Free Waits

Tom Waits
Album: Frank's Wild Years
Hang on St. Christopher

Some tastes, like coffee, are acquired.  My first cup left me wondering how on earth people could stomach the stuff.  But once I became accustomed to that bitter black brew, once that caffeinated buzz regularly curled my toes, it became a daily necessity.  Coffee and the music of Tom Waits, birds of a feather.

Tom Waits is part cabaret singer, part performance artist, part Romantic, part lounge act, part sideshow carny, part teller of tall tales, part troubadour, part...well you get the picture.  A jack of all trades kinda guy.  Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if he's part yodeling sheepherder.  Everything he does, he does well.

I first stumbled upon Tom Waits in my late teens.  I was a devoted Rolling Stone subscriber in those days, and RS had rhapsodized over his 1985 album, Rain Dogs.  So when my family embarked on a weeks-long trip to Ontario to visit my sister, I picked up the cassette tape (which, incidentally, is the second stupidest medium to transmit sound ever unleashed upon an unsuspecting public)* and spent the next two days in the car listening to it over and over again.  At first I thought I was hearing the deranged musings of a dope-addled hobo, but the more I let the music envelop me the more I realized that this was not mere cacophony but rather beautifully orchestrated chaos.

After that I worked my way through Waits' extensive back catalog.  Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs, and Frank's Wild Years form a trilogy of sorts, and his earlier records are equally compelling though stylistically much different.  At times his early songs are suffused with an appealing wistful melancholy; at other times with a surrealistic sense of humor.  He can take a cliche and make it his own.

He's a hell of an actor too.  Dig Tom Waits.  I insist.

*(8-track is by far the worst.  Fuck you, 8-track.)