Louis Armstrong Meeting Ethel Merman in Hell
Alex Harvey, Song Noir: Tom Waits and the Spirit of Los Angeles
Reaktion Books, 240pp, £10.99, ISBN 9781789146639
reviewed by Stuart Walton
Among the bonus tracks on what appears, for the time being, to have been Tom Waits's last album of original songs, Bad As Me (2011), is a selection called 'Tell Me'. The record's preceding 44 minutes have oscillated wildly between broken-backed odes to dysfunctional relationships, tenderly gruff statements of resignation at their demise, and a burst or two of expostulating political fury, coming to rest with a befuddled celebration of New Year's Eve, the singer executing a lethargic segue into an 'Auld Lang Syne' that only lacks the cup of kindness. 'Tell Me' shines through the middle of the bonus trio with a sudden diamond-bright imitation of a mid-tempo 1950s pop hit, the melody picked out in slapback echo guitar, underpinned in the breaks by chiming glockenspiel. The singer asks a series of existential questions — 'Tell me why it's so / Tell me so I'll know' — before supplying Nature's timeless answers. It feels like the one damn song that, as David Bowie once put it, could make you break down and cry, unimaginably beautiful, an effect to which Waits's approximately pitched vocal, full of the decades of damage that he had acquired before he was out of his twenties, adds the kicker.
That sense of disjunction is what Waits's music career has been all about. It has become conventional to divide it in two. First came a ten-year preamble that began with his debut album, Closing Time (1973), and concluded with the soundtrack to Francis Ford Coppola's cinematic shipwreck, One From the Heart (1982), a set of prospective late additions to the Great American Songbook, on some of which Waits duets with the honey-voiced country singer Crystal Gayle. During this period, he established a performing persona as a shambling, half-inebriated supperclub pianist with a voice roughened to sandpaper and a repertoire of blues and jazz moves, none of which would have been particularly remarkable but for his stupendous lyrical prowess. Then, in a Faustian act of creative repurposing, he left behind the woozy schmaltz and vinegared stage patter of the old mode for an extended séance in the experimental backwaters of American music, in which Captain Beefheart and Harry Partch preside over the cacophony, with pump organs and marimbas, Indonesian angklungs and glass harmonica crowding out the bedrock guitar and bass.
Despite the fact that not much has changed about this approach since its inception with the 1983 album, Swordfishtrombones, there are still early aficionados of Waits who consider this later development a frivolous dereliction of what he once was. What emerges from the music writer and documentary-maker Alex Harvey's study of Phase One of the career is the degree to which Waits himself had become aware that the earlier mode was coagulating fast. 'All of a sudden it becomes your image,' he told an interviewer as early as 1976, 'and it's hard to tell where the image stops, and you begin, or where you stop, and the image begins.' That was the year in which the flawless finest album of the early phase, Small Change, was released, and when Waits probably first came to significant attention in Europe. There would be three more studio albums, plus the Coppola soundtrack, before that image was laid aside, and the sense of obstructed frustration with it is plain to hear on Heartattack and Vine (1980), where not even fuzz guitar, stick drumming, and his most tortured, demented howl can drown the churning of the treadmill.
In any case, not everything about the early style was junked. Regular recourses to fundamentalist blues have continued to punctuate the later compositions, even if they now sound more like the oneiric distortions of Beefheart's Magic Band, an influence Waits has readily acknowledged, than Howlin' Wolf. Then, too, he has always had an affinity for the heart-wringing ballad, sometimes, as in 'Kentucky Avenue' from Blue Valentine (1978) or 'On The Nickel' (Heartattack and Vine), orchestrated with alternately hushed and swelling string arrangements in the Hollywood fashion, sometimes accompanied only by solo piano or guitar for the emotional close-up. Some writers have hailed Waits, or damned him with frail praise, as a consummate pasticheur, twizzling the style dials between shouting gospel, Cajun, zydeco, sweet soul, Springsteen balladry, rocksteady reggae, carnival tunes, sea shanties, postbellum parlour songs, Weimar cabaret, Northwest grunge, and Russian trepak. That last, the traditional Cossack stamping dance, appears on the soundtrack album to the Robert Wilson theatre production, The Black Rider (1993). It is an utter hoot.
