Tom Waits
What resulted, among many other things, was a sort of ritualized literary scat singing, an idiom native to the sort of philosopher who wakes up drunk in boxcars and is just as likely to buttonhole you about James Joyce’s plagiarism as ask you for money. It’s like jawboning with Steinbeck’s dust-bowl down-and-outers, provided they’ve joined a circus instead of setting out for California–or like listening to one of your grandpa’s war stories, provided he went AWOL for a spell to live in the jungle with cannibals. But Waits is not to be mistaken for one of his characters–as profoundly, eloquently undisciplined as most of them are, their creator is in total control, and in concert he rules the stage like a shaman with the power to call down lightning on any member of the tribe who walks counterclockwise at the wrong time.
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I could really only make a couple other complaints–I would’ve liked to hear more than just two songs (“Tango Till They’re Sore” and “Tom Traubert’s Blues”) in Waits’s bantery solo-piano style, and I wanted more of his monologues. Not that he didn’t talk to us–he told a story about Wieners Circle on Clark Street, complained that the decrepit hotel at Belmont and Sheffield where he’d stayed decades ago had been gentrified out of existence, and described a gangland battle between two 11-year-old pimps who weren’t big enough to handle guns. (“They threw silverware at each other,” he said. “I know it sounds like I made that up, but I didn’t.”) I’m surprised Waits didn’t take advantage of every opportunity to sit down–he’d soaked his suit jacket through with sweat by midset. But then we’re talking about the same guy who once told Thrasher magazine, “I like to play the drums until my knuckles bleed, until I pee my pants.”
