Tom Waits:Bad As Me

9.5/10
Anti; 2011

Within a hundred-year period, Socrates begot Plato who begot Aristotle. Within another hundred-year period, Howlin’ Wolf taught Captain Beefheart who taught Tom Waits. Even though the former may have been more mono-y-mono, the musical lineage of the latter crooners is evinced by their etching yowls and angular allure. There’s also a pedagogy that soaks through the hand-me-down sheets. A brotherly borrowing. A grateful riff from me to you. For most musicians, save someone like Harry Partch, musicianship is inevitably formed out of the fancying of an existing sonic quality. Among others, the essences of Armstrong’s pipes, Bukowski’s poetics, Carmicheal’s composition and Midler’s muse all symphonize the wild-blooded DNA of Tom Waits.

Since his early years as a performing barfly, Waits created an aberrant character for himself and fates worse than death for the characters of his songs. Waits’ behavior and catalogue throughout his career have crawled on the margins of the social and musical strata for decades to charismatically flambé his creative autonomy and elusive identity. Stylistically, his expressions, plays and harlequin art form have released a thespian secretion in the classic duo of comedy and tragedy. One will rarely find, if ever, Waits’ characters on top of the world, but rather treading for a laugh at the bottom of a half-empty glass of their own manqué destiny. Waits has always been, and continues to be, a maestro at capturing the quotidian life of the struggler and the passerby.

Undoubtedly, Kathleen Brennan (Wait’s wife of 31 years) has been one of his primary music consultants, who deserves due-credit for encouraging Waits in experimental exploration. Resultantly, in 1983, Swordfishtrombones dropped an integral watermark on Wait’s toolbox, retrograde sound, which jackknifed through Bone Machine, Mule Variations (just to name a few) and elbowed its way into 2011’s Bad As Me [ANTI]. The combination of his guttural vocals, Casey Waits’ (his son) tight drumming, the dexterity of Marc Ribot (featured on 6 other Waits’ records), plus appearances by Keith Richards (as and Flea, all give way for sizable instrumentation on the new record. To compound, the municipal, vitriolic and mawkish natures of Waits still co-exist judging by: the opening homage to “Chicago,” the heckling acidity in “Raised Right Men” and “Hell Broke Luce,” and the cry of, “There’s a battle going on / Between the blue and the gray/And you don’t want my love / Don’t make me stay” chorused in the Spanish Tinge “Back In The Crowd.” The upper-register falsetto in “Talking At The Same Time” that quips, “Well we bailed out all the millionaires / They’ve got the fruit / We’ve got the rind” adds another touch of finesse to the mastery.

In a 2004 interview with Jonathan Valania for Magnet Magazine, Waits explains his lyrical concoctions, which are evident still: “Every song needs to be anatomically correct: You need weather, you need the name of the town, something to eat–every song needs certain ingredients to be balanced.” Thematically, the lyrics are raw, emotive and steam-of-consciousness-driven by a variegated vehicle of imagination. As a seminal storyteller, Waits’ eidetic, third-person narratives usually do not allow much room for his personal life, but the internalization of the aging musician is apparent on tracks like, “Satisfied” and “Last Leaf” – as a coming-to-terms silhouette shadows the last few pounds of his opuscale.

Though Wait’s music does not yield your average jazz, blues or even rock standard, the musical talent and rapport exhibited on Bad As Me outstands most. The goose-bump rush of adrenaline experienced while listening to his albums can be likened to standing at the edge of a precipice, spanning the open fjord using the eyes, knees bent with obligations to the wind. However, a personal sampling of Bad As Me is the only true proof of the pudding as one listener might taste a chocolate flavor and another might taste an ice cream man dragging a dead priest down 9^th and Hennepin.

–Zach Frimmel