Tom Waits – Rock Salted

Tom Waits – Mule Variations | Review

Tom Waits – Mule Variations Anti- Records 86547-2 (1999)

Waits’ late-90s “comeback” album has aged well. After the achievement of Rain Dogs in the mid-80s, and Bone Machine in the early 90s, he largely slipped from view for a few years. His comeback positioned him as something of an elder statesman of the independent rock scene, which still had some vitality even as major labels had already started to consolidate their investments around a fairly narrow range of music that excluded stuff like this.

When David Bowie had mild resurgence a couple years prior with EART HL I NG, he seemed to draw his subject matter from watching movies on TV. Although Bowie and Waits go in much different directions in terms of genre, and only Waits leans on the use of humor, Waits’ lyrical focus has shifted to more middle-aged circumstances as well here too. Take “Come on Up to the House,” which might be viewed as one of the best rock songs about a dinner party. The lyrics, which cajole someone loaded with excuses to come over for a visit, have some great turns of phrases (like about coming down from that cross because we could use the wood). It also features orchestration that recalls the album-closing style of “Anywhere I Lay My Head” from Rain Dogs or, reaching back further, “Cripple Creek Ferry” from Neil Young‘s After the Gold Rush. As Harry Nilsson once did so well, “Cold Water” also evokes the mundane aspects of daily life, like taking a shower. And “What’s He Building?” is an eerie rock monologue in the tradition of The Velvet Underground‘s “Lady Godiva’s Operation” but with a neighborly suspicion narrative like that of the Tom Hanks film The ‘Burbs. Sure, Waits had released “In the Neighborhood” on Swordfishtrombones, but the irony of that song in muted if not absent here more than fifteen years later.

At the time the album came out, “Hold On” was the single, and it met with success. It hearkens back to the sentimental (and sometimes maudlin) side of Waits’ music—think “Tom Traubert’s Blues (Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen)” from Small Change, “Ruby’s Arms” from Heartattack and Vine, and “time” or “Blind Love” from Rain Dogs. This is something that appears elsewhere on the album too. Yet this is a softened, more mature sentimentality that stops just short of being truly maudlin. These songs work well here. The opener “Big in Japan” also tended to be liked by audiences. It has a heavier beat and more rock and roll edge to it, with some gruff histrionics. While these are solid songs, the album as a whole has much more to offer. It is really the more mature, middle-aged attitude (Waits was nearly 50 years old when it was released) that shines through in hindsight. It lacks nothing in terms of relevance and appeal to listeners of all ages.

Maybe surprisingly, this is really one of the finest full-length albums of Waits’ entire career, all told. He continued to put out some decent music later on but despite some nice highlights it was not as consistently solid at album length.

Tom Waits – Closing Time

Tom Waits – Closing Time Asylum SD 5061 (1973)

Tom Waits’ debut went in a direction he never really revisited. Only “Midnight Lullaby” points to what he would do on his next few albums, though the style is not yet fully formed. People look to “Ol’ 55” as one of his better songs, but I find it a bit ho-hum. It leans a bit too much on the prevailing “California soft rock” fad, which was in full swing at the time. That sort of sums this up. The album doesn’t always play on Waits’ strengths. So it could be said he was still finding his voice. But this album still has some charm. “Old Shoes (& Picture Postcards)” is among my favorite Waits songs — usually my only reason for returning to Closing Time.

Tom Waits – Blue Valentine

Tom Waits – Blue Valentine Asylum 6E-162 (1978)

While not Tom Waits’ most strikingly original work, his Hollywood beatnik shtick is still quite effective here. There are plenty of faux jazz ballads, a showtune, and a few intimations of his edgier eighties songwriting. He even manages to pull off the maudlin “Kentucky Avenue”. Everything seems more polished and sober than Small Change and most people find it far more inspired than Foreign Affairs. This is one of Waits’ most successful albums of the 1970s. It was also his last effort completely dedicated to this particular old time hipster musical persona. His next albums would start to take a left turn toward rogue carnival weirdness.

