A Couple more articles
Mike Cox
attached below.
I also read a review of the new CDs in the Ottawa Citizen. The reviewer was
critical of TW citing the new music is too much of what he has done before.
He called the words to Flowers Grave "Trite" He gave Blood Money a higher
rating than Alice. Lots of dumb comments in the article but great praise
for Tom in general.
Here is the Globe & Mail article...
A double shot of Waits
Back with two new albums, the whisky-voiced artist remains one of today's
most lauded songwriters. Just don't tell him he's made a difference, writes
CARL WILSON
By CARL WILSON
Tuesday, May 7, 2002 - Print Edition, Page R1
There was this propaganda poster in Russia in the thirties," Tom Waits
recites: " 'Today, you play jazz. Tomorrow, you will betray your country.' "
Many yesterdays ago, the 52-year-old musician did play jazz, perched
behind a piano and a bottle while string and horn sections dressed his
busted bebop ballads in rumpled suits and ties. Today, he builds musical
bombs to lacerate the soul, melodic conundrums from the global salvage
yards, as heard on the two separate albums he releases today, Alice and
Blood Money.
Tunes to plot subversion by, certainly. But the day we speak, world
news is grim and Waits is wondering if there's a deeper betrayal in singing
songs for a living. And I want desperately to convince him otherwise.
These first new albums since his Mule Variations in 1999 collect songs
from two postmodern operas Waits created with his wife, Kathleen Brennan,
and director Robert Wilson at the Thalia Theatre in Hamburg. Wilson's
balletic plays were easy to write for, he says from his long-time rural
roost in northern California: "It was already music for the eyes." But it
was wearing to have other people singing the songs. "They either elevate it
or they butcher it, very little in between." Recording well, it seems, is
the best revenge.
Alice draws on a 1992 show based on Alice in Wonderland and its
author's real-life fixation on little Alice Liddell. It is mostly parlour
music, so delicate and sepia-toned it seems to issue from a ghostly
Victrola, which Waits corrodes with the drip of his famous rust-bucket
vocals.
Blood Money lives mostly at the harsher end of the Waits emotional
scale. From Wilson's adaptation of Georg Buchner's Woyzeck, which comes to
New York next fall, it's the tale of a soldier who goes insane after he is
played false by the army and his girlfriend. It screeches and roars through
rhythmic arrangements for pump organ, sax, bells, bass, drums and a
four-foot-long seed pod from the Indonesian Botang tree that Waits's
musicians shake like a baby rattle from hell. And its message is brutally
clear: Misery is the River of the World ("everybody row!"), Everything Goes
to Hell, "life's a mistake all day long . . . you'll never get out alive."
From outside, Waits looks like a man with an enviable marriage, career
and even hobby (acting in films like Jim Jarmusch's Down by Law, Francis
Ford Coppola's Dracula, Robert Altman's Short Cuts). So where does all the
pessimism come from? Is it merely theatrical?
His reply takes me aback. "The whole world's on fire right now," Waits
says. "And it makes you wonder what you're doing making jewellery for the
ears. When was the last time you sat in a room and everyone sang the same
song? . . . There's a lot of things that have to happen first before you
turn on a record player. You need to be warm and fed. "I don't doubt the
power of it, but I think an overinflated sense of yourself and the value of
what you do would lead you to believe writing a song is going to change the
world."
I'm speechless. Here I am on the phone with Tom Waits -- a scenario I
would have dreamed of at age 14 -- and he's telling me his work is useless?
Of course, anyone who doesn't work for Doctors Without Borders feels
irrelevant sometimes. But Waits certainly changed my world. As a small-town
teenager, stumbling on him led me to bop and free jazz, punk rock, country
crooners and even Harry Partch, the mid-century hobo composer. He pointed me
to old movies, surrealism and railroad lore; his acrobatics with American
vernacular stretched the possibilities of words.
"I'm interested in the migration of seeds," Waits says. "How different
influences wind up commingling and then become part of the lexicon."
He was my crowd's tutor in the lyricism of liquor and tobacco. We were
fascinated with his failed romance with Rickie Lee Jones, their songs
signalling to each other in code, as we worked out what grand adult passion
was about, how life is turned into art. And of course, his songs became our
envoys of romance, our solace in heartbreak. I ended up wearing battered
fedoras right into university.
Did it matter that it was Waits instead of Bon Jovi? I think so. His
mix of bleak intellect and tender feeling taught us that wallowing is about
burrowing all the way through an emotion, to its absurd underbelly.
What we didn't grasp was that the wastrel who roomed at Hollywood's
Tropicana Hotel, dreaming in film noir, was practically a kid himself. On
his 1973 debut Closing Time, he was 23. He only sounded like a wise old
sailor, as his youthful personas and bad habits got tried on in public.
"Most people get their information about you from things you tell
them," Waits says. "You can tell them your dad was Nikolai Tesla and you
were raised by Helen Keller and slept with John Wilkes Booth, and they'll
say, 'Wow, no kiddin'?'
"A lot of people would garner from my songs that I eat dirt and leaves
and drink gasoline and sleep under a car," he says, laughing. "Yeah, that's
all true."
