Singer-songwriter Tom Waits is being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Monday night. I don’t know how it happened, but I’m thrilled. He’s been my good musical companion for 30 years. More.
It’s something I never expected. Like the Browns winning the Super Bowl. Actually, it’s more like the Indians winning the Super Bowl.
In 1975, everybody in my college dorm was listening to this new guy named Springsteen. Except for one guy on the hall who played stand-up bass. He had the Tom Waits double-live album, “Nighthawks at the Diner.”
I was dumbstruck from the first note.
Waits has always been out of time and place in the world of rock and pop music. While I was playing Led Zeppelin albums, Waits was a beatnik weirdo with an uncanny gift for gritty yet graceful lyrics and heart-moving melody. His songs, “grand weepers and grim reapers” are late-night narratives about drifters, dreamers and three-time losers. His compositions have a seamy, cinematic quality.
And Waits is always the sly wisecracker in song or onstage.
I was late for his show at the Agora that summer and wound up walking in the front door with him and his young lady companion. They were coming from a famous Cleveland fleabag called the Sterling Hotel. He owned the packed club that night. The raging crowd dug him hard and raucous.
There was a song on “Heartattack and Vine” called “On the Nickel” about the skid row bums who lived on Fifth Street in Los Angeles. It was sad, sweet, and soulful. Ripped my guts out. It brims with poetic compassion. The album’s title track was the other side of the Waits coin, a raging, barnburner about the furious joys of addiction, madness and violence.
Tom Waits is like Charles Bukowski meets Louie Armstrong. And they get drunk with Rodney Dangerfield.
On some albums he’s pushed the boundaries of songwriting and recording into avant-garde gear-grinding that’s hard to follow. But in 1988 he brought a show called “Big Time” downtown to the Hanna. Just before it closed. The performance was music and poetry. It was bizarre theater. It was Waits singing through a bull horn on a stage illuminated only by the light bulb from an open refrigerator. Anyone there that night will tell you: It was trash vaudeville transcendent.
And as always, underhandedly hilarious.
I consider the 1999 Tom Waits album “Mule Variations” his finest effort. Check the telescopic imagery in these lyrics from “Take It With Me”:
In a land there’s a town, and in that town there’s a house
And in that house there’s a woman
And in that woman there’s a heart I love
I’m gonna take it with me when I go.
Genius, right?
There’s a preponderance of Rock and Roll Hall of Famers who are in a decidedly post-career phase. The great thing about Waits is that his best work is still ahead.
Last week I was on YouTube listening to various Waits songs to refresh my mind and soul. There was an oft-repeated comment on there.
“If God had a wallet, there’d be a picture of Tom Waits inside it.”
I don’t know who wrote that. But I wish it was me.
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2 users responded in this post
Waits has always been out of time and place in the world of rock and pop music.
Tom Waits is like Charles Bukowski meets Louie Armstrong.
If God had a wallet, there’d be a picture of Tom Waits inside it.”
I don’t know who wrote that. But I wish it was me
Tre frasi da incorniciare in un articolo bellissimo. GRANDE TOMMONE &…..GRAZIE BUZZ!
…………AUUUUGH!!!!
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la semana musical…
The King of Limbs – Radiohead
Space is Only Noise – Nicolas Jaar
Underneath the pine – Toro Y Moi
Mind Bokeh – Bibio
Andorra – Caribou
Swim – Caribou
Soul Station – Hank Mobley
We’re New Here – Gil Scott-Heron / Jamie Smith
Dear Science – TV On The Radio
Space Oddity – David Bowie
More Songs about Buildings and Food – Talking Heads
Black City – Matthew Dear
Alligator – The National
High Violet – The National
Field Commander Cohen – Leonard Cohen
Build a Rocket Boys – Elbow
Let England Shake – P.J. Harvey
Smoke Ring for my Halo – Kurt Vile
Dye it Blonde – Smith Westerns
Collapse Into Now – R.E.M.
Yuck – Yuck
The Fool / Exquisite Corpse EP – Warpaint
Brothers – The Black Keys
Inspiration Information III – Mulatu Astatke & The Heliocentrics
Porgy and Bess – Miles Davis
This is happening – LCD Soundsystem
Ravedeath 1972 – Tim Hecker
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