A Belated Appreciation of Old Tom Waits

He’s up there with Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark, and close to Dylan

Tom Waits in Prague, 2008. Photo by Anna Wittenberg.

I came late to Tom Waits. I didn’t pay much attention to him until I was in my fifties, and even then only sporadically.

Sure, I knew some of his songs. I liked “Ol’ 55, which was the first cut on his first album. That’s an impressive way to begin a recording career, especially when it’s followed on the album by the sentimental but moving “I Hope That I Don’t Fall in Love With You.” And I loved 2001’s “The Long Way Home,” a complex and apologetic love song, one of his specialties. Also, I think “Way Down in the Hole,” which became the theme song for The Wire, one of best television series ever, is a great modern gospel song. Lots of talented people have covered it, but no one has done a version quite as ghostly as his. I also was taken with almost every cut on “Come On Up to the House,” an anthology of women covering Waits songs. One from that collection, Phoebe Bridger’s “Georgia Lee,” may be the saddest song I’ve ever heard. I was playing it a moment ago and had to stop it at the heartbreaking question asked in the chorus.

But I never went much beyond that.

Why go deep into Waits now? Because his darkness fits our times. The people who inhabit his songs would not be surprised by the intentional cruelty of ICE or by the unending rapacity of Trump. As Waits once told the film director Terry Gilliam, “There’s a battle going on all the time between the light and the dark. And I wonder sometimes whether the dark side doesn’t have one more spear.”

More practically, my foray into lesser-known Waits was spurred by the Belfast noir novels of Adrian McKinty, who took his titles from Waits’ lyrics—The Cold Cold Ground, I Hear the Sirens in the Street, In the Morning I’ll Be Gone, etc. The first of those McKinty novels actually led me to the Waits song of that name, which I found surprisingly jaunty, given that in some form, we all wind up in that cold ground.

Inspired by McKinty, and thinking that Waits has more to say than most musicians, I picked up a compilation of interviews he’s given over the decades. I was half right. Some of the interviews are revealing, especially the one by Terry Gilliam. But the book is also heavily repetitive, and finishing it became a trudge.

The best parts of the book occur when Waits discusses what is going on in a given song or album. For example, he describes his song “Underground” as “an opportunity for me to chronicle the behavior of a mutant dwarf community and giving it a feeling of a Russian march, . . . kind of a Dr. Zhivago feel to it.” He comments at another point that “Recording for me is like photographing ghosts.”

Waits has a reputation for being an elusive interview subject, but when he’s engaged he can be quite direct. The Eagles may have earned him a bundle by covering “Ol’ 55,” but he was happy to tell a journalist that he finds their music “about as exciting as watching paint dry.”

I also learned some fun oddities. I didn’t know that the vanilla-ish TV talk show host Mike Douglas, who was big in the ‘60s and ‘70s, was a fan of Waits, and was known to walk around singing that Waits tune about how “Small Change got rained on by his own .38.” (Maybe it had something to do with Douglas being a former Big Band Singer.) Nor did I know that Waits’ song “Clap Hands” is a kind of tribute to Shirley Ellis’ 1965 hit “The Clapping Song.”

Here are some songs that I’ve encountered over the last week or so that caught my ear.

--“Down There By the Train.” Waits seems to have dozens of these minor but lovely pop tunes. In that way this one reminded me of his better known “Jersey Girl.”

—“Hang Down Your Head.” I didn’t know this song, and I really like it. It is similar in feeling and sound to “Hold On” and “Downtown Train” but I prefer this.

—“Heartattack and Vine.” Waits feels to me kind of like a cousin of Randy Newman, both in having a long-running relationship with moviemaking, but also in the style of some of their songs. This one, “Heartattack and Vine,” could have been written by Newman. So could have Waits’ earlier song “San Diego Serenade,” which has a New Orleans feel to its arrangement that reminds me of Newman’s ties to the Crescent City. (Btw, that’s the aforementioned Eagles singing background on two tracks on Newman’s memorable album “Good Old Boys.”)

—“Filipino Box Spring Hog”: The undiluted, noisy Waits. If you dislike your neighbors, and if you “Don’t give a hoot what they say,” play it loud after midnight.

—Yes, I need to work more on “Swordfishtrombones.”

My conclusion from this aural excursion is that Tom Waits is in a class with Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark, and is even nipping at Bob Dylan’s heels. Waits’ middle period, which appears to have been dominated by his move to marimbas, is much more interesting than Dylan’s Jesus years.