Reflections On Tom Waits

I was grading some papers this morning and thinking about Tom Waits.  (You can grade freshman compositions and think about Tom Waits.  It's no more difficult than balancing your checkbook at a circus where a tattooed midget in a leather miniskirt is selling you cigarettes while a bearded lady stands in front of you laughing.)

You have a lot in common with Tom Waits.  You wake up in the morning and try your hardest to be yourself.

Tom Waits wakes up in the morning and also tries to be yourself.

His music is highly dramatic.  He puts on personas and characters like the rest of us put on clothes, and the more off-the-wall the story and images are the more they reveal what it is that sits at the bottom of the oddness. 

A hearse coming down the road rewrites Emily Dickinson's "I Could Not Stop For Death."

A man in a bar reveals the painful truth of love with the clarity that a boozy night has.

A man (in one boot and one high heel) reflects on the tragedy of growing up.

A man meeting a prostitute finds a truth of love and loss.

A husband giving up on love asks only for a little token that his love is worth the memory.

He isn't confessional.  He puts on everybody else's sins and feels the wisdom they gained.

He doesn't bite the fruit of the tree of the Knowledge of Good and EVil... he lets you pluck it and then drops in to take potluck and makes a cobbler out of it.

Always the music is barely contained insanity, even when he partners with the Kronos Quartet.  The hooks are pungent rather than sweet, and the accompaniment is meant to force a path for the melodies, leaping off the rails and hurtling off into the desert regions of your mind where you thought nothing grew.  The locomotive goes as far as your imagination will let it.  Tom Waits steps off the locomotive with his hat on the side of his head, and plucks a flower and hands it to you.  It's wilted and a little suspicious.  He crams it into your mouth, and you see things clearly.

The lyrics are the tunnel vision of a man drunk at one in the morning, only the man keeps mixing up what he always wanted with what he's left with and swatting at the Holy Spirit that flutters like a persistent moth around his drunken head, inspiring him because the people who aren't drunk at one in the morning can't see that clearly.

As I fold away an essay that I have marked as average and in need of grammatical attention, that's the man I think I need to sing me songs in this life.

He batters and badgers your idea of what's real until you're afraid you're trapped in a madhouse.

And then when people die, and things slip away, Tom Waits slips into his romantic suit, channels Louis Armstrong, and claims "You cannot hold back spring" with such a conviction that you just give up, and put aside the freshman papers, and give up.  Somewhere along the line the old man earned the right to say what he wants in that been-to-hell-and-never-quite-got-back voice.  If he says spring is coming, then it is.

He's walked a mile in your boots.

Or high heels.

Or both.  At the same time.

Comments

[Kim]

yes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bku4G-PSyH8

[Otter]

Indeed, Kim. And it could go on and on and on...