“A Guy in an Ashcan Sending Messages”

August 26, 2023 3:54 PM

Forty years on from the magnificent album sequence that began with Swordfishtrombones, collaborators and fans including Jim Jarmusch and Thom Yorke discuss Waits’s journey from bar-room balladeer to conductor of the ultimate junkyard orchestra from ‘All these bulletproof songs, one after another’: remembering Tom Waits’s extraordinary mid-career trilogy [Grauniad; ungated]

Swordfishtrombones
Rain Dogs
Franks Wild Years

TOM WAITS ALBUMS RANKED FROM WORST TO BEST [Aphoristic Album Reviews]
Every Tom Waits Album Ranked [The Hard Times]
The 30 Best Tom Waits Songs [Spin]

posted by chavenet (51 comments total)

#2 SWORDFISHTROMBONES
1983
Tom Waits went through a major career shift between 1980’s Heartattack and Vine and 1983’s Swordfishtrombones. He left Asylum Records for Island, and he married Kathleen Brennan, a script analyst. Brennan had adventurous music taste and introduced Waits to outsider music like Captain Beefheart. Waits transitioned from conventional piano and guitar arrangements to utilising unusual textures like the harmonium, glass harmonica, bagpipes, and marimba, sometimes reminiscent of American composer and instrument maker Harry Partch. The tapestry of junkyard sounds would continue throughout the rest of his career, and Swordfishtrombones is the pivotal record of Waits’ discography.

Kathleen Brennan helped Tom self actualize, up to that point he had been play acting. Love all his stuff but SFT was when he became legendary.
posted by Meatbomb at 4:48 PM on August 26, 2023 [19 favorites]

I am so glad that I was lucky enough to see Tom Waits live TWICE during my 1999-2009 Atlanta residency. I was a barista for most of that decade so it was A LOT of tip money saved to see a musician I consider my patron saint. (Especially since it seemed like I would never get to see him live.)

Rain Dogs is my favourite album of all time. My then-fiance (now husband) commissioned art based on "Tango Til They're Sore"as a wedding gift to me. For each five years of our marriage, we have continued to commission art from that same artist based on a Tom Waits song. Year Five anniversary was "Hold On." Year Ten anniversary was "Black Wings." And next year, Year Fifteen will be "Telephone Call from Istanbul."

Yeah, I fuggin LOVE Tom Waits.
posted by Kitteh at 5:41 PM on August 26, 2023 [36 favorites]

I don't know why no one ever talks about The Black Rider, but that's the one that's branded on my brain.
posted by phooky at 6:16 PM on August 26, 2023 [15 favorites]

They overlooked Falling Down, the only studio track on Big Time, also oozing his Frank O'Brien persona, before his carnival orchestra sound on The Black Rider. Covered by Scarlett Johansson, among others.
posted by Brian B. at 6:45 PM on August 26, 2023 [4 favorites]

My first knowledge of Tom Waits even existing was in the Jim Jarmusch film Down By Law, which I saw as part of a subscription package to the only art house cinema in my area in southern New Mexico. That movie opened a lot of doors for me, including Jarmusch, Waits, and Roberto Begnini.
posted by hippybear at 6:52 PM on August 26, 2023 [10 favorites]

Can an opinion be a a hot take if you've been holding it for 20 years? If so, my hot take is that I love his musicals best: The Black Rider, Blood Money, and Alice.

Other than that, Tom Waits is one of the artists where I don't know which songs go with which albums because I started listening to him post Summer of Napster.
posted by betweenthebars at 6:53 PM on August 26, 2023 [5 favorites]

Weird. The Black Rider was the one I went back to the least. Of the however many Tom Waits albums I bought (Alice and Blood Money are both in that stack), I ripped all of them to put on my phone except The Black Rider.

Frank's Wild Years, now, that one's on repeat in the back of my head for probably the rest of my life.
posted by Mister Moofoo at 7:06 PM on August 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

My introduction to Tom Waits was through a friend, the guy who was my plus-one for my brother's wedding. The wedding was in Vermont, and I drove us the whole way there from New York and back, in a rented car.

