Tom Waits
Mule Variations
Epitaph
Tom Waits began his musical career some 20-odd years ago singing woeful, drunken bar croonery.
These early songs are quirky, half-comedy sketches about the weather conditions in his living room
and drunken pianos.
Somewhere in the mid '80s, though, his approach started getting scarier both lyrically and
musically. Themes changed to dark, underground worlds where every hobo has a song and the devil
is waiting just around the corner with a contract in his hand. Pulse-raising rhythms hammered out
on hub caps and oil drums like those on Bone Machine's "In the Colosseum" and
Swordfishtrombones’ "Underground" are enough to shake even the most firmly affixed dentures.
These "experimental" albums are all sprinkled with romantic, sometimes even sweet
numbers like "Innocent When You Dream" from Franks Wild Years (1987) or "Hang Down Your Head"
from’s Rain Dogs (1985). But even these songs have a bassy, syrupy-thick feel. Like if you
listen real hard, you can hear the upright bass making the snare rattle just a little.
It’s been six years since Waits released The Black Rider, the oft-overlooked stage/musical
interpretation of the William S. Burroughs novel by the same name. And most of that was recorded well
before its 1993 release date. That places 1992’s Bone Machine as his most recent full-length
release. In those seven years, something has changed. Things are smoother, clearer, cleaner and more
hopeful. Mule Variations is actually less a variation and more a hybrid of his earlier
lounge repertoire and his more recent burlesque infatuations.
If Mule Variations is any indication of what Mr. Waits is interested in these days,
it would seem his obsession with all things percussive has taken a back seat to a new love for Alan
Lomax-style "American Primitive" arangements with generally very spare and down-home-ish
instrumentation. The piano is more pervasive on this album than on any since One from the Heart (1982).
Slamming dressers and xylophones are nowhere to be found.
Production on The Mule Variations is a prime example of what happens when you try to pull
an old, warm analog sound out of super-high-fidelity, digital equipment. It sounds fake. The only
exceptions to this on this record are "Get Behind The Mule" and "Eyeball Kid." Charlie
Musselwhite — who plays harp on a few numbers — and Ralph Carney — who plays all forms of sax
and horns — are blessings here, adding layers of sonic dirt which help round some of the crisp,
digital edges.
As much as the spoken word piece, "What’s He Building in There?" is creepy and
sonically bountiful, it’s really just a rehashing of the even-more-haunting "The Ocean Doesn’t
Want Me Today," from Bone Machine. The waist-deep soul we've come to expect over the past
15 years is teetering dangerously close to what some blues musicians back in the '60s used to call
"plastic soul," in reference to Mick Jagger and company.
This album, though fresh and warm in spots, appears to be mostly a collection of reworked older
ideas and pasted together pieces and parts, rather than the dense, majestic trainwrecks of which we
all know Waits is capable. Out of all the directions Waits could have gone, this is the least
satisfying. Bone Machine and The Black Rider were a one-two puch to the music world.
Mule Variations is more like an arm-wrestling match with Mom.
— Larry Davidson (crumbtrail@hotmail.com)
