Words Are Enough: Tom Waits

Tom Waits brought the longing, the desperation and the unbearable hopes of the American with Nothing to Lose into the suburbs and freaked all the folks out, at least those who didn't know any "pool-shootin' shimmy-shysters." This has to have been part of his point. No way was Waits writing for the people who populated his songs. They weren't listening; they were too busy chasing after doomed love, drinking themselves to death, driving in the rain at 3 a.m. or "busting my chops working for Joe and Sid" because the "work never stops." Tom Waits made the hustlers, the losers and the delusional dreamers into romantic figures. Who didn't want to die with a bullet in his chest like Romeo in "Romeo is Bleeding"?

But Romeo is bleeding / And he gives the man his ticket / And he climbs to the balcony at the movies / And he'll die without a whimper / Like every hero's dream / Just an angel with a bullet / And Cagney in the sceen.

Who'd have thought that you'd find yourself so intoxicated by a song that you wanted to be, at least for five minutes, a chain smoker with five dollars to his name who can't hold a job and who pines in vain for the waitress who looks like Rita Hayworth? No one beats Tom Waits when it comes to marrying the soul's discontent with an open road in the wee hours (from "On a Foggy Night"):

On a foggy night, an abandoned road / In a twilight mirror mirage / With no indication of a service station or an all-night garage / I was misinformed.

That was the Tom Waits of Asylum records; his second phase, beginning with a new contract with Island, sees Waits move from keen portraiture to nonsense wordplay, abstraction and, most critically, enigma. Waits harnessed the mystery at the heart of the great American folk songs of the early Twentieth Century. Instead of detailed accounts of the drifters driving through the darkness of the California night, Waits now sings about the darkness itself. Take this passage from "The Black Rider":

Come along with the Black Rider / We'll have a gay old time / Lay down in the web of the black spider / I'll drink your blood like wine.

Songs leave us puzzling about what the narrator is leaving out, and why, as in "More Than Rain":

And it's more than good-bye I have to say to you / It's more than woe-begotten gray skies now.

Or, they ruminate on the violence of lost hope:

Well, Frank settled down in the valley / And hung his wild years / On a nail that he drove through / His wife's forehead.

Or, Waits speculates on the awful silences that surround a tragedy, as in "Murder in the Red Barn":

Now a lady can't do nothin' / Without folks' tongues waggin" / Is this blood on the tree / Or is it autumn's red blaze? ... There's nothing wrong with a lady / Drinking alone in her room / But there was a murder in the red barn.

Waits has always been deft at turning a phrase; "don't you know there ain't no devil, there's just God when he's drunk" from "Heartattack and Vine" is typical. But it is the depth, the pain, and the longing in the verses that make Tom Waits something much more than the late-night diner version of Oscar Wilde.

— Christopher Hickman (hickatz at mindspring dot com)