Het Tom Waits topic #1

Met zijn jaren 70 werk was ik nog niet zo bekend maar dit weekend heb ik op een beurs in een box de albums 'small change', 'blue valentine' en 'heartattack and vine' gekocht. Daarvoor had ik alleen 'the early years vol.1'. Ik vond het opvallend dat hij kennelijk op zijn jaren 70 albums al is begonnen met die donkere, diepe stem. Nummers als Jersey Girl, Ruby's arms, Tom Traubert's bleus, invitation to the blues deden meteen dat speciale Tom Waits gevoel bovenkomen. Echt fantastisch. Deze drie cd's zullen de komende weken nog veelvuldig in mijn cd-speler zitten.

Mijn favoriete Tom Waits cd's zijn waarschijnlijk Rain Dogs en Mule Variations, maar ik moet zeggen dat alles erg dicht bij elkaar zit.

Ik ben van plan binnenkort nog de eerste cd(small change) te halen.

Maar goed, zijn er hier meer mensen die deze muziek kunnen waarderen? Misschien zelfs mensen die hem live hebben gezien in 1999?

Hoe dan ook, hierbij open ik het grote Tom Waits topic!
En als ik een topic over het hoofd heb gezien nodig ik hierbij de moderators uit om het meteen maar weer te sluiten!

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Op dinsdag 30 oktober 2001 20:10 schreef yellow_snow_ het volgende:

[..]

correctie: Small Change is niet zijn eerste plaat, da's volgens mij Closing Time.. en die is errug goed.

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Op dinsdag 30 oktober 2001 20:20 schreef tong80 het volgende:
Heb vandaag nog een live-cd van 'm gedraaid.

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Ik heb aan bootlegs van hem
- Alice demo's (nooit uitgebrachte opnames voor een musical)
- at the cirkus 14 juli 1999 (van mp3 overgezet)
- Seven Dollar suits - live in concert 1999 (wel aardig, niet alle opnames even goed, is overigens te verkrijgen via www.cd-uitleen.nl)

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Op dinsdag 30 oktober 2001 21:00 schreef Zanderrr het volgende:
Ik heb hier ook nog een videoband liggen met zijn uitzending van 'Storytellers', die is ook erg tof.

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Frank's wild years en The Black Rider heb ik ook. Bij Frank's wild years kan je heel duidelijk merken dat de muziek zich aanpast aan de verhaallijn (een man met niets die de top wil bereiken). Aan het begin van de cd een beetje café stijl muziek en aan het eind van de cd krijg je echte bombastische Las Vegas nummers. Leuk gedaan.

The Black Rider vind ik wel een leuke cd, maar ik luister hem niet vaak. Je moet er echt voor in de stemming zijn vind ik. Het is een erg fragmentarische plaat. Van Russian Dance word je overigens wel vrolijk

Voor mensen die de "musical" platen leuk vinden raad ik iig de Alice demo's aan. Deze opnames zijn dus nooit officieel verschenen:

Staan een aantal hele mooie nummers op zoals there's only one Alice, everything you think of is true en ...but there is never a rose.

[Dit bericht is gewijzigd door -Wepeel2- op 30-10-2001 23:19]

En dan komt er dus zo'n typische Tom Waits schreeuw achteraan. Eén van zijn beste nummers imho.

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Swordfishtrombones

Well, he came home from the war with a party in his head
And a modified Brougham DeVille
And a pair of legs that opened up like butterfly wings
And a mad dog that wouldn't sit still
He went and took up with a Salvation Army Band girl
Who played dirty water from a swordfishtrombone
He went to sleep at the bottom of Tenkiller Lake(3)
He said, 'Gee, but it's great to be home'

Well, he came home from the war with a party in his head
And an idea for a fireworks display
And he knew that he'd be ready with a stainless steel machete
And a half a pint of Ballantine's each day
And he holed up in room above a hardware store
Cryin' nothin' there but Hollywood tears
And he put a spell on some poor little Crutchfield girl
And he stayed like that for twenty-seven years

He packed up all his expectations, he lit out for California
With a flyswatter banjo on his knee
With Lucky Tiger in his angel hair, and Benzedrine for getting there
They found him in a eucalyptus tree
Lieutenant got him a canary bird, and skanked her head with every word
And Chesterfielded moonbeams in a song
He got twenty years for lovin' her from some Oklahoma governor
Said everything this doughboy does is wrong

Now some say he's doin' the obituary mambo
Now some say that he's hangin' on the wall
Perhaps this yarn is the only thing that holds this man together
Some say that he was never here at all

Some say they saw him down in Birmingham
Sleepin' in a boxcar goin'by
And if you think that you can tell a bigger tale
I swear to God you'd have to tell a lie

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Op woensdag 31 oktober 2001 16:26 schreef Zanderrr het volgende:
Er valt wel wat te fixen mbt tot die videoband, maar ik heb zelf maar een enkele videorecorder, dus ik ga dit weekend ff informeren of ik 'm bij een vriend kan laten kopieren.

