Do you really wanna do this? You are about to enter the murky world of Waits...noIrish, vaudevillian, down & dirty in the streets, bars and the gutter. YOU’LL Need a chaperone. Who better than the master noir storyteller Ian Rankin. Here is Ian's ode to Tom. Step right up & enjoy the ride...
Words and curation by Ian Rankin, cover art by Mick Clarke, as ever
I grew up in a mining village in the east of Scotland. The nearest record shop was five miles away in Kirkcaldy. My older sister owned a Dansette record-player and a few albums by The Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel. This was the late-60s and music came to us by way of BBC Radio One and a weekly dose of Top of the Pops on TV. Luckily by the age of 11 I had a best friend whose older brother really liked music, introducing me to the works of Frank Zappa, Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull and others. Their world seemed more colourful, more outlandish. Although I still couldn’t afford vinyl LPs, I could stretch to a regular copy of the music paper ‘Sounds’. Its double-page colour posters began to cover my bedroom walls: Black Sabbath, Alice Cooper, Wishbone Ash, Deep Purple. That room was probably only eight feet by seven, but music made the walls disappear. Soon I was old enough to stay up late, meaning I could tune in to The Old Grey Whistle Test. Top of the Pops be damned – this was the good stuff. Alex Harvey and Lynyrd Skynyrd, Focus and John Martyn. Aged twelve I’d been given my first cassette recorder. I would tape Alan Freeman’s Saturday radio show, and Edinburgh Rock (which was broadcast on a new independent station, Radio Forth). Late at night I’d try to angle my tiny transistor radio so as to pick up Luxembourg, mostly because they played songs banned on the BBC. Later would come John Peel, and enough pocket money to buy LPs, and the swapping of those LPs for others new to me as I found my musical tribe in high school.
And somewhere along the line came Tom Waits, trundling into view as if on a box-car, bringing with him tales of a vagabond America both caustic and romantic. He appeared on my TV one night, courtesy of the Whistle Test, playing ‘Tom Traubert’ and ‘Small Change’ (I think). It was 1977 and though I thought him a charismatic presence my tastes were already shifting from Genesis and ELP to Eddie and the Hot Rods and The Damned. I’d have to wait a further six years to make Waits’ acquaintance again, thanks to an old schoolfriend who one night played me ‘Swordfishtrombones’. I bought it the very next day, adding the ‘Asylum Years’ compilation and ‘Blue Valentine’. (Hey, it was the days of the student grant – I was living high on the hog).
Reader, I was smitten. Here was a restless musician who, like Bowie, kept evolving, seeking new sounds, new ways of illuminating his art. He’d always been an astonishing lyricist, but the growling voice had now been welded to appropriate instrumentation. His words were still telling stories, but so too were the musical arrangements. It was like entering a fairground, surrounded by noise and coloured lights, the whole kinetic effect creating a world that seemed dizzyingly real. Having come from a (blues?) tradition portraying hardscrabble lives with consummate lyricism (he’d worked in diners and pizza restaurants, studying the parade of bums and nighthawks), Waits now moved rapidly towards vaudeville and the experimental. He might’ve been the new Springsteen, but he strove instead to learn from Beefheart – apparently introduced to the music of the Magic Band by his wife Kathleen Brennan.
There may be something of the vaudeville or the music hall in Waits’ preference for traditional proscenium theatres when touring. This could explain why he has several times played at the Edinburgh Playhouse. I first saw him there in 1985, and as my diary of the time records:
‘it was the greatest gig of my life – and perhaps of his.’
The concert seemed more intimate than his 2008 appearance. That later show was altogether brasher, but also colder, the theatrical flourishes failing to add much to the actual songs. A year afterwards, I was asked by BBC Radio Four to write a short story based on a favourite Waits lyric. I opted for ‘Step Right Up’ (included on this list). It always makes me smile with its accumulation of perfect (and ridiculous) detail as a market trader patters his way towards the next sale. I feel I’m standing right in front of the man, soaking it in. Similarly, many of Waits’ lyrics place the listener as a bystander or witness. Try listening to ’29 dollars’ without feeling a tangible connection to what the woman in the song is going through.
This playlist will take you on a guided tour of the sordid and sensational, the sinister and otherworldly. You’ll board unsavoury vessels you may have trouble escaping from with your life. You will feel a paranoid’s dread at what a neighbour is building in their basement or garage. Hopefully you’ll grin at the absurdity of a merry drunk and share a sailor’s shore leave wistfulness. As one song title has it, ‘We’re All Mad Here’ while another adds the postscript that ‘God’s Away On Business.’ We’re all going to be dirt in the ground eventually, but Waits ensures we have a wild wild ride on the way to the boneyard…
Here’s one final question though – does Tom Waits really exist? I mean the Tom Waits we fans think we know? Rock music is littered with apparent hellraisers who go home at night to their model train sets. Is ‘Tom Waits’ a construct, a performative act? When I started scribbling notes for this essay, I found myself calling Waits a ‘confessional storyteller’ but of course he’s nothing of the sort. He never seems to be writing about himself, preferring instead to channel the lives and anecdotes of his characters. They are to be the listeners’ focus, leaving the singer himself hidden, peering out only occasionally from the curtain. Not that it matters. He is a fairground barker, a circus ringmaster, a poet and balladeer, a virtuoso performer, and one of the great narrative voices in modern song. Welcome to the skewed and seditious world of Tom Waits.
Playback notes: Since Ian is taking us on a journey here, we suggest play in order - maybe pour yourself a hard one and settle in for the ride. Skipping is out of the question.
Ian Rankin is the author of the Rebus novels. The 20th Rebus story A Song for the Dark Times: is due in autumn 2020. Visit his website and follow him on Twitter.