Essential Albums
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The 11th album from Tom Waits, 1992’s <i>Bone Machine</i>, was his first to arrive in the wake of the new “alternative rock” landscape carved out by the likes of Nirvana’s <i>Nevermind</i>, U2’s <i>Achtung Baby</i> and R.E.M.’s <i>Out of Time</i>. A consummate record-industry outsider for 20 years, Waits had a long discography of uncompromising sounds, experimental urges and lyrical misery. But whether by accident or design, <i>Bone Machine</i> would end up as the most abrasive, cacophonous album of his career, clanging with errant percussion and sandpaper-throated howling about existential dread, death and the apocalypse. Yet this was the early ’90s, a time when even the most out-there artist could find some space in the mainstream (which partly explains how <i>Bone Machine</i> wound up winning a Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album). Recorded in a cavernous, un-soundproofed former cement hatchery in California, <i>Bone Machine</i> found Waits cobbling together a scrap heap of percussion, resulting in an album full of rust and decay. “In the Colosseum” features Waits playing the “conundrum”, his bespoke percussion collection that he whacks with a hammer, and that he once described as being akin to “hitting a dumpster”. Meanwhile, “Earth Died Screaming” finds Waits and a handful of co-conspirators trying to capture the sound of Smithsonian field recordings by banging two-by-fours against stones or wood. And “Such a Scream” features characteristically booming drums from future Guns N’ Roses drummer Brian “Brain” Mantia. Between the chaos, Waits provides some of his most tender ballads, like the tragic “A Little Rain”, inspired by a news story about a 15-year-old girl who accepted a ride in a stranger’s van. There’s also the sorrowful “Whistle Down the Wind”—which features keening violin and accordion from Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo—and “That Feel”, a highlight of Waits’ years-long bromance with Keith Richards, as the two duet on a wistful ode to the ephemeral. There’s also the tune “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up”, which received some attention from MTV—thanks in part to its Jim Jarmusch-directed video—but it wouldn’t break out until a few years later, when the Ramones turned the song into a pop-punk protest. It wasn’t the only <i>Bone Machine</i> track to enjoy a long pop-culture legacy: The twangy Hollywood fantasy “Goin’ Out West”—described by Waits as “just one of those ‘three chords and real loud’ things”—would be immortalised as the song playing right before Brad Pitt’s character explains the rules of <i>Fight Club</i>. Somehow, the harshest, strangest album of Waits’ career would be one of his most impactful. - The album that marked Tom Waits’ quantum leap as a songwriter—1976’s <i>Small Change</i>—coincided with the rusty-throated storyteller’s descent into alcoholism: Life as a touring musician had given Waits no shortage of the kinds of late nights, booze and lonely hotel rooms he’d always sung about. Indeed, his fourth album has a unique bleakness: It’s a collection of bleary-eyed bawlers, narrated by lost men holding up lamp posts or dreaming of New Orleans. Recorded in five nights with no overdubs, the beautifully weather-beaten <i>Small Change</i> ended up as the singer’s breakthrough moment, becoming his first album to make a dent in the Billboard charts. The opening track, “Tom Traubert’s Blues (Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen)”, remains one of Waits’ most enduring songs, dripping with melancholy, regrets and a dusting of strings. Reportedly inspired by Waits’ time wandering Los Angeles’ Skid Row with whisky in a bag, “Traubert” is a textbook example of Waits’ evocative storytelling (“And it’s a battered old suitcase to a hotel someplace, and a wound that will never heal/No prima donna, the perfume is on an old shirt that is stained with blood and whisky”). Waits was already widely respected by his singer-songwriter peers by the time <i>Small Change</i> was released, but “Tom Traubert’s Blues” established him as a once-in-a-generation talent (decades later, the song would be turned into a worldwide smash hit for Rod Stewart). Waits has always been an anachronistic figure; even in his twenties, he was name-dropping actresses from the golden age of cinema, and letting his piano wander into <i>Casablanca</i>’s “As Time Goes By”. And indeed, much of <i>Small Change</i> sounds like it could have emerged from a jazz club in an early film noir. Tracks like “The One That Got Away” and “Step Right Up” feature walking bass, salty sax and an atmosphere of hopelessness and doom. Meanwhile, “Small Change (Got Rained on With His Own .38)”—which features nothing more than Waits’ gravelly voice and the moonlit sax of Lew Tabackin—plays like a Mickey Spillane novel in miniature. And “Pasties and a G-String” is pure neon-soaked, zooba-zabbaing sleaze. But no track best encapsulates the boozy joys of <i>Small Change</i> like the closing-time anthem “The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me) (An Evening with Pete King)”, on which Waits sounds absolutely sloshed—he even plays some bum notes on the piano. It’s a standout on an album that finds a masterfully constructed character singing stories of masterfully constructed characters. <i>Small Change</i> is 1970s Waits at his heartbroken-barfly best.
