Plenty of people have modelled themselves on him, but Tom Waits has never slunk in anyone’s shadow
Tom Cox
We are complete numbskulls to believe it’s true, of course, but there’s a brief moment at the Rex Theatre in Paris when several thousand of us think that we just may have been given Tom Waits’s phone number.
“You’ve got my number, give me a call,” rumbles Tom on I’ll Shoot the Moon. “It’s 2-7-9-4-6-8-2-3.” A surreptitious rustle for pens can be detected …
OK, Tom, you fooled us. For a moment, we were stupid enough to think that the primitive, cadaverous crypto-world you come from has means of telephonic communication.
The unique thing about Waits is that, despite his obvious self-awareness, he probably doesn’t think I’ll Shoot the Moon is the least bit rancid, fetid or exotic.
When he gnarls through a deformed ballad like this he’s probably thinking of himself as a fallen diva, the proverbial fat lady singing; not the Plasticine- complexioned, beatnik Worzel Gummidge blues man that we see before us.
This is why Waits will always be so much stranger than disciples such as Beck and Gomez: he’s an extraterrestrial attempting to establish himself as a human – not the opposite. The one-armed dwarfs and rain dogs he grunts about aren’t just apparitions from an overactive imagination; they are the people he plays poker with in the dimly lit back room of his local bar.
Plenty of people have modelled themselves on Waits – Elvis Costello is sitting in the audience, doing his dishevelled best to mimic Tom’s craggy suit and porkpie hat – but Waits has never slunk along in anyone’s shadow.
Well, a handful of people, perhaps, but most of them have probably been dead for half a century, and, thanks to an overruling peculiarity in his genetic makeup, it’s physically impossible for Waits to sound as though he’s imitating. He handles his instruments as if he’s just found them buried in Mississippi marshland and plays them as though he’s leading a revolution for the People of the Ground.
This whole procedure – a set lasting more than two hours, trailed by five encores – is easy for Waits now. Even the lookalikes and freaks who believe they understand him best know they will never really comprehend him, so they go into raptures at everything he does and says. “I know you guys – you want the hits!” he says, and the audience roars, in the knowledge that there’s no such thing as a populist Waits set.
The songs Waits wrenches out of the earth from the classic Swordfishtrombones and Rain Dogs albums neglect the odd rancid rudiment – Jockey Full of Bourbon misses the extra percussion of whipped flesh, Tango til They’re Sore hasn’t got the bit that sounds like crates of beer toppling down cellar stairs – and remind you just how well those albums work as cohesive mood pieces, but Waits’s back-up men are skilled enough to give him space to wallow and wheeze in his own time: the accompaniment is simultaneously stripped- down and lush.
The songs mutate slightly, but are uniformly timeless, Waits slobbing around in self-created luxury to revisit any moment of his 30-year career without making it sound like revivalism. He has avoided the detrimental effects of ageing on his music by being born part scarecrow, part poet, part crooner and part the creature your mum used to tell you about that lived under the humpback bridge.
He finishes with Time, which presents the inconceivably poignant spectacle of a gremlin trying his best to sum up the multi-formed sadness of humanity in three minutes. It features that great line about the rain sounding “like a round of applause”.
Stepping out into the damp Paris night a few moments later, what the rain really feels like is the thing that greets you after you’ve spent two hours in an underworld cauldron, and washes you back to mundanity.