I was doing all the driving because my friend doesn't have a license - so he offered to instead play DJ. And about halfway through our trip up to Vermont, he put on RAIN DOGS, and I heard it for the first time.

We played it twice on the way up to Vermont. However, we did not listen to it on the way home - because at some point I had secretly swiped it and hidden it in my suitcase, because I needed to burn a copy of myself before "innocently" calling my friend to say "weird, guess what I found in my luggage!" and returning it.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:27 PM on August 26, 2023 [7 favorites]

For those of you, like me, wondering if a person were dead, Google continues to be shit. Second result was "Tom Waits dead 2023: Singer Killed by Celebrity Death Hoax"

Not linking because bullshit

https://en.mediamass.net/people/tom-waits/deathhoax.html
posted by I paid money to offer this... insight? at 7:40 PM on August 26, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'd heard random Tom Waits songs over the years and never liked him.

Then one night in the early 90's I was on tour driving through the night to somewhere near Olympia, Washington when my friend put Bone Machine in the tape deck. There was just the dark, and the rain, and the trees, and this incredible music.

It was (and is) like nothing I've ever heard. I was hooked from the first bars of The Earth Died Screaming. It was like discovering a new universe of music.

So I got to be a big fan and ended getting a VHS copy of Big Time which I watched approximately 1.5 million times. That was my first exposure to some of the music on the three albums which are the subject of this post, and the Big Time versions are still my favorites (maybe just because that's where I encountered them first).

But I'd never heard the song Frank's Wild Years until a friend lent me a mix tape. I was driving north on the Hollywood Freeway when the track came on...
posted by DrumsIntheDeep at 7:40 PM on August 26, 2023 [9 favorites]

Hang on, I'm realizing I was introduced to ONE of Tom's songs earlier; when "Innocent When you Dream" was in the movie Smoke.

Also, just for fun - there was a throwaway cold-open once on the show NCIS where the character Ziva David is undercover as a nightclub singer, and halfway through her act some shit goes down and she grabs her gun and jumps off the stage to handle it or something. Apparently they filmed a take where they let Cote de Pablo (who played Ziva) get through the whole song; a jazzy cover of Tempation.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:48 PM on August 26, 2023 [3 favorites]

Big Time is currently streaming on Amazon Prime. If you haven't revisited it in a while, it's worth it.
posted by MrVisible at 8:05 PM on August 26, 2023 [2 favorites]

Let us not forget Fishing With John, Episode 2
posted by staggernation at 9:09 PM on August 26, 2023 [9 favorites]

The black rider is fantastic. So many great songs hidden away in there; Lucky Day is probably my favorite, if not only for the bridge:

Now when I was a boy
My daddy sat me on his knee
And he told me
He told me many things
And he said sone
There's a lot of things in this world
You're gonna have no use for
And when you get blue
And you've lost all your dreams
There's nothin' like a campfire
And a can of beans!

But Rain Dogs was the one I heard first, while being antisocial at a party in Boston, and it completely flipped my head.

Edna Milton in a drop dead suit... Dutch pink in a downtown train... Two dollar pistol but the gun won't shoot... I'm in the middle of a pouring rain. Sixteen men in a dead man's chest, and I've been drinking from a broken cup... Two pairs of pants and a mohair vest... I'm full of bourbon I can't stand up.
posted by kaibutsu at 10:42 PM on August 26, 2023 [4 favorites]

The Black Rider is also probably my favourite as well. It's not that _every_ song is great, but both that the highs are so high, and the album as a whole fits together so welll.

Bone machine might be next, but Franks Wild Years is up there too.
posted by vernondalhart at 11:20 PM on August 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

I don't know if I'll ever get to see Tom Waits live, but I will always cherish seeing the 2004 London production of The Black Rider with Marianne Faithfull and Mary Margaret O'Hara.
posted by GeorgeBickham at 12:53 AM on August 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

I was going to try to sum up what listening to Swordfishtrombones was like, but I absolutely can’t do better than Ian Rankin in the linked article:

I first heard it on a friend’s stereo system, the pair of us transfixed by what was happening in front of our ears. It felt to me as if a vaudeville show was taking place in a scrapyard, the music whirling and clanging, Waits presiding over it all like a bruised but keen-eyed master of ceremonies. Rain Dogs added extra textures and refinements, laying its (marked) cards on the table with its opening track, Singapore, a novel contained within two and a half minutes of controlled musical mayhem.