Tom Waits – Heartattack and Vine

Tom Waits – Heartattack and Vine Asylum 6E-295 (1980)

Here Waits is still operating within the realm of orchestrated pop balladry (“Saving All My Love for You,” “On the Nickel,” “Ruby’s Arms”), but he’s made a noticeable change in welcoming more harder-edged blues-rock sounds to his palette, with heavier drums and guitar and no piano (“Heartattack and Vine,” “‘Til the Money Runs Out”). This proved to be a transitional album as Waits moved toward his edgier mid-80s sound. But often he is stuck with a slick, “professional”, L.A. kind of sound (“In Shades,” “Downtown”) that is too much of a compromise between the two poles of the album. Even when he does succeed in one firm style or another, it is hard to find people who want to swing between gravelly crooning and gruff R&B the way this album is presented. There is definitely good stuff here, but the sum total is a little unsatisfying. After marrying Kathleen Brennan, whom he met while working on One From the Heart, he basically committed to the style of Swordfishtrombones and stuck with that approach for the rest of his career.

Tom Waits – Swordfishtrombones

Tom Waits – Swordfishtrombones Island ILPS 9762 (1983)

A good album, but one I hardly ever revisit. Of course I dig stuff like “16 Shells From a Thirty-Ought-Six”. You would have to be a major asshole not to. But this album as a whole doesn’t resonate with me like some of his others. Still a fine effort and among Tom Waits’ better ones. This would be his last album for nearly twenty years to look back at all on the lounge jazz/blues that characterized much of his 1970s output.

Tom Waits – Real Gone

Tom Waits – Real Gone Anti- Records 86678-2 (2004)

Some killer songs, “Hoist That Rag” chief among them, but also a lot of filler in the middle part of the album. Marc Ribot is a strong presence.

Tom Waits – The Black Rider

Tom Waits – The Black Rider Island 314-518 559-2 (1993)

I’ve never been fully satisfied with The Black Rider. It was created as part of a theater production of the same name that joined Tom Waits with one of the century’s greatest writers (William S. Burroughs) and one of the world’s most respected theater artists (Robert Wilson). There is a weak link though…and it’s Tom Waits! The story (thanks to Burroughs) is a brilliant parable. I have not had the opportunity to see a theater production of the work and judge Wilson’s contributions, but reliable sources have raved about it. So why can’t this album hold up? Well, it has its moments. But too often Waits gets ahead of his compositional abilities, trying too hard to sound like a latter day Kurt Weill or something. Underneath it all, there is still something amazing about this album. Too bad Waits couldn’t pull it together like on Bone Machine.

Tom Waits – The Heart of Saturday Night

Tom Waits – The Heart of Saturday Night 7E-1015 (1974)

The Heart of Saturday Night sits — sometimes uncomfortably — between the California soft rock of Tom Waits’ debut and the beatnik barfly music of his later 1970s work. His avant hobo persona was still a long ways off. Waits is ambling in the right direction, but compared to later efforts the performances come across as too uncertain and the songwriting too muddled. In a perplexing way, the worn out and boozy ambiance of Small Change and the theatrical and maudlin touches of Blue Valentine ending up providing the missing ingredients. So while there is hardly anything in particular wrong with this album, Waits has done better.

Tom Waits – Small Change

Tom Waits – Small Change Asylum 7E-1078 (1976)

Fans of Tom Waits’ later work aren’t always on board for his earlier stuff, and vice-versa. Aside from briefly dabbling in soft rock, his early period was primarily marked by boozy bar songs, piano ballads, a sprinkling of orchestrated numbers, and a gentle subversion of traditional pop with an eye toward the seedier side of life. Well, for his early period, Small Change might be the best. It opens with the lush, maudlin “Tom Traubert’s Blues (Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen).” The next song “Step Right Up” showcases the off-kilter songwriting talents on which Waits would increasingly rely. The rest of the album focuses more on piano bar jazz and blues, with borderline incoherent vocals and a fascination with the dark corners of down-and-out society. It all works though, somehow. This is right on the pulse of late-night drunken melancholy. If you played this at an AA meeting you’d probably make some people cry.