Harvey is properly attentive to the dialectics of the early Waits persona. At what point does the inhabiting of a fictional life in performance become simply the act itself, the schtick, the sell? It at least had the virtue of unplaceable peculiarity for a while. Was he an incarnation of low-living, post-Beat dishevelment or a draggled lounge-bar jazz smoothie? And that voice. According to Harvey, it began as an impersonation of the singing voice of Waits's Uncle Vernon, which grew a little raspy after throat surgery, while the off-kilter accompaniment owed something else to Uncle Robert, whose failing eyesight began to affect his playing on the salvaged Methodist pipe-organ he had in his home. The singer himself characterised his style as Louis Armstrong meeting Ethel Merman in Hell. For his sweetest and saddest songs, it almost sounds as though a more mellifluous voice ought to try unfettering the trapped melody, although when they have, the result has you promptly returning to the real thing. On a rare cover version, of 'Somewhere' from West Side Story, which opens Blue Valentine, the guttural gasping croon strengthens to a growl, and then something within smooching distance of a retch, to remind us that Sondheim's lyric is a gamble on fragile optimism, the urban inmate's trance-dream of romance struggling to bloom amid the gunfire, of peace and quiet and open air.
What the persona began to distract from was the fully realised character delineations in Waits's lyrics, which owed their fine evocative detail to the prose of Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski's poetry. On Small Change, their name is legion, from the 'maverick Chinaman' and the striptease girls in 'Tom Traubert's Blues' to the teenage boy of the title track, hosing down the pavement after what the public prints call a gangland slaying. In full flow, these are among the greatest compositions of the American Seventies, otherwise a universe of blow-waved, coke-addled West Coast monotony. Harvey is no bunting-draped cheerleader. He has sharp criticisms to make of certain tracks on Nighthawks at the Diner (1975) – overwriting, resort to cliché, motions gone through. His judgments are generally sufficiently sound, though, that one would entrust the book to somebody who hadn't the faintest idea why somebody as famous as Tom Waits hadn't appeared on their radar.
The thematic focus of Harvey's book is the West Hollywood purlieu of LA in which Waits spent the 1970s, mostly living at the infamous Tropicana Motel on Santa Monica Boulevard, where his two rooms were crammed to choking with boxes, bottles, movie posters, beach furniture and musical instruments. Rickie Lee Jones recalls the first night Waits invited her back, when a path to the bed had to be navigated between the encroaching piles of paraphernalia. Life spilled out on the streets, where drunks and dealers, chancers and renters engaged in hustles and scraps under the sickly lamp glare. During one phase, the apartment would be routinely broken into by an out-of-work actor whenever Waits was away. He returned one morning at three to find the intruder hammering away on the piano. Even the kidney-shaped pool for the use of residents was painted black, the better to hide the etiolated bodies that floated about in it on sultry nights, or perhaps just to humour Alice Cooper.
In his final chapter, Harvey brings the discography briskly up to date, and touches glancingly on Waits's still largely underrated film career — his Benny, the billiard hall owner, in Coppola's Rumblefish of 1983 ('Time is a very peculiar item'); the derelict Rudy who almost redeems Héctor Babenco's disastrous Ironweed (1987); best of all his Earl Piggot, the alcoholic chauffeur in Robert Altman's Short Cuts (1993), married to Lily Tomlin and caught between abusive resentment and the bourbon-blurred memory of what used to thrill him about her. He has made more than 30 pictures. And the music flowed on through nearly 40 years, from boozy piano to brake drums and bullhorns, always the insistence that nothing quite fits ('The problem is that most instruments are square and music is always round'), the listener invited to inhabit in glimpses and glances a social canvas practically as broad, as Simon Schama proposed in a Guardian encomium of 2006, as Shakespeare's. The interpretations turn out to be more fluid than the precision of the scene-setting might suggest. I'd be surprised if the addressee of 'Kentucky Avenue', for example, is another boy, as Harvey thinks. The romance, which has the singer scratching the beloved's initials into his arm with a rusty nail, feels too conventional, but I could be wrong.