I saw him perform in Edinburgh a few years ago and remember him pointing out wistfully that “9th and Hennepin” had become unrecognisably up market since he wrote the song. posted by rongorongo at 1:16 AM on August 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'd love to see that art kitteh.

They'll paint the donley blue if you pay.
posted by Meatbomb at 2:37 AM on August 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

A Soldier's Things
Shore Leave
16 Shells from a 30-ought-6
posted by Meatbomb at 2:48 AM on August 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'm realizing I was introduced to ONE of Tom's songs earlier; when "Innocent When you Dream" was in the movie Smoke.

Same here. It wasn't much later that a friend gave me a copy of "Small Change" and I was hooked.

I think Thom Yorke summed it up nicely for me:

"Every track was a short movie set in a mysterious, circus-like down-at-heel America that I had almost no understanding of, with different characters both in the lyrics and the instruments, an entire universe revealed to me for a few minutes only to drop me at the other end of the block – no idea how I’d got there."

I was shopping for school supplies with my daughter last week, and we came across the pencils and I saw the name Ticonderoga, and then I was immediately transported into the body of that homesick sailor in Hong Kong.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 4:48 AM on August 27, 2023 [6 favorites]

It felt to me as if a vaudeville show was taking place in a scrapyard

One thing I absolutely love when people write about Tom Waits is that they always use similes and metaphors that are gloriously baroque. A playwright I knew describes his voice as "like a bear with a cold" and Tom as "made of whiskey, spiders, and old hats". Critic Daniel Durchholz said his voice sounded like "it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car."
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:49 AM on August 27, 2023 [22 favorites]

Well, this is an interesting artifact: this is from 2010, and it looks like it was part of a musicians-covering-each-others'-stuff project that never really got off the ground. It looks like Peter Gabriel was approached to do a video of himself singing and playing a song by some other songwriter he especially admired; I can only assume that other musicians were going to be asked to do the same, but this is the only such video I can find.

Peter chose Tom's In The Neighborhood off SFT. And while Peter doesn't have quite the same grizzled-and-hoarse note to his voice that Tom has, he does come kinda close.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:55 AM on August 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

Here's the full rundown about that Peter Gabriel track from the Tom Waits website. It was created as part of The Voice Project, which works to get imprisoned musicians and artists out of jail.
posted by hippybear at 8:21 AM on August 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

Right, but I don't see any other evidence that any other musician participated in what looks like it was planned to be a larger-scale public-awareness kind of thing, after Peter covered "In The Neighborhood".
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:57 AM on August 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

Early on in our relationship, my now-husband put on Rain Dogs to see if I would like it. I realised as he put it on that he actually looked nervous. I loved it and I'm not sure he would have stayed with me if I hadn't!
posted by altolinguistic at 9:01 AM on August 27, 2023 [4 favorites]

"For the better part of a year after its release, Franks Wild Years was the nightly go-to pump-up album for me and my roommate."

We used to sometimes do that with Small Change and it does tend to foreshadow a specific kind of night.

It's amazing how many absolute legends are on his sessions. It's like Steely Dan for hobos.
posted by credulous at 10:12 AM on August 27, 2023 [5 favorites]

I can't remember who said this (Merlin Mann?), but "Tom Waits" is a character played by Tom Waits.
posted by neuron at 10:12 AM on August 27, 2023 [6 favorites]

My introduction to Waits was through an artifact of a drunken meeting of the minds with Paul Westerberg and The Replacements. Bob Mehr wrote about it in Trouble Boys, the biography of the band:

"The band got together with Waits and his wife and collaborator Kathleen Brennan at the Formosa Café in West Hollywood. Though Waits and Westerberg could both be shy in such situations, they hit it off grandly. Waits was particularly enamored of [guitarist Slim] Dunlap, who seemed like a character straight out of one of his own songs.

