musique real

I have pulled my iPod out of retirement. It was laying a long patch of low while I adjusted to new surroundings. But yesterday I picked it up from off the floor, dialed up a shuffle, and set off for parts unknown. By the time I arrived on campus, this upright bass with a static of vibration was pulling my scapula in new directions. Baroque triplets on an overdriven electric guitar against these loose snare hits. I want to write about what this music does to me.

Tom Waits walked up and played some kind of terrifying peekaboo game with me when I in the 5th grade. He had covered “It’s All Right With Me” for the Cole Porter tribute album Red Hot + Blue, and I was convinced it was a song of infidelity. Many years later, I took a closer look at the lyrics and realized that “It’s All Right With Me” is more truthfully a song about falling in love, despite the pain of a previous relationship. The point is, my first understandings of Tom was frightened confusion. It wasn’t until later, on my 19th birthday, that my father gave me a pair of cassette tapes, Closing Time and Swordfishtrombones. They were dark, and percussive. And holy, somehow. Those are the three words I need you to understand. They made you move, made you feel like banging on things. Made you laugh. The end of “swordfishtrombones” (the title song) unfolds in this marvelous little po-mo joke, revealing the songwriter as storyteller. These albums were important, in respect to Waits’ career, because they were his debut (Closing Time) and his rebirth (Swordfishtrombones). The latter was written with Kathleen Brennan, Tom’s wife, and they have continued to collaborate equally from that point on.

Fast foward to 2004, when Tom and Kathleen released Real Gone (something of a family affair). The mainstream media had rediscovered Tom in 1999 with Mule Variations, which deserves its own post. (Each of these albums I’ve mentioned will probably get its own post at some point.) Andrew Malo and I were sitting in my car, on a dark country road, and he played me “green grass,” a song from a dead man, calling to his lover, asking her to lay down on the green grass above his grave, asking to be remembered. It’s macabre, but that’s a superficial sort of thing to say. I think it’s actually what a dead man would say to someone who loves him. “Lay your head where my heart used to be.” The song is short, but the lyrics meander, as though the singer has all the time in the world. And, frankly, he would.

When I got to the computer lab, Les Claypool, Brain and Tom’s son Casey were cooking up this Baroque, afro-cuban syncopation. Marc Ribot gives these beautiful contrapuntal rhythms on electric guitar. And then, just as it builds, Tom Waits’ voice appears on the horizon, telling a story about… what? A soldier, a killer, a sailor? Smoke is drifting across an open field; men are killing and dying. The first verse ends and the unrelenting cry picks up: “Hoist that rag! Hoist that rag! Hoist that rag!” It is the infernal bellowing of dwarven miners in some strange, dark musical. Or possibly soldiers, passing a flag up the sooty scaffolding of a building. Men who are changing the map of the world, who “stick [their] fingers in the ground/ heave and turn the world around.” They are afraid, and they are questioning their gods, but they also feel like they have no choice (“God used me as a hammer boys”), so they might as well perform their role with gusto: “Just open fire when you hit the shore/ All is fair in love and war.”

All lyrics from The Tom Waits Supplement.

It makes me want to move. I think these musicians must be having so much fun, creating this space together. And I think Tom and Kathleen must be in love with words. It is the only explanation for these strange stories wrapped up in song. “Hoist That Rag” is not happy. It’s a dark song — it’s a song with a history of mothers who smother their children out of desparation. A song that recognizes the empty fields of war. But it’s a good, honest song. It has many meanings, and it points to many stories gone before. It’s good music. It makes you move.