And then, boom: He got married, quit drinking, fired his manager, had
babies, and put out 1983's radical Swordfishtrombones. Some fans balked; my
home-town bookseller warned me, "It's terrible. Totally devoid of Waitsian
emotion." (How many people become adjectives by age 33?) In fact, it blew
off the barn doors.
Swordfishtrombones opened with a coal-mine clank and a gruff bark:
"There's a world/ going on/ underground!" As this ragbag album of marimba
mambos and sinking-ship sea shanteys announced, Waits was going to lead
listeners down rabbit holes and give guided tours. Over the next two
decades -- through Rain Dogs, Frank's Wild Years, Bone Machine and his movie
appearances, not to mention Rod Stewart's sterilized hit version of Downtown
Train -- his following swelled. Mule Variations sold more than a million
copies.
It was his new wife and collaborator who pushed him to pursue his more
arcane urges. Because Brennan shuns the limelight, the former Hollywood
script consultant's contribution is underrated, but Waits calls her "the
brains behind Pa," without whom he's nothing. He writes from the newspaper,
she writes from dreams. He washes, she dries. Even in marriage, Waits gives
us an unconventional model for us to aspire to.
Besides their creative progeny, the couple has three live ones, Kelle
(now in college), Casey and Sullivan. No word yet on whether the Waits kids
have artistic aspirations or are fleeing to accountancy and police school.
Waits likes his privacy, and has cut back on live shows (he may play a few
major cities to support Alice and Blood Money) and media. "There are too
many magazines about people. Why don't we take more interest in the lives of
animals? I guess it's because we dominate," he sighs. "We don't care."
What he does enjoy is recording. "In order to put something living
into it you have to be very agile," he says. "It's like sneaking up on a
bird. Most people record the feathers and throw away the bird." To avoid
that, he says, "You want musicians that will eat with their hands and drink
out of a creek without a cup. It's kind of like method acting with your
instrument. . . . I'll say, 'Play like your hair is on fire, Charles,' and
you want someone to nod wisely as if he's been asked to do that before and
succeeded."
And Waits always drags in his collection of outrageous instruments.
"I like bringing things in that I've never recorded before -- things
that have never been recorded before."
On Blood Money, he solos on a 57-whistle, 1929 circus calliope. Where
did he get it? "All these calliope guys live in Iowa, for some reason," he
says, "and they're a grumpy group. If you don't know your calliopes, they
want nothing to do with you. I made the mistake of describing the whistles
as 'pipes' -- and the guy hung up on me!
"They're earsplitting loud. They suggest that you play it with
earplugs, but I think, what's the point of that? You're supposed to hear it
from five miles away. . . . When you depress a key you feel this whoosh and
this pressure, that tells you you are allowing a great volume of pressurized
air into a chamber. It's like you're pulling on a lunch whistle at a
factory. Then it opens up and screams -- " And at this point, to my
unutterable delight, Waits unleashes a monkey howl.
Alice's chamber nocturnes, meanwhile, rely on the Stroh violin, with a
metal cone attached to its bridge for amplification. The resulting sound is
a tintype image, half violin and half Satchmo cornet, which Waits again
illustrates vocally. (Tom. Waits. Is. Singing. On. My. Phone.) It's ideal
for tunes such as Lost in the Harbor, an exquisite parable of the mutual
misconceptions between two communities.
"That's the Humpty Dumpty situation, looking over one side of the wall
and the other -- 'over here,' 'over there,' " Waits says. "It's East
Berlin-West Berlin, Palestine and Israel, Northern Ireland. That [enemies]
are really kind of neighbours as well." The harbour is the meeting point.
"It's about conflict resolution."
Atypically, it even includes a moral: "The wall won't come down/ Till
they're no longer afraid of themselves," Waits sings. "If you don't believe
me, ask yourselves." And there's the purpose he's looking for. His work
proves by example that there's nothing to be gained by avoiding your own
darkest, weirdest, most sentimental impulses. He makes you want to become
your own most improbable invention.
That lesson has influenced countless young musicians, from Beck to Ron
Sexsmith to Tricky. "It's nice to see some of what you've put out there
returning," Waits admits. "It raises my self-esteem -- to know that you're
going into the blood system and giving someone a cold."
From experience, he knows failed imitation is how artists discover
their own voices, even their own clichés. Lord knows Waits has his.
"You need to free yourself from the confines of what you think you
should be doing," he says, "and explore your limitations as well as the
heights." That applies to any struggle, including the one to not stutter at
your idol on the telephone.
"I try not to let any of it go to my head," he demurs, "but sometimes
that's impossible. I have my own life, and then I do this concentrated stuff
of making a record and going on the road and doing interviews. That's my
job." Then, one last time, Waits surprises me: "Some people work in the
sewer, some people do tight-area excavations. We've all got something. You
write for a newspaper -- that's pretty cool. I bet you never expected when
you were a kid for that to happen."
Man, can he say that again.
Dennis Lieberson
opened up the most with an apparently young new writer. Thanks for sharing
it!
D.
"Mike Cox" <mc...@nwon.com> wrote in message
news:pOeD8.48989$GLp1...@news01.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com...