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Jazzman Richie Cole once wrote a song called "Waiting for Waits," so I
guess it's a well-known phenomenon. Anyway, there we were on the street
last Wednesday night, stretched all the way around the Beacon Theater and tied
in a bow while himself finished a fastidious sound check. The show was
nearly two hours late in starting, and after thawing us out with four
powerhouse numbers, Waits finally stopped to acknowledge and apologize for the
delay. "You probably blame me personally, as you should," he said. Sensing a
need for further explanation, he confessed, "I was shampooing my
dog. And he likes to have a moisturizer, too. Once you start with the toiletries, there's no
end in sight." With that, he had us.
It's the voice that does it -- or voices, I should say, because Waits
has a bunch. His MC voice, a sly wise-guy whine, is the closest thing in
his repertoire to normal. The others are more like theatrical masks, though
to Waits "normal," too, is just a mask. He gets you to believe he was
in Minneapolis once when it was 200 below zero, then says he got caught on
the street in just a bra and a slip, and pretty soon he's joked you into
accepting him as the title character in "Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis."
Waits's stories seem to take place in a world out of time. Nobody
ever travels by plane or communicates by computer, and the musicians
never sample a synthesizer or trip a beatbox. It's The Land that Yuppies Forgot. His
new album, Rain Dogs (Island), is essentially the soundtrack for a
street-level tour of New York led by a Faginish guide who, in the opening number,
likens the city to exotic Singapore. "Every witness turns to steam," he says,
and indeed he makes you hear the sounds and sights and smells of the city,
the perfume of pee and doughnuts, the ghostly hiss-and-rumble of pipes
and subways, the scary and touching picture of those gentlemen on the
corner, their good coats in the laundry and their lips caked with baking soda,
who declare, "Taxi? We'd rather walk." The rain dogs are the homeless
specters whose voices leak from dark doorways and billowing gutters, and
they're represented on record not just by Waits's phlegmy bark but by a
battery of eerie clinking percussion and guitarist Marc Ribot's
swab-and-sting injections.
There are levels to this society, and crawling along the bottom are
the denizens of "Clap Hands," which sounds like a subterranean S.O.S.
croaked through the cracks in the sidewalk, or "Jockey Full of Bourbon," a
sinister tango on which every instrument sounds like a lethal weapon. The ones
that can afford to party barrelhouse through raunchy blues ("Big Black
Mariah" and "Union Square," both guest-starring Keith Richards), while the
indigent bitterly plot to collect their inheritance (the very Brecht-Weill
"Cemetery Polka") or run wild through the streets ("Midtown," a retro-noir
detective theme). The closest thing to a man who walks on his own two feet is
the dreamer who struts to the subway "shining like a new dime" on
"Downtown Train" (number one on my Tom Waits top 40, largely thanks to G. E.
Smith's sweet sweet guitar hook). But he's not necessarily the highest order of man
in this cosmology -- that belongs to the sharp-eyed poet of "9th and
Hennepin." A verbal snapshot of one night in a Minnesota roadhouse, this spoken
rap starts out self-indulgent, with more similes than a Tom
Robbins paragraph, but then pans like Antonioni into the heart of the night:
The rooms all smell like diesel
And you take on the
dreams of the ones who have slept here
And I'm lost in the window
I hide on the stairway
I hang in the curtain
I sleep in your hat.
Waits has always done these voices, mostly variations on the
logorrheic barfly sliding from rowdiness to tall tales to lachrymose nostalgia. But on his
last two albums, 1983's Swordfishtrombones and Rain
Dogs, he's perfected his presentation by creating a context (a sonic context as well as
a musical-literary one) that individualizes his characters rather than
mushing them together. Both albums dispense with the standard 10-song format
and comprise instead a lot more fragments: instrumentals and spoken
monologues, more pop tunes or genre pieces (tangos, blues, etc.) than
the piano-vamp-behind- lowlife-sagas of old. And they add up to a new
musical identity for Waits, more eclectic in its influences (alternating extremes
of abrasiveness and sentimentality, from hard bop to children's rhymes) yet
more idiosyncratic.
The changes he's gone through in the last several years have
been about shedding jive affectations, hewing to a deeper, more
personal eccentricity, and then enlarging his vocabulary to express it. For one
thing, he's parted ways with Bones Howe, who was in general a wonderful
producer for Waits. But Howe's gorgeous string arrangements increasingly brought
out or overembellished a maudlin streak that weakened Waits's work,
particularly his singing (already handicapped with a consonant-gobbling rasp and
a three-note range). Producing himself has given Waits the challenge
of reconceiving the sound of his music, and he's met it with
imagination, absorbing Captain Beefheart's truncated Dada blues, Lord
Buckley's sound-effects-and -all storytelling, and Van Dyke Parks's penchant for
odd orchestrations. His road band, for instance, features a guitarist who
plays trombone, a horn player cum violinist, two demon drummers, and
accordion maestro William Schimmel (a bizarre apparition in his own right).
At the Beacon, Waits and band skipped the hitbound "Downtown
Train" and concentrated on precisely the weirdo, jagged pieces like "Jockey Full
of Bourbon" and "16 Shells from a Thirty-Ought-Six" that I wasn't sure could
be reproduced live. Waits not only reproduced them, he made them into
more savage, more expressionistic, more monumental slabs of sound.
He's clearly been picking up tips on performance, too, maybe from doing
three movies with Francis Ford Coppola, maybe from witnessing the effect of his
music in the sensational Off-Broadway production of Balm in Gilead
by Steppenwolf Theater Company (which will produce his stage musical
Frank's Wild Years in Chicago next spring). In any case, he's definitely honing
his own spiky blend of rock and theater -- if Springsteen's stadium show
made him a rock'n'roll Romeo, Waits at the Beacon was a cabaret Caliban. Along
with his two latest records, the concert showed him pulling together a
decade's worth of artistic advances along several fronts -- as a writer, musician,
and performer -- and that's the Waits I've been waiting for.
Village Voice, December 3, 1985
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