Under the illumination of half-spent fairground lamps, whirling police beacons and sparking lighters, anything could be true. You could find yourself choking on your own rage over the American quagmire of Iraq one minute, then the next noticing the elemental simplicity of the dog burying its bone, so the river won't wash it away. Everything is subject to disappearance. Where real life once happened, stinkin'-ugly though it might have turned on occasion, a brigade of cold ghosts now traipses the tourist haunts, like the ghoul-tours of the Chelsea Hotel. Of the torn-down strip on Santa Monica where the Tropicana once was, Waits commented, 'The stories get taller as the building gets shorter'. The streets aren't for dreaming now.
That sense of disjunction is what Waits's music career has been all about. It has become conventional to divide it in two. First came a ten-year preamble that began with his debut album, Closing Time (1973), and concluded with the soundtrack to Francis Ford Coppola's cinematic shipwreck, One From the Heart (1982), a set of prospective late additions to the Great American Songbook, on some of which Waits duets with the honey-voiced country singer Crystal Gayle. During this period, he established a performing persona as a shambling, half-inebriated supperclub pianist with a voice roughened to sandpaper and a repertoire of blues and jazz moves, none of which would have been particularly remarkable but for his stupendous lyrical prowess. Then, in a Faustian act of creative repurposing, he left behind the woozy schmaltz and vinegared stage patter of the old mode for an extended séance in the experimental backwaters of American music, in which Captain Beefheart and Harry Partch preside over the cacophony, with pump organs and marimbas, Indonesian angklungs and glass harmonica crowding out the bedrock guitar and bass.
Despite the fact that not much has changed about this approach since its inception with the 1983 album, Swordfishtrombones, there are still early aficionados of Waits who consider this later development a frivolous dereliction of what he once was. What emerges from the music writer and documentary-maker Alex Harvey's study of Phase One of the career is the degree to which Waits himself had become aware that the earlier mode was coagulating fast. 'All of a sudden it becomes your image,' he told an interviewer as early as 1976, 'and it's hard to tell where the image stops, and you begin, or where you stop, and the image begins.' That was the year in which the flawless finest album of the early phase, Small Change, was released, and when Waits probably first came to significant attention in Europe. There would be three more studio albums, plus the Coppola soundtrack, before that image was laid aside, and the sense of obstructed frustration with it is plain to hear on Heartattack and Vine (1980), where not even fuzz guitar, stick drumming, and his most tortured, demented howl can drown the churning of the treadmill.
In any case, not everything about the early style was junked. Regular recourses to fundamentalist blues have continued to punctuate the later compositions, even if they now sound more like the oneiric distortions of Beefheart's Magic Band, an influence Waits has readily acknowledged, than Howlin' Wolf. Then, too, he has always had an affinity for the heart-wringing ballad, sometimes, as in 'Kentucky Avenue' from Blue Valentine (1978) or 'On The Nickel' (Heartattack and Vine), orchestrated with alternately hushed and swelling string arrangements in the Hollywood fashion, sometimes accompanied only by solo piano or guitar for the emotional close-up. Some writers have hailed Waits, or damned him with frail praise, as a consummate pasticheur, twizzling the style dials between shouting gospel, Cajun, zydeco, sweet soul, Springsteen balladry, rocksteady reggae, carnival tunes, sea shanties, postbellum parlour songs, Weimar cabaret, Northwest grunge, and Russian trepak. That last, the traditional Cossack stamping dance, appears on the soundtrack album to the Robert Wilson theatre production, The Black Rider (1993). It is an utter hoot.