The band invited Waits back to Cherokee to hear their new tracks. “Waits’ wife was with him, and he was being really mild-mannered,” recalled Matt Wallace [producer of Don’t Tell a Soul]. “And the band is drinking a lot, of course.” Around midnight, Brennan got tired and taxied home. The moment she left Waits reached for a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and began chugging. “And he just turned into Tom Waits,” said Wallace. “It was like Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde.”

"Date to Church" wound up, oddly, as a B-Side to the Mats' lead single off their next album. Warner/Sire also slapped it into Just Say Mao, one of their wacky compilation CDs meant to introduce listeners to new artists. (Those CDs and the content chosen for them are another topic altogether.) Writing credits were attributed to "Reverend Backwash".

Other cuts from this session were thought to be lost but then gradually surfaced over the years and then all showed up in "Dead Man's Pop", a cutting room floor scrape-the-spatula box set from 2019.

If Only You Were Lonely
Lowdown Monkey Blues
We Know the Night
I Can Help (Billy Swan cover)
posted by JoeZydeco at 10:28 AM on August 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

I have probably listened to Nighthawks at the Diner more than any other album - other albums have songs I've played more, but that one is what I put on if I feel like listening to a full album. That and Rain Dogs and Blood Money, since both came out when I was in my peak-Waits phase.
posted by coffeecat at 10:34 AM on August 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

Love seeing that other people appreciate The Black Rider.

No one reads the comments down here, right? I've spent my life saying I started listening to Tom Waits after finding some used CDs at Rhino Records, definitely not from Dracula, so I'm going to keep going with that.
posted by betweenthebars at 11:27 AM on August 27, 2023 [6 favorites]

As an aside, I'm partial to this Waits pastiche by Over the Rhine:

Don't Wait For Tom
posted by slappy_pinchbottom at 11:47 AM on August 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

I don't think I've told this story here before, but I might have. If I have, it's been some years, so here it is. A friend is a big fan of Tom Waits. Years ago, this friend and me would often sit at a Huddle House and eat/web browse late at night.

There was an internet-enabled jukebox in this place, which had some interesting features. Like, after you played a song, it put up a little game a lot like whack-a-mole, and if you got a high enough score you'd get an extra credit. I never lost that game. I don't play music on jukeboxes, but my friend did, so after putting in a song he'd let me know, I'd stand up, infallibly earn a free credit, and he'd use it.

Being an internet-enabled jukebox, it had a huge selection of songs. My friend discovered that there was a 45-minute Tom Waits spoken word track on it. That was terrific: it was just the right mood for hanging out at Huddle House. That was important, because I'm a bit sensitive to loud music, and the wrong track can be actively annoying, and in Brunswick GA there's a lot of people who like the wrong sort of track. (Mournful white guy singing about how much he loves a bar? Pass.)

One night we had come in and had been sitting for a while. When we got there we had done the customary thing at the jukebox, and sat down to eat. Shortly thereafter, a guy comes in with a friend. He looks at the jukebox and audibly enthuses to his companion, hey, it's one of those internet jukeboxes! He excitedly put in some money to queue up his songs, tickled with the very concept.

What he didn't know was that my friend had put in his 45 minute Tom Waits track, then another couple of miscellaneous tracks, then had put in the 45 minute track again, just to make sure it was a nice ambiance for the evening. We finished eating and paid, and as we left the guy was getting more and more heated that his music wasn't coming up. The waitperson was just indicating to him that we had put those songs in as we were exiting the place....