Tom Waits – Rain Dogs

Tom Waits – Rain Dogs Island ILPS 9803 (1985)

Easily Tom Waits’ greatest achievement. It’s a ramshackle wreck of a thing, and no two songs are great for quite the same reasons. This one will stay with you for a lifetime.

Waits met his wife Kathleen Brennan while working on the film One From the Heart (1982). He relocated to New York City from Los Angeles. This album succeeds in part by jettisoning the last vestiges of his LA sound and fully embracing the freaks, the losers, the rabble — what Barney Hoskyns called the album’s general focus on “the urban dispossessed,” inspired by Waits’ recent contribution of music to the documentary Streetwise (1984) about homeless kids in Seattle.

Brennan introduced Waits to the work of composer Harry Partch, known for inventing his own instruments and referencing the lifestyle and language of hobos. Wait uses all kinds of junkyard percussion and sounds made without musical instruments as such, with a percussion-heavy emphasis on idiosyncratic rhythms. Partch looms large, and is frequently mentioned as an influence. This is apparent straight from the opener “Singapore” and then doubly so on the next track “Clap Hands.”

Another influence, or at least close comparison, is Lotte Lenya singt Kurt Weill (1955). A gem of a post-WWII look back at the Weimar-era theater songs of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. These were songs from a time of vibrancy, desperation, and possibility, contradiction, an grand change. The songs reflect those circumstances. And Leyna’s 1955 recordings capture the shambolic yet determined and cutting theatrical sensibility that made this music so iconic and emblematic of those times. Here, on songs like “Tango Till They’re Sore” and “Anywhere I Lay My Head,” the piano and horns tap that same slightly seedy and bawdy cabaret energy. Marc Ribot‘s flamboyant guitar continues that effect across much of the rest of the album. Waits, who also developed an acting career, always had a flair for theatricality. Rain Dogs transforms those impulses toward something shorn of campiness, more gritty, knowing, and subversive.

But this was also the mid-1980s, the era of big pop tunes. And this album has those too. Kathleen Brennan features large here, co-writing “Hang Down You Head” (released as a single) and exerting influence in that direction. There are quite a number of melodic pop tunes here, including the ballad “Time” and “Downtown Train,” the latter being covered extensively. These more pure conventional pop expressions manage to sit comfortably among the more experimental offerings.

And there is more. “Blind Love,” with guitar from both Keith Richards and Robert Quine, is an achingly sad/sweet country-twinged song replete with a fiddle. And there are plenty of tunes like “Big Black Mariah” and “Union Square” that lean on bluesy rock with Waits’ voice barreling forward at its gruffest, not far from Captain Beefheart. These elements of American weave throughout the album.

Not yet has been said yet about Waits’ own performances. His voice is gravelly here. Yet it still draws, subtly, from his early career trying to make a name for himself as a California soft rock singer trading on sentimental emoting, and his ability to cover a wide range of material and deftly push a song into new areas owes to his time singing barroom jazz, and his ability to deliver, with clever and precise phrasing, a memorable mood or sentiment, like on “Walking Spanish” or “9th & Hennepin,” is a more subdued and, at times, unique and personal form of the kind of beatnik monologues he traded in more crudely in the 70s. So, yes, Waits’ vocals help make this album what it is. But, to his credit, this album comes off as a collective effort built on more than just his own presence. Of course, what that makes that possible is the songwriting.

One thing that still impresses about this album decades later is how consistently great the songs are. There are some great songs here. They are full of menace and beauty, characters on the fringes of society, like from a Genet novel, and the eclectic bohemianism of hanging out with the legendary denizens of the storied Chelsea Hotel of the day. And yet these songs are understated, without ever feeling forced or contorted. Perhaps just as important as there being great songs here, there is not a bum track to be found.

This remains an essential statement from the 80s, one of those classics that is woven through with signs of the times yet also pointing back to deeper history and standing in its own category.