Harvey is properly attentive to the dialectics of the early Waits persona. At what point does the inhabiting of a fictional life in performance become simply the act itself, the schtick, the sell? It at least had the virtue of unplaceable peculiarity for a while. Was he an incarnation of low-living, post-Beat dishevelment or a draggled lounge-bar jazz smoothie? And that voice. According to Harvey, it began as an impersonation of the singing voice of Waits's Uncle Vernon, which grew a little raspy after throat surgery, while the off-kilter accompaniment owed something else to Uncle Robert, whose failing eyesight began to affect his playing on the salvaged Methodist pipe-organ he had in his home. The singer himself characterised his style as Louis Armstrong meeting Ethel Merman in Hell. For his sweetest and saddest songs, it almost sounds as though a more mellifluous voice ought to try unfettering the trapped melody, although when they have, the result has you promptly returning to the real thing. On a rare cover version, of 'Somewhere' from West Side Story, which opens Blue Valentine, the guttural gasping croon strengthens to a growl, and then something within smooching distance of a retch, to remind us that Sondheim's lyric is a gamble on fragile optimism, the urban inmate's trance-dream of romance struggling to bloom amid the gunfire, of peace and quiet and open air.
What the persona began to distract from was the fully realised character delineations in Waits's lyrics, which owed their fine evocative detail to the prose of Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski's poetry. On Small Change, their name is legion, from the 'maverick Chinaman' and the striptease girls in 'Tom Traubert's Blues' to the teenage boy of the title track, hosing down the pavement after what the public prints call a gangland slaying. In full flow, these are among the greatest compositions of the American Seventies, otherwise a universe of blow-waved, coke-addled West Coast monotony. Harvey is no bunting-draped cheerleader. He has sharp criticisms to make of certain tracks on Nighthawks at the Diner (1975) – overwriting, resort to cliché, motions gone through. His judgments are generally sufficiently sound, though, that one would entrust the book to somebody who hadn't the faintest idea why somebody as famous as Tom Waits hadn't appeared on their radar.
The thematic focus of Harvey's book is the West Hollywood purlieu of LA in which Waits spent the 1970s, mostly living at the infamous Tropicana Motel on Santa Monica Boulevard, where his two rooms were crammed to choking with boxes, bottles, movie posters, beach furniture and musical instruments. Rickie Lee Jones recalls the first night Waits invited her back, when a path to the bed had to be navigated between the encroaching piles of paraphernalia. Life spilled out on the streets, where drunks and dealers, chancers and renters engaged in hustles and scraps under the sickly lamp glare. During one phase, the apartment would be routinely broken into by an out-of-work actor whenever Waits was away. He returned one morning at three to find the intruder hammering away on the piano. Even the kidney-shaped pool for the use of residents was painted black, the better to hide the etiolated bodies that floated about in it on sultry nights, or perhaps just to humour Alice Cooper.
In his final chapter, Harvey brings the discography briskly up to date, and touches glancingly on Waits's still largely underrated film career — his Benny, the billiard hall owner, in Coppola's Rumblefish of 1983 ('Time is a very peculiar item'); the derelict Rudy who almost redeems Héctor Babenco's disastrous Ironweed (1987); best of all his Earl Piggot, the alcoholic chauffeur in Robert Altman's Short Cuts (1993), married to Lily Tomlin and caught between abusive resentment and the bourbon-blurred memory of what used to thrill him about her. He has made more than 30 pictures. And the music flowed on through nearly 40 years, from boozy piano to brake drums and bullhorns, always the insistence that nothing quite fits ('The problem is that most instruments are square and music is always round'), the listener invited to inhabit in glimpses and glances a social canvas practically as broad, as Simon Schama proposed in a Guardian encomium of 2006, as Shakespeare's. The interpretations turn out to be more fluid than the precision of the scene-setting might suggest. I'd be surprised if the addressee of 'Kentucky Avenue', for example, is another boy, as Harvey thinks. The romance, which has the singer scratching the beloved's initials into his arm with a rusty nail, feels too conventional, but I could be wrong.
Under the illumination of half-spent fairground lamps, whirling police beacons and sparking lighters, anything could be true. You could find yourself choking on your own rage over the American quagmire of Iraq one minute, then the next noticing the elemental simplicity of the dog burying its bone, so the river won't wash it away. Everything is subject to disappearance. Where real life once happened, stinkin'-ugly though it might have turned on occasion, a brigade of cold ghosts now traipses the tourist haunts, like the ghoul-tours of the Chelsea Hotel. Of the torn-down strip on Santa Monica where the Tropicana once was, Waits commented, 'The stories get taller as the building gets shorter'. The streets aren't for dreaming now.