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Eventueel kan jij van mij wel die Alice demo's krijgen als je daar interesse in hebt.

Hier het nieuwsbericht:
Tom Waits to release two albums simultaneously
By JAM! Music

Tom Waits will simultaneously release two new albums of music based on theatrical projects.

Anti/Epitaph Records says Waits will release "Alice" and "Red Drum" on April 9. They will represent the singer's first new albums since his Grammy-winning "Mule Variations" set.

The company said both albums are largely acoustic affairs. "Alice" started as a musical stage production in the early 1990s, based on the life of Alice Liddell -- the girl who inspired "Alice In Wonderland."
Waits co-wrote the music with his wife Kathleen Brennan.

"Alice" was staged at Hamburg's Thalia Theater under the direction of Robert Wilson. Mojo Magazine reported some time ago that "Alice" was more accessible than Waits' more angular work such as "Black Rider." The demos for "Alice" have circulated among Waits collectors for several years, although this marks the project's first official release.

Anti said in their press release that the "Alice" songs are
"unforgettable haunting opiate songs played by piano, bass sax, Stroh violin, cello and vibes." Titles include "We're All Mad Here," "There's Only Alice," "Table Top Joe", and "Poor Edward."

"Red Drum" is based on another collaboration between Waits and director Wilson -- this one based on the story of Woyzeck, a poor soldier driven made by infidelity and medical experiments. The songs are performed in a
style that Anti described as "Tin Pan Alley meets Weimar Republic."

Titles mentioned for "Red Drum" tracks include "Coney Island Baby," "All The World Is Green", and "God's Away On Business."

Ik ben zelf zeer benieuwd naar de cd 'blood money'. Van Alice heb ik de demo's al (zijn al ongeveer 10 jaar oud), maar ik ben wel benieuwd hoe de nieuwe opnamen klinken. Uiteindelijk zal ik beide cd's wel weer gaan kopen

Hieronder is de informatie te vinden over beide albums (bron: www.anti.nl)

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1 Misery Is The River Of The World
2 Everything Goes to Hell
3 Coney Island Baby
4 All The World Is Green
5 God's Away On Business
6 Another Man's Vine
7 Knife Chase
8 Lullaby
9 Starving In The Belly Of A Whale
10 The Part You Throw Away
11 Woe
12 Calliope
13 A Good Man Is Hard To Find

ALBUM DESCRIPTION

BLOOD MONEY

"The higher that the monkey can climb
The more he shows his tail...
If there's one thing you can say
About mankind
There's nothing kind about man
You can drive out nature with a pitch fork
But it always comes roaring back again"
(Misery Is The River Of The World)

Blood Money is etched. It's scratched out in bold, dark lines with marimba, trumpet and bass clarinet and contains some of Tom Waits most memorable melodies. The songs are declarative, sardonic, unforgiving, musical dispatches from the bottom of the heap.

"Blood Money is flesh and bone, earthbound," said Waits. "The songs are rooted in reality: jealousy, rage, the human meat wheel...They are more carnal. I like a beautiful song that tells you terrible things. We all like bad news out of a pretty mouth. I like songs to sound as though they've been aging in a barrel and distressed."

"Life is whittled
Life's a riddle
Man's a fiddle that life plays on
When the day breaks and the earth quakes
Life's a mistake all day long
Tell me, who gives a good goddamn
You'll never get out alive..."
(Starving In the Belly Of A Whale)

Blood Money is a new collection of thirteen songs originally written and produced by Waits and longtime collaborator and wife Kathleen Brennan. "Kathleen and I are well suited to this material. She is hilarious, blasphemous and ominous. She's the brains behind Pa," said Waits.

Blood Money careens from the brutal to the tender with assaulting rhythms and romantic melodies. It's a grim musical deposition on the human condition, a dark mortality play where Tin Pan Alley meets the Weimer Republic.

"I'd sell your heart to the junkman baby
For a buck, for a buck
If you're looking for someone
To pull you out of that ditch
You're out of luck, out of luck"
(God's Away On Business)

"She's a rose, she's the pearl
She's the spin on my world
All the stars make their wishes
on her eyes"
(Coney Island Baby)

"Misery Is The River Of The World" and "God's Away On Business" have a percussive backbeat that sounds like a dead army of marching skeleton men. This signature rhythm first appeared on 1992's Bone Machine, but the army seems larger on these songs. Waits attributes that to a new percussion instrument: "There's a lot you can do with a giant four foot dried, curling, boomerang seed pod from the Botang Tree that grows only in Indonesia," said Waits.

