnings, he was little more than a slightly charismatic, decidedly more interesting, jazz bar act. In the late 1970's he wrote rejected hallmark stories about drinking pianos, hookers in Minneapolis jails penning letters to Johns they formed special bonds with, Spanish harlem shoot-outs where heroes bleed to death watching Cagney on the screen, and parody montage narratives of every gimmicky sales pitch ever spoken - with the caveat, however, that "the large print giveth and the small print taketh away". He had coherent narratives to tell then, and the jazz/blues musical atmosphere surrounding those were suited to them.
Right around the mid-80's Waits employed his well ahead of its time, "junkyard orchestrations". It was there he departed into tales of lonesome sailors on shore leave passing the time shooting billiards with midgets, disgruntled husbands reveling in escaping their spent piece of used jet trash wives (and their Chihuahuas with some kind of skin disease), and deliberately out of tune Bourbon Street, New Orleans piano ballads where folks take apart their nightmares and leave 'em at the door - just to "tango till they're sore". Tom Waits' narratives grew more and more compelling even as they grew bizarre. In the 90's, his penchant for the odd won Bone Machine a Grammy for Best Alternative Album, and at the close of the millennium Mule Variations yanked two more Grammys for Best Contemporary Folk Album and Best Male Rock Vocal Performance (which, if you ask me, was the cleverest of tongue-in-cheek winks) - all of this accomplished, with never once having a "hit single" or enjoying any mainstream radio airplay.
Simply put, Tom Waits is an enigma. There's been no artist like him, and likely won't be after. He's a performer completely removed from the conventional expectations one might hold for a musician deemed successful by popular definition. He dwells in the outskirts of all of that, offering it no obligation or abide, yet it flocks to him, praises his work, and then leaves him alone to his own devices, untouched and unaffected - as he creates more of what time after time re-invents his own wheel of artistic expression. No one is the same kind of good as Tom Waits.
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