Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Tuesday with Tom
Tom Waits: Under Review 1984-2006 includes clips of Tom Waits videos and performances. But mainly it consists of shots of guys talking about his transition as an artist during the eighties and nineties in almost the same way that guys talk about professional sports figures. The film intercuts American critics Robert Cristgau and Anthony DeCurtis, four very solid English and Australian music writers, and a very brief interview with Bones Howe, Waits' producer of the time that just proceeds the era covered in the film.
Bones talks about Tom was into junkyard sounds in the early eighties. He didn't really love what Tom was doing, so it was time to have professsional separation. Howe's sound was a great LA session sound. The early albums are full of skid row romanticism with lots of instrumentation. I confess to bowing out after Foreign Affair. After that my contact happened during very late night videos like Neighborhood from Swordfish Trombones. Later I caught up with Big Time and to some extent Bone Machine. We saw him in Eugene on his 1999 tour.
In the video much time is spent talking about the "trilogy" of Swordfish Trombones, Rain Dogs and Frank's Wild Years. What I love about the critics and comentators in this video is that they spend some time all with varying degrees of passion or agreement about album quality but also Tom's influences. This period of Tom Waits is filled with the impact of Harry Partch, Howlin' Wolf, Captain Beefheart, Kurt Weil, and in Frank's Wild Years Frank Sinatra. They talk about the spoken word stuff, but didn't mention about Ken Nordeen's obvious influence. Maybe that will be on a bonus disk someday.
The Island trilogy and Big Time, the highly theatrical concert film was followed by a period of theatrical collaboration and more sonic and rhythmic experimentation with the likes of Primus on Bone Machine. This also was the era of the Jarmusch "I Don't Wanna Grow Up" video where he is crouched in a curtained room playing the world's smallest unkele. Of the theater pieces, Anthony DeCurtis says that critics don't want to talk about it but that "Even experimentation can become predictable." Our Waits experts offer multiple opinions about the merits of Mule Variations or the album I am now most interested in checking out now Real Gone. Real Gone is Waits' scathing response to George W and the Iraq mess.
My uneven path through Waits and his work these past 22 years is what made Tom Waits: Under Review 1984-2006 an interesting experience for me. If someone knew all the albums well this could be quite tedious. Not enough exposure to Waits would result in just plumb feeling overwhelmed by the level of commentary. Instead, this 80 minute mostly talking head video of musical admiration was in the Goldilocks zone for me. The result of viewing it was quick determination to rebuild my IPod's Tom Waits playlist immediately.
posted by well-executed buffet at 7:35 PM
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