Tom Waits

If you don't like Tom Waits, I judge you accordingly. This is something to be said at the outset.

So many of my friends, my self included, have a disease. We want to use each other aurally. Aural sex. This occurs most often on trips and you know it's about to occur when you see the procurement of an I-POD. Usually this scenario is when all my hypocrisy reveals itself. I love being fascist about music; I rarely like someone else doing the same. (There are about 3 exceptions to this.)

But the biggest exception ever was Mark, my great Jazz-duet partner, who gave me a greatest hits of Tom Waits he made for me about 10 years ago. Immediately it was the best thing I'd ever heard. It remains as such.

And so I'm listening to Waits' new album that he's streaming. It's wonderful. The two best concerts I've ever been to were both Tom Waits. One in Memphis and one in Birmingham. He makes most seem lazy - a sentiment I expressed to my buddy who accompanied me to Birmingham. Though I think it was a slightly more emphatic version of that statement: He makes everyone seem lazy. Probably not literally true, but it damn sure was the truth walking out of the Birmingham theater. I'm pretty sure that weekend was something Tom Waits would have been proud of.

So why Tom? Well, it feels like there's a million reasons. Waits is the greatest at stretching the edges of a genre - he's always got a pulley system in his tool box. He's usually called "weird" by my friends who don't get my love for this guy. But the thing is, he's not really that weird. He's not doing atonal music. He's a manipulator of the cliche.

The great point that must be mentioned about Waits is that his voice is an instrument the way an electric guitar is an instrument - it is a plethora of possibilities. Most singers don't think of their voice that way. In any given song Waits can use two or three vocal approaches. And at the same time there's a thread that runs from Closing Time to Bad As Me that contains several different, large-scale vocal mutations. When my friends say they don't like, say, his voice from Real Gone, I play Closing Time or The Heart of Saturday Night and the surprise is always apparent.

Okay - but there's more. That's the thing, you can't sum it up. But I love how Waits always creates a place out of objects. He doesn't simply talk about "I" and "babe" and "love." He shows you what these people look like: "Charlie I'm pregnant, living on 9th street, right above that dirty bookstore on Euclid avenue." That's not a lyric - it's a world.

I remember Jim Jarmusch, another favorite dude of mine, used two songs from Rain Dogs to bookend his film Down By Law. Jarmusch said the same thing after he let the audience hear this line: "He bought a second-hand Nova from a Cuban-Chinese, dyed his hair in the bathroom of a Texaco." Now that's a fucking lyric.

The man is a creator of worlds - he is Lewis and Clark: explorer and cartographer of the strange. But he's also a romantic: "With her charcoal eyes and Monroe hips."

Have I made the argument that he's the most interesting artist of the second half of the 20th century? Yes. Do I really believe in things like "most" and "best?" Probably not. Will I make the argument again? Damn right.