Tom's Wild Years

Not everyone in the '70s would have bet that Tom Waits would ever make it to 70. Then again, they wouldn't have said it about his great bad-boy friend, Keith Richards, either. Someone from that generation of doomed artists did eventually make it to old age, half a century on. But while the Stones guitarist's survival requires invoking some kind of biological miracle, it must be said that the American songwriter has always simply been a beautiful character, a magnificent cartoon. The cigarette stuck to his lips, the shirt untucked from rumpled trousers, the surly look of someone who's kept late hours and slept little, the limping gait and the gestures of a marionette held upright by the loosened knot of a tie around his neck. And then that hat balanced on his unruly quiff, the goatish chin sharpening his face even further, the voice growing more sandpapered with every record: Waits has perpetually been acting, handing us a mask to fantasize about. Proof of this lies in the steadily rising arc of his parallel acting career, which today occupies him far more than music. A long series of cameos in films that started out with the best of intentions, alongside big names – Jarmusch and the Coens, Stallone and Redford, Nicholson and Benigni – and that often ended up, undeservedly, as box-office flops. With some prestigious exceptions: the cult movie "Down by Law", the ensemble piece "Short Cuts", Coppola's "Dracula", right up to "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs". His roles have gradually become more substantial.

Further proof of the artistic fiction lies in the fact that, at barely 30, he settled down, leaving Rickie Lee Jones and the apartment at the Tropicana Hotel in Los Angeles, where he used to compose on a piano set up in the kitchen, and started a family with the woman who remains to this day his wife and muse: Kathleen Brennan, to whom he has stayed faithfully devoted, involving her more and more in his productions and building a sort of family music business made up of close friends and relatives (even longtime bassist Greg Cohen became his brother-in-law by marrying his sister).

Sure, in the early days he got through plenty of beer and cigarettes, especially on stage, back when you could still smoke indoors. But he never went much further than that, and not for very long. That wretched life of the tormented night owl was probably only truly lived for a few years. Much like certain Stanislavski-trained actors who personally experience roles and situations in real life, stealing expressions and details from other people's everyday existence in order to inhabit their parts with greater truth. Having repeatedly declared that he'd quit alcohol and tobacco hasn't, however, allowed his voice to clear up – if anything, it has mysteriously continued its descent into Hades, becoming ever more cartoonish, grotesque and exaggerated, just like the puppet it emerges from, plunging into an infernal abyss of rust and tar. The shift in tone and register is almost unbelievable, especially on the early LPs, where, from one year to the next, it's hard to believe it's the same singer.

Waits gave a new coat of paint to urban poetics, feeding and repainting, with his stories and music, a new metropolitan mythology that began at the start of the 20th century, embodying on stage an existential dimension: that hidden, underground world where – in a society that has become totally alienating – it's still possible to find one last shred of humanity, the will-o'-the-wisp of poetry, to fall in love. The very title "Closing Time", paradoxical for a debut album, is emblematic of a gaze turned backwards from the very start, toward a black-and-white universe, and culturally at odds with the fashions of the moment. A style evocative of an entire era, whose elements he reclaimed independently, reworking and updating them into an original, inimitable body of work. More than Conte, to whom he's often been compared, in Italy it was Buscaglione who pulled off a similar operation.

But if life is made of encounters, then to run into the ghost of Saturday night, at some point you have to meet someone who puts on one of his CDs: Waits can't be the starting point of anyone's musical education, only the destination of a dense web of cultural references that point back and forth to one another, ranging from Armstrong to mariachi, from Sinatra to heavy metal, from Bukowski to the waltz: a choreography of genres and arrangements that exploded with "Swordfishtrombones", all of them placed before the distorting mirror of the author's inspiration, the only glue holding songs and albums together: those hoarse, unmistakable vocal cords, capable of melting them all down into one bubbling cauldron. Confirming the irrepressible theatrical dimension of Waits's work, the devastating trilogy of '80s albums had to close, fittingly, with a stage production, "Frank's Wild Years": a Broadway-style musical, not a solitary pub gig, in which, in its early stages – as you can see in various YouTube videos – it was hard to tell him apart from a barfly. It would end up becoming the biggest disappointment of his career, mostly due to the financial difficulties of staging it. What came out of it is still, to this day, his only live DVD, "Big Time": the Big Time that slipped away from him just as it did from its protagonists. In that case, yes, reality truly did line up with Waits-as-Frank's fantasy, the loser and the romantic, who from then on would officially take the stage as representation, on a stage with wings and a proscenium, no longer mistaken for just another patron among the tables of a night club between 9th and Hennepin.

Gone are the bowler hat and tie, in come the fedora and umbrella. Of the old look, the jacket, pointy shoes and a soul patch under the lip remain. The lyrics change too: the celebration of Kerouac-style escape, of life on the road chasing the American dream, gives way to the return home. The rain dog rediscovers the warmth of the hearth in chilling pieces like "Train Song" and "House Where Nobody Lives". The pessimism expands, moving from the outcasts and drifters of American cities to something universal: Waits's melancholic, resigned gaze extends to all of humanity, especially in his more recent work: "God's Away For Business" and "Misery's The River Of The World" are titles that speak for themselves.

He even becomes political, moving in the same direction as his other great friend, the good one this time, Bruce Springsteen: examples include "Day After Tomorrow", "Road To Peace", and last year even "Bella Ciao".

Waits overturned the image of the drunk pianist, wrapped in a cloud of smoke and eccentrically retro, in which, as he complained, Asylum had stuffed and mounted him (a label that, while denying him experimentation and cross-pollination in his sound, at least had the merit of believing blindly in him for a decade despite poor sales), transforming it into something even more extreme and fable-like: the infernal puppeteer pulling the strings of that underground fauna he himself belonged to, the mad devil of that undergrowth of literary, theatrical and cinematic references, rearranged by his own magic wand. The mutation spread to the record label too, with the turn-of-the-millennium move from the pharaonic Island to the tiny ANTI-Records (another name that says it all): an independent label with a punk catalogue that in 2002 indulged Waits's eccentric anti-commercialism, releasing two CDs on the market at the same time (the soundtracks "Blood Money" and "Alice" for two stage shows directed by Bob Wilson); only to publish, four years later, a triple album of songs that had remained "Orfane" throughout the Mule's long transformation into a centaur. Now, nine years on from his last effort, "Bad As Me" (and even longer since his last tour), the metamorphosis of an absolute artist into a living icon, a symbol of creativity, could be said to be complete. Maybe.

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