wanted briefly to respond to a few of Barry's comments:
>I seemed to be the only one I could find anywhere who'd actually seen him
>perform before--on the Penn campus in Philadelphia some 25 years ago,
Really? Nobody saw the Big Time tour? The Waits show was the first memorable
event after I moved to Montreal 11 years ago, in my first year of
university. And it was rather like an omen - seeing him at an old theatre
house in Outremont, a gorgeous, transcendent, hilarious show that I can
still vividly recall to this day (and there ain't that many of those, altho
I suppose I drank slower in those days) - that I was in the right place. I
woulda assumed a lot of people saw that tour (and the subsequent movie),
since it was very large-scale by Waits standards.
On a more contentious note:
>I think this show also proves that it's generated some myths--the biggest
>being that Waits' extraordinary music had some drastic sea change when he
>shifted labels, which puts him in a sort of gravelly post-modern and hiphop
>mode which makes him one OK "boomer' performer for the alt. generation.
Note Barry's sarcasm here. But that aside: While I agree completely with
Barry that the "Asylum Years" were full of fantastic music, much of it as
interesting and creative etc. as anything he's done since, it's no myth at
all that Swordfishtrombones (his first Island album) was a dramatic shift. It
was presaged by some of the material on Heartattack & Vine and even on Blue
Valentines, where there was a harder-edged blues and rock influence than
anything on his previous work. But the dramatic move away from the piano as
anything but an occasional (and even incidental) part of his sound, the
abandonment of orchestral arrangements, the shift from songs that had
identifiable stories to ones that tended towards much more pure imagery (this
was more a shift in emphasis than in style overall, I agree), and
*especially* his use of non-Western rhythms and avant-garde sounds and
homemade instruments and further-out singing styles - all did add up to
something truly new, a genre unto itself, as if 70s Waits had gone through
Cronenberg's transporter (a la The Fly) with Captain Beefheart (and of course
Harry Partch).
And while that may have endeared him to younger fans who wouldn't have
cottoned to the jazz-ballad/bebop stylings, it also turned off a lot of older
fans. I remember when I was about 14 and Swordfishtrombones came out, I
dropped by my local bookstore, run by a 36-ish Waits fan. He had the album, I
didn't yet. He said he thought it was "totally devoid of Waitsian emotion."
Damn, I thought, that's awful. Went out, bought it anyway - the cover art
made it impossible to resist. Dropped the needle (wow, needle) and
"Underground" - whose main sound is brake drum and clanging pipes - started
up, and my head exploded. And that was the first time I really believed in a
generation gap.
(Although of course later I met many older fans who loved the new work, too,
so perhaps I unbelieved it eventually.)
All that said: Damn, I'm jealous of you SXSW bastards. I hope to hell Mule
Variations is followed by a tour. I attended a listening party for it held by
Epitaph here last week, and it sounds absolutely superb.
CarlW.
