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.

Quantum Criminals: Why Steely Dan Is The Most Noir Band Ever

steelydan.com

 A few years ago, I got a phone call from our own Brian Thornton. "Hey, man, I got something up your alley. I just agreed to do two anthologies for Down & Out Books based on Steely Dan, and I had two dropouts. Can you help?"

Could I? We went through the list of available songs, me avoiding the much maligned Everything Must Go. We came up with the standalone single "FM," which wasn't a very good story title. But a line from the chorus, "No Static at All," was. I had Brian his story in about a month. 

One of the anthologies, Die Behind the Wheel, is still available after Down & Out called it a run, mostly used copies and stray bookstore inventory. The other, A Beast Without a Name, which my story appears in, might turn up on Thriftbooks.com. Still, it was an obvious prompt, one I may take up myself if I can find an interested publisher, a couple of name writers, and enough stories based on the title. (Cornelia Read, inbox me. You live in Becker and Fagen's old stomping ground!)

More recently, I listened to Alex Papademas's Quantum Criminals on audio. Papademas, a writer for Pitchfork when it was a plucky independent music site run by a bunch of over-caffienated Millennials just pretentious enough to give me a run for my money writing about music. He once was a self-described Steely Dan hater because that's what that generation did back in the early 2000s. Now?

He played Aja one night and realized he actually loved Steely Dan. More importantly, he loved the characters, who are, to a person, noir as hell. A couple would be right at home in a Charles Bukowski story. And why not? Donald Fagen and Walter Becker were two of the grumpiest men in rock. And unlike the scowling Robert Fripp of King Crimson fame, they never aged into a phase where they poked fun at themselves for taking themselves too seriously. Fagen still gets a bit pompous talking about Dan's music. And yet we still love them and their rogues' gallery of gamblers, ramblers, perverts, and losers. 

Right off the bat, Steely Dan gives us Jack, who beats a man to death for stealing his water, but is saved because "the hangman isn't hanging." He then "loves a little wild but she brings you only sorrow." Then ends up in Vegas fighting the cards in a losing battle. Jack is the ultimate loser.

Then there's the poor guy, probably the generic character Papademas calls "Mr. Steely Dan," whom we meet on every album. On Can't Buy a Thrill, Mr. Dan is trapped in an affair with a married woman. He wants to walk away, but as "Dirty Work" tells us, he'll come running "like a thousand times before."

And then there's "Felonious," the "Midnight Cruiser," an obvious reference to Thelonius Monk and his wrongful arrest on heroin charges. Monk, a jazz musician Becker, Fagen, and longtime guitarist Denny Diaz admired, was notoriously surly, known for putting the famously hard-nosed Miles Davis in his place, and, as Papademas describes him, plays the piano like a weapon.

Mr.Steely Dan is the most common and morally ambiguous character in Steely Dan's catalog, showing up on every album -- a nostalgic time traveler with questionable racial views ("I would love to tour the Southland in a traveling minstrel show."), as the last man on Earth reading old newspapers and looking for survivors on an old ham radio, and a hedonistic LA denizen trying to have a drug-fueled threesome. He's even a failure-to-launch novelist on Steely Dan's return album Two Against Nature in "What a Shame About Me."

But there are others. There's Dr. Wu, either a drug dealer or a lover's other boyfriend whom the unknown narrator befriends. Depending on interpretation of "Doctor Wu," the Katy who lied is either a double-dealing woman (from a catalog full of double dealing lovers from "Rose Darling" to "Gaslighting Abby") or drugs. Yes, the Dan had issues "chasing the dragon," even explicitly stated in "Time Out of Mind."

There's Mr. LaPage, content to show "movies" in his den and likely would be in the Epstein Files today. There is "Deacon Blues," the doomed jazz musician prowling the suburbs for married lovers and drinking way too much. That's a James M. Cain novel in the making.

Then we have the real-life acid chef Owsley Stanley in "Kid Charlemagne." The line "Yes, there's gas in the car" is a cultural touchstone. But Stanley is not the only real-life character in Steely Dan's music.

