Tom Waits

Tom Waits is one of the greatest rock artists (and not only rock) that the 20th century left us, an opinion shared by virtually everyone who follows the devil's music, so much so that it's genuinely hard to find detractors of the master from Pomona. Why? Because over thirty years of career Waits has built an enviable reputation, grounded in a professional ethic never dented by commercial temptations or star-driven posturing, but above all in a series of albums of the highest quality. "Swordfishtrombones", however, retains a particular flavor, as it stands as a crucial breaking point in Waits's career; it marks the sharp, irreversible shift from a simple, if gifted, pseudo-crooner of smoky nightclub cocktail jazz to an erudite post-modern composer, capable of conceiving a sort of total music, indebted both to the masters of American songwriting and to a variety of different musical forms drawn from African, European and other folk traditions. The amalgam of such different sounds gave rise to a series of rhythmic asymmetries, dissonances and cabaret-style off-key touches, which nonetheless bear the stamp of classicism, since the musical models that generated these sounds are themselves classic (in the sense of traditional, by now shared and decoded common heritage).

From an iconographic standpoint, Waits's art is that of a storyteller who has always viewed America and its ideals critically, preferring to recount the so-called "wrong side" of the star-spangled imagination, populated by drifters, aimless wandering souls ("rain dogs") and outcasts of every kind. Waits's imagery is the same as Bukowski's and that of those poets raised within the American underground counterculture, who in the 60s and 70s adopted an attitude hostile, if not outright contemptuous, toward the American way of life. Waits tells of an American dream that, admiring itself pompously in the distorting mirrors of a funfair, suddenly discovers it's a nightmare. But even before the singers of the beat generation, the early signs of Waits's poetics can be traced back to the doomed narratives of Robert Johnson, and even further back to the very concept of Americanness, or rather its negation. Being American means waging a battle to free oneself from the limitations one is born with, as Greil Marcus explains in "Mystery Train".

In other words, America draws its lifeblood from every citizen's will to improve their existential condition by exploiting their innate, distinctive talents, and by trusting in the promise of infinite possibility that the great country puts at their disposal. And it is precisely from the collapse of that promise, from the personal defeats that irremediably disprove it, from the annihilation of hopes eagerly pursued, that a micro-universe of macabre desolation and everyday marginalization is born — the very emotional corpus that the greatest American songwriters, Waits included, have drawn upon. Despite the experimental scope of his music, which translates into the legitimate trans-national ambitions of the sounds on "Swordfishtrombones", Waits remains fundamentally an American artist, with all the caveats that might apply, wherever needed. In "Swordfishtrombones", the marginalized — or more broadly, the "losers" (though never "beautiful" ones) — remain the protagonists.

The conceptual heart of the record lies in the convergence of the dichotomy between salvation and damnation; Waits's characters, painfully aware of their own being, seem almost to yearn, in a kind of ethical void, for some event which, whether desirable or amoral, might serve as catharsis for their condition. And in this sense the shadowy, at times depressive, mood of the songs makes "Swordfishtrombones" a kind of sung mass, through which unredeemed souls are delivered to the salvation of a paradisiacal hell — certainly more desirable than the atrocious, inexhaustible transience of everyday life.

This explains the lucid, grotesque madness of Frank in "Frank's Wild Years", or the squalor celebrated in "Gin Soaked Boy", narrative fragments that renew the archetypal figure of the loser beyond any plausible chance of rehabilitation. Stories that, within the imaginative universe of American song, form the exact counterpart to Springsteen's poetics. The Boss, in a populist — if not demagogic — narrative mode, tells of the hardships, tragedies and defeats of ordinary people, who nevertheless, in a nationalistic impulse, or rather in a stubborn will to cling to the great American dream, manage to face them proudly, or at least with dignity. Springsteen feeds people what they want to hear. Waits's nation, by contrast, is inhabited by the people of the underworld, resigned to vegetate below the survival line, cut off from any possibility of redemption. They are social "freaks", born with the indelible mark of the defeated. Implicit in his poetics, then, is a critique of America, but also of the regime's court singers who exalt its greatness, regarding the hypocrisy and indifference with which these people are treated.

Waits peels the baloney from the eyes of the Uncle Sam lodged inside the average American, lifts the lids off the pots, exposing the rot beneath that veneer of false solidarity typical of the country's conservative wing. Perhaps it was partly for this reason (the collapse of hopes and certainties about the American way of life), as well as for the complex, avant-garde nature of the sound, that the record was rejected by the Elektra/Asylum tandem, only to be courageously released — from a commercial standpoint — by Island Records.

But let's proceed in order.

In "Underground", the drums beat out a martial rhythm like a military march, while the electric guitar follows the contours of Waits's vocal lines. The presence of horn and acoustic bass gives the track a rural dimension, evoking marching bands in action at village festivals. "Underground" is perhaps the metaphor for the whole of Waits's poetics. Telling of an underground (mining) city, hard at work while the rest of the world sleeps, Waits conjures up that universe of the wretched, drifting almost clandestinely, like a wreck, in the sea of bourgeois opulence. "They're alive, they're awake while the rest of the world is asleep" he sings; they are alive and keep on existing, despite collective indifference.

In a rarefied yet dark, film-noir atmosphere, Waits unveils in "Shore Leave" one of his most brilliant experiments in the blending of disparate sounds. An Afro-Caribbean dance rhythm (aided by marimba and assorted jingling percussion) accompanies a bluesy banjo that veers off free-form, with Waits's deep voice completing this nonsensical collage of "swamp" exoticism. "Dave The Butcher" is a little instrumental gem, where bass and percussion weave a lopsided rhythmic carpet, over which the Hammond lays down a series of melodic phrases with an estranging, more than psychedelic, effect.

