Practicing With Swordfishtrombones

When I did my run of Bouchercons (on and off from 2005 to 2008), it seemed like Tom Waits was it. In 2006, a bunch of us sat at a riverside cafe in Chicago, a group that included the late Ken Bruen, and spent maybe twenty minutes rolling through Waits lyrics. 

And is it any surprise? Jon Stewart once said, "I'd like to get drunk and pass out in a gutter with that guy." If Steely Dan's ramblers, gamblers, and assorted survivors tended toward the affluent or wannabe affluent, Waits's characters were just as likely to be found in a dive bar or sitting on a freeway ramp with a cardboard sign. And oh, could he spin a tale about how they got there.

The focus was on three albums: Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs, and Mule Variations. The first was probably the most noir, which is like saying the Pacific Ocean is the wettest of oceans. You're still going for a swim in the Arctic.

One only need look at the spoken word "Frank's Wild Years," (which ironically does not appear on the album of the same name.) Waits sounds like a guy rattling off the tale of a down-on-his-luck salesman with a spent wife and a yappy dog. As he prattles on through one gravelly aside after another, he comes to how Frank, tired of it all, torches his house (presumably not his wife. The dog did not fare so well.) "all Halloween orange and chimney red. Never did like that dog."

The album's other spoken-word (and, let's be honest, full-on Beatnik) song is "Trouble's Braids." More of a poem recited over bongos, one can almost see Jack Kerouac reciting this story about a man on the run, hiding in the mud, staying away from the main roads, and building a fire in the backseat of an old Tucker. Neat trick, since Tucker only built 51 cars. He either torched a collector's item, or the car had been left rotting in a field, Either way, survival, set to a hypnotic bongo beat, was the first order of business. But you don't even need an explanation to understand why "16 Shells from a Thirty-Ought Six" is noir. It actually inspired a short story I wrote called "Whittle You Into Kindlin'."

I wouldn't call Waits a rock musician. Certainly some of his music is rock, but I'd say he's more Americana, even if the label didn't exist for the bulk of his career. But his propensity for singing about America's losers in a rough voice made him attractive to crime writers, especially when he underwent renewed interest in the 2000s. He doesn't have a lot of range, but a friend of mine, a musician, said he had thirty-two distinct voices he used in his music. That's better than Bowie, who often sounds like he's singing with two other singers. (Mind you, Bowie did a lot of this with an expansive range even guys like Steve Perry could only dream of.) What made Waits's characters and narrators (many unreliable) real came from those voices. He opened his mouth and became these people.