A few days later, we were entering the Huddle House. That guy was sitting there waiting. As soon as he saw us come in, he jumped up and ran to the jukebox and put several songs in. I don't remember what they were, they weren't bad, and they certainly weren't 45 minutes. It was pretty amusing.
posted by JHarris at 12:30 PM on August 27, 2023 [9 favorites]

MetaFilter: like Steely Dan for hobos.
posted by chavenet at 12:50 PM on August 27, 2023 [12 favorites]

Love threads like this. I don't have any fab Tom Waits stories, just noting that since it's a comp the 1991 collection Tom Waits: The Early Years Vol.1, a group of demos he recorded as a 21-year-old in 1971, doesn't make any of the ranked lists above, and it should. Some of its songs (and some from the also great Vol. 2) appear on his early records in more fleshed-out versions, but as much as I adore the rainy clonking baroque carnival stuff, I also really love "Rocking Chair", "Had Me A Girl", "Looks Like I'm Up Shit Creek Again" and a bunch of others on those two early, very stripped-down but still wonderful records.
posted by mediareport at 2:15 PM on August 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

I can't remember who said this (Merlin Mann?), but "Tom Waits" is a character played by Tom Waits.

*Snerk* Someone once commented in another thread making the case that Tom Waits was a Time Lord. They also shared a link to a drawing someone did of Tom in a beat-up car, suspended in space, with a license plate reading "TAR-D15" or something like that. Tom had a ring on his finger shooting out a laser beam in lieu of a sonic screwdriver, and was leaning out the driver's side window and addressing the viewer: "Hop in, kid, she's bigger on the inside than she looks."

Also, in the FanFare threads about Buster Scruggs, someone speculated that for the sequence where Tom played an old timey prospector, that the filmmakers likely just followed Tom around with a camera on a Tuesday instead of actually staging things or writing a script.

In both cases - Tom as gold rush prospector hermit or Tom as Time Lord - the in-thread opinion of each theory was "yeah, you know what, that tracks."
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 2:37 PM on August 27, 2023 [7 favorites]

I fully credit Tom Waits with saving my life. Throughout my twenties and half of my thirties I struggled with severe and untreated depression. I self medicated a lot and seriously contemplated suicide. There were lots of nights when I didn’t want to wake up in the morning and almost did something about it. But Tom always had something to say about it that told me to Hold On and helped me through my own wild years. Hard to choose a favorite album because I feel like they all had something that spoke to me at the right time. So thank you Tom for helping me see it through.
posted by skookumsaurus rex at 4:38 PM on August 27, 2023 [14 favorites]

I had a friend who ran into Tom Waits by surprise, coming out of a diner. He was a fan but totally blanked on what to say, so he said the first thing that came to mind, which was to ask if he knew where he could get a bullhorn around there. Tom Waits said that Radio Shack made a pretty good bullhorn and told him where the nearest one was, then carried on with his day.
posted by chimpsonfilm at 5:00 PM on August 27, 2023 [9 favorites]

skookumsaurus rex: I also credit a Tom Waits project with saving my life. He was part of the film Wristcutters: A Love Story (cw:suicide) And that film's deadpan and matter of fact approach to the subject, and TW's humor, really helped when I couldn't talk to anyone else. Oh! Someone made this movie, so someone else gets it! And that's all I needed and then I moved towards fine. And Tom Waits helped!
posted by indexy at 6:02 PM on August 27, 2023 [6 favorites]

And the more I see this movie about wrist cutting
The closer I am to fiii-iiii-iiiine yeah
posted by hippybear at 6:19 PM on August 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

> It looks like Peter Gabriel was approached to do a video of himself singing and playing a song by some other songwriter he especially admired; I can only assume that other musicians were going to be asked to do the same,

There was a pair of albums
Scratch my Back, covers by Peter Gabriel
And I'll Scratch Yours, covers of Peter Gabriel

Everyone who was covered was invited to cover, but some didn't; in Radiohead's case because they didn't like the cover of their song. I really like Peter Simon's Biko

> production of The Black Rider

I saw that in San Francisco. We had front row seats, right against the orchestra & got to see the Ones Martenot & pump organ as well as various scrapyard percussion played up close. Singular experience.
posted by ASCII Costanza head at 6:35 PM on August 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

There was a pair of albums

This track isn't from that project. I looked. It's an interesting little thing. It's also not on Gabriel's Flotsam And Jetsam gigantic assembly of errant tracks from across his career. This is a genuinely new discovery for me.
posted by hippybear at 6:39 PM on August 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