Fagen himself is part of two autobiographical songs: "Rikki, Don't Lose My Number" and "My Old School," both referencing incidents at Becker and Fagen's alma mater, Bard College in Annandale, New York.  The former references a faculty wife named Rikki whom Fagen had grown close to. Papademas is cagey about how close, but he does relate how she went through a dark phase. The song is about how Fagen hoped she'd reach out before it was too late. The latter song involves a raid by that great moral crusader G. Gordon Liddy, then a prosecutor running for college. Liddy, seeking headlines, raided Bard College. Fagen and Becker got caught in the sweep, along with a female friend in for the weekend. Being students, the college got them released. There friend? Ended up "with the working girls in the county jail."

Walter Becker and Donald Fagen either lived enough noir (other than time travel and nuclear war) or knew enough of these characters to fill a dozen more albums had Becker lived long enough. Being perfectionists, they only did nine albums. That's enough darkness for anyone. And, like the great noir writers of old, they left us wanting more.

 

Ha Ha! Charade You Are!

While working today, I had on Pink Floyd's Animals, probably the least known of the band's classic run. The other three are Meddle, Dark Side of the Moon, and Wish You Were Here. I wouldn't count The Wall because the band began its long, slow breakup during the recording of it. It's more a Roger Waters project featuring members of Pink Floyd.

The album's premise is there are three types of people in the world: "Dogs," who are go-getters, predators, and pack animals; "Pigs-Three Different Ones"-in which the rich and powerful shove their snouts in the trough to the exclusion of everyone else who needs to feed; and "Sheep." The last is self-explanatory.

But it's "Pigs…" That strikes me as the most, well, criminally oriented. "Dogs" depicts someone who is ambitious, aggressive, and greedy, but is eventually brought down by everything they attain. "Sheep," of course, while musically being the best song on the album, is yet another screed telling us that all is hopeless for the common man. But "Pigs…"? The all-consumer elites are a staple of noir, hardboiled, and thrillers.

Waters is vague in his first verse. It's the rich and greedy in general. To me, Lex Luthor of Superman fame is a classic example. Since the nineties, he's been a billionaire of various stripes, the most recent movie making him the classic tech bro with absolutely no compassion or sense of responsibility and utterly self-absorbed. Nicholas Hoult plays Luthor as a nuanced, but clearly evil, villain. You understand him, and that only makes you want to punch him in the throat harder. Last week's industrial fat cat is yesterday's media mogul is today's tech bro.

Waters gets more specific with verse 2, which is openly about Margaret Thatcher without naming her. But I think it applies more to today, where the demagogue (which Thatcher was not, though I get why people might disagree) has become a new low in leadership around the world. But even they are common villains in and out of crime: the corrupt politician or sheriff, the real estate mogul squeezing his tenants. Kingpin from the Marvel franchise is a great example. In more recent versions, he's not even a supervillain. He's the son of an abusive gangster who's actually trying to rise above his past, but that pesky Daredevil keeps messing up his illegal efforts. Vincent D'Onofrio, like Hoult, makes Kingpin much more nuanced. He's a lonely man trying to rebuild a neighborhood. We even see him meet his wife and show a human side. But he is a villain. He doesn't hesitate to use his father's tactics to get what he wants.

Waters names names in his third verse, going after moral crusader Mary Whitehouse, the subject of a LOT of satirical lyrics in British rock back in the 1970s. Whitehouse, while having a rather cheerful demeanor, was described as the classic definition of a puritan: Lying awake at night worried someone somewhere was having fun.

If you want to see a real-life version of this, look no further than Cincinnati's own Simon Leis, a man who tried to frame Barnes & Noble as selling porn to minors, then having a temper tantrum on the radio when the county prosecutor simply told the offending store, "Oh, just put that magazine behind the counter with the Playboys and Penthouses." Leis's most infamous act was to attempt to shut down the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit at the Cincinnati Museum of Contemporary Art. It went to trial for obscenity. The museum, in famously conservative Hamilton County, Ohio, won. But Leis had a long history of such behavior. His attack on Larry Flynt was depicted in The People Vs. Larry Flynt (with Flynt playing the judge in that scene.)

 So there you have it, a classic album about three types of people who pathologically can't understand other people don't like being told what to do. 

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to be watching for Pigs on the Wing.