Blood Money features musicians: Charlie Musselwhite (harmonica); Larry Taylor (bass); Andrew Borger (drums, marimba, percussion); Matthew Sperry (bass); Gino Robair (percussion); Bent Clausen (piano, marimba); Bebe Risenfors (bass clarinet); Ara Anderson (trumpet); Colin Stetson (clarinet, bass clarinet) and Waits on piano, chamberlain...and calliope.

"It's a 1929 pneumatic calliope with 57 whistles," said Waits. "It's no wonder they used them in the circus, it can be heard up to five miles away. The studio is in a canyon, we were in an old house there and people in neighboring communities complained of the noise. While playing, your face turns red, blood pressure goes up, your hair sticks up like Einstein's and you're sweating like you ran a mile, what's better than that?"

"Golden Willie's gone to war
He left his young wife on the shore
Will she be steadfast everyday?
While Golden Willie is far away
Along the way her letters end
She never reads what Willie sends"
(Another Man's Vine)

Blood Money is based on the socio/political play "Woyzeck," originally written by a young German poet Georg Buchner as a spare, cinematic piece in 1837 and inspired by the true story of a German soldier who was driven mad by bizarre army medical experiments and infidelity, which led him to murder his lover. Waits and Brennan wrote songs for an avant-garde production of "Woyzeck" directed by Robert Wilson. "Woyzeck" premiered in November, 2000 at the Betty Nansen Theater in Copenhagen and went on to win Denmark's version of the Tony for Best Musical last year.

The Danish production has toured extensively in Europe to sold-out houses and wide acclaim and comes to New York and Los Angeles this fall.

"A good man is hard to find
Only strangers sleep in my bed
My favorite words are good-bye
And my favorite color is red"
(A Good Man Is Hard To Find)

Blood Money contains songs from the bottom of the world. There is a feeling the songs are trying to reach you from another time or dimension, where there is an eerie vaudeville cabaret playing fado, parlour songs and cambias. Appropriately, the record ends its macabre tale with, "A Good Man Is Hard To Find." Ironic in the spirit of Dennis Potter's use of music in The Singing Detective or Pennies From Heaven, it is an oddly sanguine nostalgic adieu from a ship going down.

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1 Alice
2 Everything You Can Think
3 Flowers Grave
4 No One Knows I'm Gone
5 Kommienezuspadt
6 Poor Edward
7 Table Top Joe
8 Lost In The Harbour
9 We're All Mad Here
10 Watch Her Disappear
11 Reeperbahn
12 I'm Still Here
13 Fish & Bird
14 Barcarolle
15 Fawn

ALBUM DESCRIPTION
ALICE

"But I must be insane
To go skating on your name
And by tracing it twice
I fell through the ice
Of Alice
There's only Alice"
(Alice)

Alice is one of the most distinctive of all Waits' creations, occupying its own corner in the odd-angled room that is Tom Waits' body of work. While there are the familiar parts--the redoubtable ragged voice, jazz ballads and poignant musings on death and longing--the whole is strange and exotic.

A devastatingly beautiful atmosphere made of sorrow and reverie, insanity and resignation, rises like a mist in Alice. It's a lyrical melancholia, a feeling that creeps in on the arms of Stroh violins and unabashed poetry. These are songs to fall into, and sometimes, to keep falling. There are fragile, haunted musings, and laments, mad ruminations, and tales of unrequited love and anthems from beyond the grave.

"Alice," said Waits, "is adult songs for children, or children's songs for adults. It's a maelstrom or fever-dream, a tone poem, with torch songs and waltzes...an odyssey in dream logic and nonsense."

"The ground is drinking a slow faucet leak
Your house is so soft and fading
As it soaks the black summer heat a light goes
On and a door opens
And a yellow cat runs out on the stream of hall light and into the yard
A wooden cherry scent is faintly breathing the air"
(Watch Her Disappear)

It's an odyssey he and Kathleen Brennan created together, in what is becoming one of the epic collaborations in music, going on over twenty years now.

"Kathleen is my Alice," said Waits. "We met on New Year's Eve, 1980. We used to play a game called 'Let's Go Get Lost.' She'd say 'turn here, turn here...until we were lost. It's kind of like writing songs together. In the studio, Kathleen will submerge herself in seven newspapers and a novel, and then at just the right time she'll raise her head and make a remark that will become the eyes and ears of the song. Will and Ariel Durant said, 'A book is like a quarrel. One word leads to another and may erupt irrevocably in blood or ink.' That's kind of like me and Kathleen writing. When we're totally lost, we know we have something."