Oh, huh, different project—Stereogum

Lately the overarching narrative with respect to Peter Gabriel's been his dialogue with other artists, be it musically or literally. This cover has nothing to do with Scratch My Back, the set of orchestral reinterpretations he released earlier this year. It's for the Voice Project, a non-profit project that creates a "chain of songs," each covered-artist then tagged to cover...

track listing of Home Recordings Volume 1
posted by ASCII Costanza head at 6:50 PM on August 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

Thank you ASCII Costanza head. Great research there. I hadn't been able to dig that up.
posted by hippybear at 6:59 PM on August 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

Sorry, I just keep on thinking of more things to the add to the Tom Waits Appreciation celebration here.

....So: friends of my father's started this blues club called "The Shaboo Inn" in my hometown, in the 70s. My hometown is pretty much the ass-end of nowhere in Eastern Connecticut, but the caliber of talent they managed to pull in was more like what you'd get at CBGB's. And in fact, a lot of the same acts played there as did in CBGB's - it was one of the dates on that very first tour The Police did before they recorded their first album, Talking Heads played there, and so did The Cars, Aerosmith, Dire Straits, Elvis Costello, Tom Petty...Kiss was GOING to play there but the pyrotechnics got a little too complicated, and there was a rumor Bob Dylan had planned to play there once as a surprise gig but got stuck in traffic somewhere outside Hartford. It was also a regular stop on the blues club circuit, with Taj Mahal, Bonnie Raitt, Howlin' Wolf, B.B. King, Muddy Waters, Joe Cocker...

Tom Waits played there a couple times, and there is even a bootleg of one of his sets (the album title is "The Heart Of The Shaboo Night"). Apparently, his first-ever set was a bit of a slow night with a small crowd, but Tom went ahead anyway. And about halfway through the set, one of the club's pet cats wandered on and jumped up onto the piano keyboard in the middle of the set, and started walking across the keys; Tom was tremendously amused and jammed with what the cat was doing. And after his set he was discussing things with the owner, "Lefty" - and said that he really liked the club, even though it had been a slow night. "The whole vibe, the cat - it was great."

The next time he was back the show went better - but as they discussed the show after, Tom told Lefty he liked the prior gig. "Wait, Tom, the crowd was way better this time and the show was a lot smoother." "Yeah, but...the vibe was different. No cat either."
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:35 PM on August 27, 2023 [10 favorites]

I was shopping for school supplies with my daughter last week, and we came across the pencils and I saw the name Ticonderoga, and then I was immediately transported into the body of that homesick sailor in Hong Kong.
The Guardian article mentions that "Johnsburg Illinois", Kathleen Brennan'a home-town. was written by Waits about her. I believe that puts her as the muse behind "Shore Leave" also:-

...I wondered how the same moon outside over this Chinatown fair
Could look down on Illinois and find you there

Interesting to think of Swordfishtrombones: quirky, joyfully experimental and lyrically honest, as a token of love between the couple.
posted by rongorongo at 10:58 PM on August 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

Tom Waits got me a job once.

I was working my first renaissance festival and I was walking by a leatherworker's shop during the week when there weren't any tourists around, and he was playing Tom Waits so I complimented his musical taste. We talked for a while, and I told him I was living in a school bus down by the horse corral, and he said I should come by some night. Which led to some raucous evenings drinking and listening to Tom Waits, which led to the leatherworker offering me piecework, because his wife was too busy with the baby to help much.

So I spent a summer selling pretzels and ices during the weekend, picking grapes in the mornings during the week, and doing leatherwork while listening to Tom Waits in the afternoons. By the end of the fair I'd saved up enough to throw in on an apartment with another few rennies where we could huddle for the winter while we waited for the Georgia fair to begin.

