Locality Data
Discussions about Tom Waits can get heated among my friends. People seem to either love him or hate him. Even among respected musical connoisseurs, his work can be divisive. I, for one, think Tom Waits is one of the most important songwriters and composers in the history of rock music. I love his lyrics, sound, style, and philosophy. I’m in awe of his ability to invite listeners to occupy his songs.
You’ll hear some obvious Waits influence on my song “Beyond Good and Evil.” My producer J Seger and I tried some experimental recording techniques during the session. We looped the main rhythm track and used footsteps, chains, lead pipes, and breaths to create the rhythm. You’ll also hear a whisper track between verses which quotes from Nietzsche, whose writing inspired the title and themes of the song. I tried to make the song’s narrative detail very specific but vague at the same time. I’ll let you be the judge of how successful I was there, but I like that the song is about a very specific event in this couple’s life and that the imagery rather than the plot of the song is in the foreground. Our goal was to make every musical choice contribute to the haunting meaning of the song. This aim evolved directly from Waits.
I like Waits for a lot of the same reasons I love the poetry of Charles Bukowski. Both artists write about people who have been swept under the rug. Bukowski found his unwashed muse at the horse track and at dive bars during the daylight hours. Waits stalks the red light districts of LA and Singapore. Both are writing about a dark reality that many live but that few artists dignify. Bukowski’s poetry and Waits’s songs elevate these lives and reveal their artistic worth. In fact, Waits has acknowledged Bukowski’s influence on his writing; you can hear him talk about Bukowski’s “Notes from a Dirty Old Man” column in the LA Free Press here.
In the Netflix documentary Keith Richards: Under the Influence, Waits expounds on his musical theory. He explains that what makes Keith Richards great is that he “is really big on detail.” He continues, “and you have to be if you’re an archeologist, and you insist on locality data. You know, not only where something came from, but what are the principles and the properties of it.” The same could be said of Waits; he’s a musical archeologist. Waits didn’t just write about the seedy streets of LA in the 70s; he lived there. Like a method actor, he embedded himself in the scene and became the characters he wrote about. The principles and properties of his songs are mined from the full breadth of lived experience and from the dusty archives of esoteric music.
People who dismiss Waits almost always start with his voice. Waits garbles, wobbles, grunts, and slurs his way through the lyrics. But it wasn’t always that way. On early recordings like Closing Time and The Heart of Saturday Night, Waits sounds gravely, but his voice is rounded out by beautiful melodies and backing harmonies. He sounds like a capable lounge singer, washed up, sure, but singing his drunken heart out. “Drunk On the Moon” is a great example of this vocal period. Waits’s choice to sing differently was exactly that, a choice. He begins to make the move on Nighthawks at the Diner and perfects it on Small Changes.
Listen to Waits sing “The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me).” That voice. It’s the voice of someone who, as Bukowski wrote, has been “clubbed into dank submission” by life. It’s the voice of someone who smokes two packs a day, who orders a beer and a shot at noon, who is always between jobs but somehow gets by. It’s the sound of someone whose voice has been ignored and marginalized, and it’s the growl of someone who sounds how he feels: beat up, angry, hopeless, insistent. Waits’s piano playing on this song is intoxicating. He slurs musical phrases, hits bad notes, and stumbles to the finish line. His playing is perfect because it realizes the meaning of the song — which brings me to my second point.
Waits is a genius musician and composer. His early records are a masterclass in pop-jazz piano stylings. On Blue Valentine and Heartattack and Vine, however, Waits channels the electric blues. The guitar takes the lead, musically. It’s the kind of blues played in a room with rolled up singles and white lines on a mirror. “$29.00,” “Blue Valentines,” “Heartattack and Vine:” here Waits excavates the rural blues tradition, reshapes it, and exhibits the form’s ability to articulate the desperate, urban dreams of bums, hookers, drunks, nobodies, and those with rap sheets a mile long. Waits accomplishes a visceral and authentic feeling; the instrumentation, playing, and singing match the setting and subject matter. Waits crafts seventies hyperrealism, the sound of rusting industry and the death rattle of the Age of Aquarius.
In his next act, Waits goes full vaudeville on Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs, and Frank’s Wild Years. These records represent some of Waits’s most experimental work and reveal a songwriter at his artistic height. Waits is writing and performing short stories and plays; his ambitions stretch far beyond traditional songwriting.
Take “Shore Leave,” for example: This song tells the story of a grizzled soldier on leave in Hong Kong writing home to his wife in Illinois. The lyrical detail is vivid. And, is that insincerity or pining we hear as the soldier’s pens his love letter home while roaming the carnival streets “Squeezing all the life/ Out of a lousy two day pass”? You see his “buck shot eyes,” taste the “cold chow mein,” and peep that “new deck of cards (with girls on the back).” This guy’s in need of more than a shave. His world is not the world of his wife back in Illinois. Where does he feel most at home? In the suburbs of Illinois or rowing down the gutter in Cuban heels on his way to The Dragon for a cold one? “Shore Leave” is an exotic musical stroll; the strange rhythm nudges you along; you trail each step the soldier takes. You hear banjo, accordion, bass-marimba, metal aunglongs, a calliope, a harmonium. Listen carefully and you can hear the motorcycles zip by, the waves hitting the shore, a bus slug past. The syncopated clatter of the market and the smokey rhythms of the “filipino floor show” appear as you listen.
Tom Waits is a seminal artist because he approaches songwriting and music like an archeologist. He insists on “locality data.” He is trying to capture in exacting detail the scene, sound, and experience of the people and places he writes about. Every choice — from what he writes about to the way he sings to the instruments and arrangement — serves the theatrical purpose of bringing characters and circumstances to life. Think of Waits more like an operatic performer or voice actor than a singer, and all will be revealed.