The romantic-melancholic vein emerges in the splendid "Johnsburg, Illinois", where Waits, accompanied solely by Greg Cohen's piano and bass, delivers lyrics that would be more at home in the repertoire of a Chris Isaak: "There's a place on my arm where I've written her name/ Next to mine/ You see I just can't live without her/ I'm her only boy and she grew up outside McHenry/ in Johnsburg, Illinois".

After so much romanticism, the raw rock'n'roll of "16 Shells From A 30.6" suddenly bursts in, one of the Pomona master's classics, which could almost pass for a Beefheart track played with the rhythmic straightforwardness of the Cramps. Driven relentlessly from start to finish, the vocal part seems to echo the terrifying roar of a shining beast in captivity. "Town With No Cheer" drips with the moods of an Australian town (Service Town) left to fend for itself, as the lyrics themselves make clear. The atmosphere could hardly be more desolate, with Waits mumbling words over a sound-bed built from minimal elements, following an evocative bagpipe introduction that conjures the image of a spectral, solitary ghost town.

The accompaniment on "In The Neighborhood" is provided by a genuine brass band, rounded out by percussion instruments and the ever-present Hammond organ. More than a song, it feels like a full-blown national anthem, thanks to the rhythm's solemn martial quality, while narratively it once again immortalizes the unshakeable but modest flow of small-town life; it's like being transported to Twin Peaks, or better yet, to the backdrop town of Michael Cimino's "The Deer Hunter", where weddings, funerals and departures for the front disturbed—but only in that instant, that event—the mood of a community forever identical to itself. "Just Another Sucker On The Wine" is another delightful instrumental in which Waits's harmonium, sweetly countered by Joe Romano's trumpet, manages to conjure a melancholy spleen. And it's precisely this shadowy, depressed atmosphere that serves as the record's connective thread, the element able to convey the substance of these stories even before the lyrics do. "Swordfishtrombones" is a kind of meta-concept about the illusion of a social redemption that's never achieved, nor achievable, given the sheer difficulty of rising out of a provincial context (in the most damning sense of the word—devoid of any cultural, or even economic, momentum).

In the delirium of "Frank's Wild Years" every semblance of civilization dissolves, and the ensuing savagery is the product of a mind torn apart by the inexorable grind of a mediocre everyday existence. Frank sets fire to his house, dazed by the illusion of a better life ("Frank put on a top fourty station/ got on the Hollywood freeway/ headed north"). It's catharsis, liberation, the sudden breaking free from a wearing state of stasis. The track is a smoky, talking-jazz piece, with the acoustic bass stringing together turnarounds while the Hammond organ floats free-form phrases overhead. Another performance from a seasoned showman surfaces on "Swordfishtrombone", while on "Down Down Down" Waits pulls out the full semiotic toolkit of archaic small-town bluesmen, complete with a driving rhythm, a tar-black voice ravaged by smoke and drink, and a hallucinated story that invokes the supernatural as a metaphor for everyday life: "He went down down down and the devil called him by name/ He went down down down hangin' onto the back of a train". Waits molds the blues to his own will, mastering it the way only a handful of others (Nick Cave and Captain Beefheart) know how.

The record's emotional peak, though, is "Soldier's Things", in which Waits, transfigured into a ghetto Frank Sinatra, narrates the contents of a box of personal effects belonging to a soldier fallen in battle. Given the kind of atmosphere it evokes, it feels like the ideal continuation of "Soldier", found on the Spirit's magnificent "Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus".

Another slice of dive-bar blues comes with "Gin Soaked Boy", where electric guitar takes center stage much as it does in B.B. King's songs. The gin-soaked boy wanders "lost" through the night with no fixed destination. "Trouble's Braids" is a cursed, Nick Cave-esque soliloquy, backed by clanging percussion and an acoustic bass that drives the rhythm forward. That "southern gothic" iconography (made up of "swamp things", voodoo rituals, crows feasting on mangled corpses, abandoned shacks that are the setting for incestuous relationships), conjured above all through Waits's messianic delivery, can be glimpsed, barely sketched, between the lines of the narrative: "Well I pulled on trouble's braids/ and I hid in the briars/ out by the quick mud/ stayin' away from the main roads/ passin' out wolf tickets/ downwind from the blood hounds/ and I pulled on trouble's braids/ and I lay by a cypress/ as quiet as a stone/ 'til the bleeding stopped/ I blew the weather vane off some old road house/ I build a fire in the skeleton back seat on an old Tucker/ and I pulled on trouble's braids". The record closes with the instrumental "Rainbirds", sad and resigned in tone, acting as an emotional summation of the whole work.

From the psalms of Robert Johnson to the harmonic abominations of Captain Beefheart, by way of David Crosby's disillusioned psychedelic torpor, right up to the more recent Morphine, Neil Michael Hagerty and Black Heart Procession, fifty years of America's sickest and most creative songwriting find sublime tribute in "Swordfishtrombones", both for how it has come to stand as a many-sided document of American root music and for being a postmodern treatise on reinventing the body of the blues using homegrown musical materials which, in Waits's hands, take on a trans-ethnic character.

Thanks to Antonella Farro and Anna Aurucci for translating the lyrics

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14/11/2006