- The 1973 debut from Tom Waits introduced one of rock music’s greatest storytellers, a 23-year-old Californian who dripped with the nostalgia and whisky-aged melancholy of a man three times his age. Though never a commercial hit, the songs on <i>Closing Time</i> spent the 1970s as a jumping-off point for covers by the Eagles (“Ol’ ’55”) and Tim Buckley (“Martha”). Still, none of those versions can top Waits’ deeply sentimental performances, performed with a sandpaper rasp that sounded like a smoking engine—especially when compared to commercial contemporaries like Jim Croce and Jackson Browne. Weaned on Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac and <i>The Twilight Zone</i>, Waits was discovered lurking around Los Angeles-area open-mic nights by David Geffen, who signed Waits to Asylum Records, the nascent label that was already home to such acts as the Eagles, Joni Mitchell and Judee Sill. Waits quickly got to work on <i>Closing Time</i>, a street-light symphony that makes Frank Sinatra’s <i>In the Wee Small Hours</i> seem like a party record. Wandering between the piano bar and a folk café, Waits spins tales of loneliness and late nights awash in beer, cigarettes, lazy old tomcats and Greyhounds headed out of town. The opening track, “Ol’ ’55”, was written after Waits heard a story about a guy who rushed a date home before curfew time by driving the Pasadena freeway in reverse. In another artist’s hands, that tale would have been little more than a funny anecdote, but Waits uses it to paint a vivid portrait of young love and yearning. Elsewhere on <i>Closing Time</i>, the indelible “I Hope That I Don’t Fall in Love With You” speaks to the kind of bleary-eyed, spotted-from-across-the-bar love that occurs almost entirely in the narrator’s mind, while “Martha” is a pure weeper about a lost love returning after decades: “Operator, number please, it’s been so many years/Will she remember my old voice while I fight the tears?” (Bette Midler would eventually perform “Martha” on <i>Saturday Night Live</i>.) And while the album includes everything from rollicking soul (“Ice Cream Man”) to steel-guitar ballads (“Rosie”) to country waltzes (“Old Shoes (& Picture Postcards)”), the 12 tracks on <i>Closing Time</i> are undeniably “Tom Waits songs”, each imbued with his unmistakable voice and atmosphere. Like all of Waits’ 1970s material, <i>Closing Time</i> was more of a cult object than a commercial breakthrough. But as the decades passed, the album established itself as a one-man standards collection, its evocative songs covered by a remarkably disparate group of artists, including Jon Bon Jovi, Meat Loaf, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, 10,000 Maniacs, Hootie & the Blowfish, Sarah McLachlan, Bat for Lashes—and countless more. As Waits once remarked about “I Hope That I Don’t Fall in Love With You”: “You take all the bar songs in the world and put ’em together, they’d stretch all the way to Kansas City, I guess—millions of them. This is just another one.” He was right to some extent. But the march of time—and the increasing affection for <i>Closing Time</i>—would also prove him very wrong.