Anyway.
posted by MrVisible at 11:30 PM on August 27, 2023 [11 favorites]

I first came across Tom Waits when watching the music videos for the Red Hot + Blue AIDS benefit album. (It’s a great album and very worth checking out, by the way; a who’s who of ‘80s and early ‘90s musicians singing their own versions of Cole Porter songs, and the accompanying videos are all done by well known filmmakers of the time.) Anyway, Tom Waits sings an absolutely wild version of “It’s All Right With Me.” It’s basically just this weird primal growl and I find it hilarious to imitate.

Soooo that was how I thought of him up until a few years later I heard his album Closing Time and I just fell in love with it. That’s my favourite album of his, though I do like songs from other albums here and there, especially “I’m Still Here,” which I find super poignant. What a talent. He’s up there with Leonard Cohen for me in terms of people with…uh, idiosyncratic voices but an incredible talent for songwriting.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 12:21 AM on August 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

Tom Waits sings an absolutely wild version of “It’s All Right With Me.” It’s basically just this weird primal growl and I find it hilarious to imitate.
This is the video. It is goofing around, but it is Tom Waits directed by Jim Jarmusch goofing around.
posted by rongorongo at 1:25 AM on August 28, 2023 [3 favorites]

So I spent a summer selling pretzels and ices during the weekend, picking grapes in the mornings during the week, and doing leatherwork while listening to Tom Waits in the afternoons. By the end of the fair I'd saved up enough to throw in on an apartment with another few rennies where we could huddle for the winter while we waited for the Georgia fair to begin.

This just sounds like a Tom Waits song all by itself.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 3:26 AM on August 28, 2023 [7 favorites]

Had the privilege of seeing Waits at the Hult Center in Eugene, Oregon on the Mule Variations tour. It was one of those rock shows that verges on the theatrical and I mean that in a complimentary way. Waits entered the hall from the back, singing "The Black Rider" through a megaphone while making his way to the stage; he performed while standing on a conductor's platform that was covered with a thick layer of dust so every foot stomp and gesture raised a small cloud, etc.

John Hodgman has a great SFT moment in his book Medallion Status. From his time as a cheese store employee, recollecting playing the album in the shop and an attractive customer's inquiry:

'And you will think, Obviously, this is the soundtrack of our imminent and deep romantic affair. Thank you for finally finding me, fellow lover of Tom Waits. I have been sending this growling, atonal, screechy birdcall out for YEARS now, hoping you would finally hear it and come to me.
But what you will actually say is, "Oh, this is the album Swordfishtrombones by Tom Waits."
And she will say, "Aha. I wanted to know what it was so that I would never accidentally buy it."
And then she will laugh and leave you alone with your jazzbo carny music for lonely boys.
That will be the first time you realize that some people do not like Tom Waits. This is OK. It is not your place in life to convince them otherwise. A job is not a place to curate culture for others or convince them vou are as strange and interesting as Elton John's percussionist. You are just there to sell the cheese.'
posted by joseph_elmhurst at 1:55 PM on August 28, 2023 [8 favorites]

A job is not a place to curate culture for others or convince them vou are as strange and interesting as Elton John's percussionist. You are just there to sell the cheese.

Oh, I beg to differ with Mr. Hodgman on that one. Back when I worked convenience stores (including the aforementioned winter before Georgia) my greatest pleasure was to introduce customers to whatever it is that I was listening to at the time. Tom Waits earned me a lot of weird looks, but got me into a lot of conversations as well. Camper Van Beethoven always got an interesting reaction out of two-in-the-morning post-bar customers. I bonded with some folks over Bob Dylan at four am.

But the most fascinating reaction that I recall was one morning when a friend of mine had lent me a John Hartford tape and I'd gotten into it. When I played it as the morning crowd came through, I interacted with an entirely different subset of the crowd. People who'd always been kind of distant lit up and wanted to talk.

And the moral of this story is that if you're in a position where you can influence peoples' musical tastes, whether that be DJ or person in charge of the music in the store for an hour a day, you have an obligation to expose your customers to a vast variety of interesting and original artists. Because a) that's the only way to make sure to have that moment of connection with all your customers, and b) it's fun.
posted by MrVisible at 3:02 PM on August 28, 2023 [5 favorites]