Lifting Waits

Tony Peyser
Mirror contributing writer

   What do circus people want to run off and join? I bet some would want to hook up with Tom Waits. After all, his music is one of the longest-running, three-ring shows around where high art and low lifes collide like battered Buicks at a demolition derby. As I write these words, I am in the most un-Waitslike place imaginable: a Starbucks in North Hollywood.
   Waits released not one but two new albums recently. Both were conceived for the stage with avant garde director Robert Wilson. Alice is inspired by Alice Liddell, the young girl who motivated Lewis Carroll to write “Alice In Wonderland” and Blood Money is based on an unfinished work by German playwright Georg Buchner about a soldier who murders his lover. (You know Bucher had a tortured life because he couldn’t even get a second “e” to end his first name.) Both albums are about obsession and were written by Waits and longtime collaborator, Kathleen Brennan, who puts all her husband’s songs in two categories: Grim Reapers and Grand Weepers. Those two varieties are here in ample supply, although a few tunes misbehave and fail to fall between these parameters.
   Blood Money’s mesmerizing “Starving In The Belly Of A Whale” sounds like the theme from “Rawhide” if it had been composed in Hell. “Kommienezuspadt” from Alice reminded me of Waits’ famously plagiarized “Step Right Up,” if it had been sung for a German production of long-lost 1930s musical. (It’s a no-brainer that Brecht and Weill clearly were a big influence on Waits and Brennan.) I prefer the Grand Weepers. They take me back to the melancholy melodies of Waits’ initial compositions from the early 1970s which fans still adore but Waits himself seems to disown, like a Members Only jacket from a straight-laced previous life.
   Overall, Alice has more light than shadows and Blood Money is the other way around. In the former, Waits tosses in the screwy “Table Top Joe” about a piano player undeterred by the fact that he was born without a body: “But I always loved music/All I had was my hands/And I dreamed I’d be famous/And I’d work at The Sands.” Alice’s third track has a line that embodies the kind of haunting poetry Waits and Brennan are often reaching for: “No one puts flowers/on a flower’s grave.” Beggars, crows, dogs, oceans, and the moon wander like pilgrims through both albums and so does the one word that best describes the location where all Waits songs take place: dreamland.
   Back in that North Hollywood Starbucks, I wondered: where does Waits —- a redwood in a world of topiary hedges —- fit into our world? The albums are infrequent, the tours are, too, and he’s just too mysterious for mass cultural consumption. Then, I was floored to hear suddenly hear over the P.A. system Waits himself singing his classic love song, “Jersey Girl.” It’s was as if the man himself was defiantly saying, “I’m Still Here” —- which happens to be the title of a heartbreakingly beautiful song from Alice.
   Miles Of Music has Alice and Blood Money for a mere fifteen bucks apiece.
   *A while back, I reviewed the pulsing debut CD by Schfvilkus, a jazz-funk ensemble from Nashville. They will be at The Temple Bar right here in Santa Monica on August 12.
   *The Goofy Band Name Of The Week is … Beached Boys.