Alice, once dubbed "the lost Tom Waits masterpiece" by the press, was originally done as an avant-garde opera directed by Robert Wilson for Hamburg's Thalia Theater in the winter of 1992. "Alice" was based loosely on Lewis Carroll's obsession with young Alice Liddell, the girl who inspired his Alice in Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass.

Working with Brennan, they wrote fifteen songs for the Wilson opera in the summer of 1992. The Thalia performed "Alice" for eighteen months, with an eclectic orchestra of Waits' design, but the composers did not record the songs until last summer (along with his forthcoming simultaneous new release, Blood Money).

"Songs are joining the dream of the listener, and completing a circuit that is really entirely your own," said Waits. These songs are unsure footsteps, in a strange house, in the dark.

"And you'll die with the rose still on your lips
And in time the heart-shaped bone
That was your hips
And all the worms they will climb
The rugged ladder of your spine
We're all mad here"
(We're All Mad Here)

Alice uses fantasy, exotic characters and images to evoke a man's inner world of loss and longing. The album opens with a haunting, smoky ode to "Alice" ("And so a secret kiss/Brings madness with the bliss...") then departs on a tour of the unlikely and seldom seen. The titles are like signposts to half-remembered dreams: "No One Knows I'm Gone," "Everything You Can Think," "Lost in the Harbour," "We're All Mad Here." Lyrics arrest, amuse, and transport. With "Barcarole" the album ends where it began: longing for what can never be. The song is a waltzing reverie with a musical fugue in its instrumental break that sounds like a cat walking on a piano.

"And I belong only to you
The water is filling my shoes
In the wine of my heart there's a stone
In a well made of bone
I will bring to the pond
And she's here in your pocket
And curled up in a dollar
And the chain from your watch
Around her neck
And I'll stay right here till it's time"
(Barcarole)

Bass saxophones, vibes, pump organ, French horns and a string trio of bass, violin and cello are arranged and played in ways uncommon to other Waits' recordings.

"The rain makes such a lovely sound
To those who are six feet under ground"
(No One Knows I'm Gone)

The musicians include: Dawn Harms, playing the Stroh, a violin affixed with a brass horn first devised so as to enable entire orchestra string sections to hold their own against brass: Matt Brubeck on cello; Larry Taylor on upright bass; Bebe Risenfors also on Stroh violin, plus viola, bass clarinet, marimba and clarinet; Carla Kihlstedt on violin, Colin Stetson on alto, tenor and baritone saxophone and clarinet; Ara Anderson on trumpet and baritone horn; Nic Phelps on French horn and trumpet; and Waits on piano, pump organ, Mellotron and Chamberlain vibes. "Table Top Joe" features a guest appearance by Stewart Copeland on drums with a piano solo by Bent Klausen.

When asked about the uncharacteristic arrangements, Waits said, "During the '70's, too many of my songs were drowning in strings. I didn't want to hear another blasted violin. So, we found string players who felt the same way about their instrument, formed an odd, skeletal chamber orchestra and tried to avoid all the old familiar phrases where strings love to play."

Lyrically and musically, the songs are part of a cycle where each song relates to what comes before and what will follow, as you listen, Alice is a puzzle that reveals as it unravels and makes a bold step forward for Waits.

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[Dit bericht is gewijzigd door -Wepeel2- op 21-03-2002 20:30]

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Op donderdag 21 maart 2002 20:19 schreef PuNkOrAmA het volgende:
Is Tom Waits die vent van Big in Japan ? Dat is wel een relaxt nummer ja

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Op donderdag 21 maart 2002 20:49 schreef _Maria_ het volgende:

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En weet iemand wat dat is met die cd "used songs"

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en komt Mr. Waits nog eens richting Europa? Voor mijn part Parijs of zo? zijn er al tourdata bekend?

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Op maandag 13 mei 2002 15:52 schreef =HellFire= het volgende:

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Ja idd, die gast heeft gewoon tijden lang op Epitaph records gestaan. Een Punkrock record! En volgens mij maakt die gast echt geen punk.

Waarom stond ie er nou op dan?

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Op woensdag 16 oktober 2002 14:41 schreef Sellars het volgende:
In hoeverre verschilt de Alice die een tijdje geleden uitkwam van de demo die eerder in dit topic genoemd werd?

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Ik vind in ieder geval de nieuwe versie van Alice mooier.
Hoewel....de versie van Reeperbahn op de Alice demo's blijft onovertoffen.

Van zijn jaren 70 werk vind ik Closing Time, Small Change, Heartattack and Vine.

Uit zijn latere werk vind ik Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs, Bone Machine, Mule Variations, Blood Money en Alice echt heel goed.

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Op zondag 30 maart 2003 14:46 schreef Bosbeetle het volgende:

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Tja dan moet ik toch nog maar eens een "gewoon" album van hem luisteren ipv alleen maar verzamelaars

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